Yokohama BluEarch Tires Get Good Design Award 2011
Yokohama company has received a Good Design Award 2011 for its BluEarth tire line-up. The award was also given to the ZEN 903ZW, a new truck and bus tire with wintertime operation.
The BluEarth lineup includes eco-friendly tires designed to provide drivers with a high level of road safety. At the same time the tire shows low rolling resistance to enhance your vehicle’s fuel efficiency as well as to minimize noise on the road.
The BluEarth tires are widely used by the company as Original Equipment on select vehicles and can be bought as replacement tire instead of a worn pair or set of original tire.
The second award was given to the Yokohama ZEN 903ZW tire. It also delivers eco-friendly performance thanks to its enhanced durability and a revised casing construction. The latter allows for retreading operation when the tread is significantly worn. Furthermore, the tire’s low rolling resistance helps you save on fuel as well as provides for a lower level of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
It’s worth mentioning that Yokohama has been a constant winner of the Good Design Award for three years already. It is the company’s eco-friendly products that catch public’s attention at the first sight.
Together with Yokohama, the Good Design Award 2011 was given to such well-known tire-makers as Sumitomo and Bridgestone.
Yokohama Tire-Makers Make Use of Orange Peels
It happens that creatively made tires can be worse of being showcased at Boston Science Museum. The hallmark of its current exposition is new Yokohama BlueEarth-1 tire made from peculiar rubber compound including orange peel oil. The “Making a Greener Tire” stand is situated in the part of museum dedicated to renewable energy and nano-technologies.
The new tire is made from Super Nano-Power Rubber (SNPR) featuring silica, natural rubber and oil derived from orange peels. The technology was first used for the company’s dB Super E-spec tire. It helps reduce the use of petrochemicals in tire-making industry at the same time providing for the tire’s lower rolling resistance.
Now Yokohama is the only world-wide company to make their tire from orange peels. Yasushi Tanaka, Yokohama president, is glad about the exposition for it promotes eco-friendly approach to technology development. Moreover, the exposition is housed at the Science museum, the leading educational and cultural center of the world.
Yokohama BlueEarth-1 tire is a part of the company’s BlueEarth philosophy that aims at eco-friendly production with minimum harm inflicted on the environment, society and people. The company’s strives to make people understand the essence “green” technologies as well as draws people’s attention to environmental problems.
Yokohama BlueEarth-1 is already available in Japan and Europe while the USA will see it in 2012. The tire is aimed at use with hybrid cars and other efficient vehicles like Toyota Prius, MINI Cooper, VW Golf and Jetta.
Earthquake in Japan Stopped the Work of Yokohama and Falken Plants
The earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan not long time ago brought to a stop the work of Falken and Yokohama automotive plants situated on the territory of the country. The plants didn’t suffer that great losses, so the production will be partially resumed in the nearest time.
Yokohama also decided to donate 50 million yen (about 440,000 Euro) to various organizations that deal with aftereffects of the March flood. The company presents their condolences to families of the dead and hopes that the area will be restored soon.
T. Ikeuchi, Falken financial director made a statement that one of their plants ceased everyday production operations due to power cutoffs as well as partially damaged plant buildings and equipment. Now the company estimates the scale of damage and is going to do its best to start working as soon as possible. Mr Ikeuchi also stated that nobody of Sumitomo employees or the members of their families suffered from the disaster.
Falken expresses its gratitude for all the calls and e-mails and states that they work to ensure regular delivery of their production to the customers.
The German Continental company shows their sympathy with the Japanese and is going to donate 250,000 million Euro to help people from destroyed areas. They are concerned about their employees in Japan, so do Michelin, Bridgestone and Toyo companies. The latter didn’t suffer much from the tsunami; however, their plants didn’t work for some time due to power cutoff.
Hankook, Goodyear and Yokohama Become Winner of Tire Technology International Awards Ceremony
This year the Tire Technology International Awards ceremony took place in Koln (Germany). The main award was given to Hankook company who became Tire Manufacturer of the Year. Goodyear was the first in Tire Technology of the Year while Yokohama won the first prize for being Ecological Achievement of the Year.
Jury members were extremely impressed by the development of Hankook company over the latest twelve months, which would likely make it the fifth world’s largest tire manufacturer in a couple of years.
Jin-Wook Choi, the executive manager and the head of European Hankook department said that they are very glad to get such an award for it means the recognition of their philosophy of standing growth. He added that the previous year was a great success for the company, which became thanks to the hard work of their employees.
The second and the third prizes in this category were given to Apollo and Bridgestone companies.
Goodyear was awarded thanks to its high-performance UltraGrip Ice+ frictional winter tire highly praised by the jury. It was called an impressive tire designed to manage the most problematic roads in the world, the ice-covered roads of Scandinavia. Marс Junio, the general director of Goodyear Innovative center in Luxemburg – it is where the tire was worked out – said that they are proud of their tire’s performance and are glad to be the best among winter tire manufacturers.
Speaking about Yokohama company, jury members stressed that the company’s numerous ecological projects weren’t unnoticed while the most impressive one was the one dealing with bio diversity preservation. In the frames of that project Yokohama carried out a profound research on how its activities affect the environment and tried to reduce negative influence on it caused by the use of natural rubber and mineral resources.
