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INDUSTRY ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN THE TYRE RETREADING SECTOR INDUSTRY ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN THE TYRE RECYCLING SECTOR Regom’s AI-powered tyre sorting technology won the day in the Industry Achievement award for the tyre recycling sector PRESTI INDUSTRIES AND REGOM WIN INDUSTRY ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS Barry and Darryl Presti were proud recipients of the Industry Achievement Award for the tyre retreading sector For the first time this year we announced the addition of two Industry Achievement Awards, one for tyre retreading and the other for tyre re- cycling. These awards were not open to the pu- blic vote, but were judged by our Nominations Committee, our independent panel of judges from around the world. This year’s awards focu- sed on historical achievements in terms of tech- nology and it was interesting to see one award being won for a 50-year old innovation’s impact on the retreading industry, whilst the other was won for a modern day development, whose po- tential was recognised by the judges. The Industry Achievement Award for the tyre retreading sector was won by envelope manu- facturer Presti Industries in recognition of the lifetime achievements of Frederick Presti, who invented and patented the seamless retread envelope in the 1970s. Today, more retreads are manufactured using this technology based on this original development than any other types of envelope combined. Presti’s original development was a key factor in the launch of Bandag’s ARC system in the 1980s and helped significantly improve retreading te- chnology by moving the industry over to from the rim and tube system to rimless. Meanwhile, in the tyre recycling sector, French technology company Regom has leapfrogged other players in the market by using Artificial Intelligence to sort tyres. tyre materials back into new tyres. One of the barriers is that every tyre manufacturer has a different set of compounds, and only the manu- facturer truly knows what is in their tyres. The only way that a premium tyre manufacturer can recycle tyre-derived materials is if they are derived from their own output. Up until now, the tyre selection process has had to be visual. However, Regom has now changed the rules and its AI-powered technology can identify tyres by brand, and by size, and by condition in a single pass. This creates the opportunity for tyre manufac- turers to recover their own tyres. In the longer term, this could change the way most EPR sche- mes operate – since each manufacturer is only responsible for its own production – Regom could eventually ensure that tyre manufactu- rers were truly recycling their own waste ari- sings. The Regom system employed by large collectors can see them feed tyres into dedicated chains – for retreading or recycling by the manufacturer. So, one key barrier to using recycled materials is removed by Regom, whose equipment is alre- ady in use by Michelin and Aliapur in France and is slated to be used by SDAB in Sweden. Regom has created a game changer for the tyre recycling and retreading sectors, hence the de- cision to award the company the Industry Achie- vement award for the tyre recycling sector. Recyclers have always wanted to get recycled P.XIV