Pirelli, the Ray solidify longtime collaboration to drive sustainable mobility

ROME, Ga.—Not far from Pirelli's manufacturing facility in Rome is an 18-mile stretch of West Georgia's Interstate 85 that has been developed into a net-zero highway testbed.

Throughout this stretch of highway—spanning from LaGrange, Ga., to the Alabama state line—are solar panels in the right-of-way, miles of smart striping for connected vehicles, landscape labs and bioswales, rubberized asphalt, solar-powered vehicle charging stations, pollinator meadows and more.

This highway testbed is a years-long project of the Ray, a 501(c)(3) non-profit with which Pirelli Tire North America L.L.C. announced its partnership in August "to help redefine and reimagine the roadway for the future."

But when the Ray says net-zero, that means "zero deaths, zero waste, zero carbon and zero impact," the non-profit said in a statement.

And that is a mission Pirelli can get behind.

Pirelli's slogan, "Power is nothing without control," emphasizes the importance of road safety for its tires, Maureen Kline, vice president of public affairs and sustainability at Pirelli North America, told Rubber News.

But there's more to this slogan when looking at Pirelli's sustainability goals.

"Power is nothing without control, but control is not enough. We have to do more," the company displays prominently on the sustainability page of its corporate website.

" 'We have to do more' has become a new slogan that Pirelli has, and that goes across the board," Kline said.

More for people. More for the planet. And more for mobility.

Pirelli's partnership with the Ray, according to the August news release, will advance research and solutions for road safety technology, a circular economy, EV charging infrastructure and renewable energy, as well as explore the "environmental and social impacts of tires and roads."

"As part of the non-profit's Advisory Board, Pirelli will contribute to the strategic thinking around roadways of the future," Pirelli said in a statement.

Kline said she could not yet share specifics about the upcoming projects, but noted that Pirelli would explore the benefits of rubber-modified asphalt, "innovative uses of scrap tires" and "other partnerships in the area of road safety."

Under the partnership, Kline said, each project will have its own contract agreement with the Ray and could include additional partners.

She said the research in RMA and end-of-life tires is especially important not only to Pirelli, but the tire industry overall, citing the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association's research on the benefits of RMA, such as the reduction in tire and road wear particles—a critical mitigation effort proposed in the issue surrounding 6ppd and 6ppd-quinone.

"(RMA) is something that we really need to explore further because it's the tire and road wear particles that are the concern," Kline said.

"As a company and as an industry, we want to find out more about how to limit tire wear," she added, noting this research is a "priority area" in Pirelli's partnership with the Ray.

The Ray, the "epiphany" of the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, is named for the late founder of Interface Inc., a manufacturer of modular flooring started in 1973, according to the non-profit's website.

In 1994, Anderson was hit with a "spear-in-the-chest epiphany" that would be "the beginning of his quest to prove that sustainability was not just the right thing to do, it was the smart thing to do for business," the Ray said. Anderson's mission was to be an advocate for corporate sustainability, delivering "his message from shop floors to the White House."

Following Anderson's death in 2011, the state of Georgia renamed the stretch of I-85 in West Georgia to the Ray C. Anderson Memorial Highway in July 2014.

But if Anderson was to have a highway named in his honor, it had to be sustainable, according to the foundation. So in the following year, the non-profit was born and work began to turn this roadway into the testbed it is today.

"(Anderson) really looked into environmental impacts of his business and (the) circular economy of his business," Kline said, calling Anderson one of the "founding fathers of corporate sustainability."

Pirelli's new partnership with the Ray follows years of dialogue between the two entities, Kline said, starting back in October 2018, when Pirelli invited stakeholders to its Rome plant to review its sustainability program, with a focus on road safety and vocational training.

Kline said she was excited to learn about the Ray, "that they had this kind of living laboratory for sustainable mobility of the future in the state of Georgia, not far from our manufacturing plant."

So she invited Allie Kelly, executive director of the Ray, to the stakeholder dialogue. During this event, she said, Kelly came to Pirelli with "great ideas" about the tire maker's "role in the overall ecosystem of road safety."

From here, Kline said, Pirelli and Kelly developed a relationship, and Kelly would return to the company to discuss the non-profit's mission with employees, which included RMA and the circular economy of tires.

As their conversations continued over the next several years, Kline and Kelly decided it was time to solidify Pirelli's and the Ray's partnership this past summer.

"The alignment between the organizations, focused on safety, circularity and innovation, will power the partnership to produce groundbreaking projects and research in the coming years, and the impact will benefit communities across the country," Kelly said in a statement.

And together, Pirelli and the Ray will take sustainable mobility further, no matter how much trial and error it may take.

"I think one of the ways to innovate is to try and fail. We don't know what we're going to be looking at five years from now, but we feel like it's a fantastic testbed for innovative ideas," Kline said of the partnership.

"One of the things about Pirelli's sustainability program is we don't want to just focus on having a greener product or having a better sustainability report," she said. "What we want to do is to look at the overall impacts of our product and our presence and be on a path to more and more positive impacts over time."