By Michael Russel

Despite the best efforts of modern science, your car tires rarely last as long as you keep your car. At some time, they will wear out or become damaged and you will have to replace them. Many years ago, most people changed their own tires. Back then, old tires were a recycling nightmare. They were almost universally banned from city dumps and landfills. Having no other options available many people would simply chuck their old tires into a roadside ditch at night when no one was looking. Those few companies that were willing to take your old tires often would end up burning them. Burning tires, however, is an environmental disaster in almost every sense of the word. Arsenic, mercury, cadmium, lead, beryllium, chromium and other toxic and carcinogenic substances and dioxins are released into the air when a car tire is burned. Cardiac disease and respiratory problems can be caused by the metal particles released from a burning tire as well. Plus the natural resources that go into making a tire go to waste if the tire is burned.

Today all of that has changed. It had to change there really were no other options. It is estimated that 1.3 billion tires are sold every year and more than two thirds of those tires replace old worn out tires. That means that almost 1 billion tires worldwide are discarded annually. 20 years ago only 10 percent of all discarded tires were recycled but today more than 80 percent make it to a recycling facility. Recycling the material in old tires is a good idea no matter how you look at it and literally 100s of applications have been developed for recycling old car tires.

Even though many people buy discount tires online, almost no one changes their own tires anymore and the recycling of old tires is done by professionals who generally do so in an environmentally safe way. When you take your car in to have the tires changed at the local garage or tire shop there is almost always provision for taking your old tires for recycling. Approximately 1 in 4 of those old tires is retreaded and used again on another automobile somewhere. In many parts of the world old tires are ground up and used to make rubberized asphalt for highways or shredded and used as a base for gravel roads or as a sand or gravel substitute in some other road construction application. Some old tires are chopped up and used as part of the surface for indoor tennis courts or other indoor sports playing fields. For many applications, recycling old tire rubber is cheaper than collecting and processing new rubber.

The burning of tires has not completely disappeared but it has improved to the point where it is both environmentally safe and it recycles the raw materials. By using a process called pyrolysis, which burns the tires in a reduced air environment or vacuum, the raw materials are recovered and recycled. A typical car passenger tire will yield one kilogram of steel, four liters of oil, almost four kilograms of carbon and 850 liters of reusable combustible gas as a result of this recycling process.

It turns out that that advice is dangerous. As you'll see in this video, once the penny test fails you are at the legal minimum for tread wear and are putting yourself in danger of losing control of your car.

The video is a bit long but it's worth watching to understand the details and they give you a new way to tell if your tires need replacing. I'll give you a hint, the new test is 25x better And when you're ready to replace your old tires it's never been easier to discount tires online.

By Gregg Hall

High performance all season tires do much more than just make your vehicle look better and perform better. They also are an incredible safety item and if they are kept in proper shape and inflated properly they can really save your life. As someone who has been around the automotive business for a lot of my life I have to say that a quality set of all season radial tires are essential for any automobile owner. Just as a house must have a good foundation, your car is no different. The car and your very life as well are dependent upon your tires and wheels. This is the reason that you keep your tires in good shape.

Some people think that maintaining all season tires is just the act of replacing them when the treads begin to show but there is a lot more to it than that. For starters you need to be sure that you always keep your tires inflated properly and rotate the tires as the manufacturer suggests so that the tread wear remains even and you don't have tires that wear out before their time. The other thing is that you need to avoid running your vehicle on rough unfinished or rocky roads and avoid running into curbs. Another thing that causes tires to wear out quickly is taking curves or corners sharply at a high rate of speed. This is one of the reasons that race car drivers have to change tires so frequently. Stopping hard will also place undo stress on your tires so you should avoid jackrabbit starts and quick stops.

If you own your vehicle any time at all you will have to change your tires and for most people this is a job that cannot be done on your own. Even if you are one of those types that think that think you can do it all yourself this is one area if expertise that is best left to the professionals. Even before I got involved in the automotive industry I was into working on my car and doing as much as I could by myself. My brother and I used to work on our cars in the backyard on the weekends. The big thing with installing tires is that they need to be properly aligned and balanced which cannot be done without specialized equipment that is found at a tire dealer. You can drive a car without balancing the tires but it is not really safe to do so and it will drastically reduce the life of your tires. Even when you buy discount tires online your best bet is to swallow your pride and realize that there are some things that you cannot do on your own and let the tire shop handle it for you.