Spanish Grupo Soledad shares its success story of circular economy in tire retreading
Grupo Soledad, a parent company of the Spanish tire retreading firm Insa Turbo, has grown in the last years and shown some great results in circular economy advancement.
It produces tire retreads at Insa Turbo’s retread manufacturing plant at Aspe that actually has expanded and now serves not only as a facility where retreads are made. The Group has its tire retreading plant — annually, the plant turns back to life some 200,000 tires of various types and makes OTR retreads. The corporation also looks for the ways to boost retread sale. For instance, Grupo Soledad tries to do so by teaming up with Continental that sends all its casing to the group’s site at Aspe, so the two can produce quality retreads.
At Aspe site only, some 40 employees carry out tires sorting procedure, and the company now seeks to greatly boost the process and make it more efficient. Grupo Soledad now wants to implement innovative robotic technology to facilitate collection, sorting and inspection of scrap tires.
In total, the company hires over 1000 people who provide solutions to businesses dealing with tire recycling, retreading tire distribution, as well as with IT consultancy and insurance.
The Group runs four separate retail networks: Confort Auto, Black Tire, Ecological Drive and FixCar. Confort Auto is a premium network and manages 700 outlets driving online sales. Among these enterprises, FixCar is the one that specifically targets car dealers. Most of them are independently owned, but the Group serves as an owner of 80 stores, and it has plans to bring this number to 100.
Furthermore, the Group’s daughter company, Soledad Distribución, was recently awarded as the best tire dealer at the Hevea Awards.
Article by Grupo Soledad.
Weibold is an international consulting company specializing exclusively in end-of-life tire recycling and pyrolysis. Since 1999, we have helped companies grow and build profitable businesses.