THE MICHELIN MAN WANTS TO TALK ABOUT HIS FUTURE AND REINCARNATION

He isn’t just the “Michelin Man.” He has a name, and it’s Bibendum—which is Latin for drinking. It’s a long story. The anthropomorphic stack of tires who looks like an inflatable mummy is 125 years old or so, depending on who you ask. I’ve been meeting up with him at races and tire events like this every few years for the last couple of decades and he hasn’t changed a bit. Still, Michelin brought a group of journalists to Sonoma, California to talk about his and every other tire’s end-of-life plan. Bibendum isn’t interested in a Viking funeral or being buried like so many of his compatriots. He’s looking for immortality. He will be recycled, into more tires.

Michelin is the largest tire manufacturer in the world. The French giant makes tires for just about anything that rolls; from bicycles to hypercars, and earthmovers to lunar rovers. It produces roughly 200 million tires per year. Technically, one company blows them out of the water making over 300 million tires a year, but I’ve never walked into a tire shop and been upsold to Lego. Depending on the size, each tire can use between 4 and 10 gallons of petroleum in the different materials that make up a tire; there are roughly 200 different materials in every tire, FYI. At this point, most of those materials can be recycled and Michelin has a goal of manufacturing tires from 100% recyclable and renewable materials by 2050, which is just one component of a broader sustainability plan.

If I believe everything I hear from executives in the automotive industry, 2050 will be when humanity finally delivers on what Star Trek has promised my entire life. I recently spoke to a representative at a car company with an unwavering goal of only building cars with recycled batteries by 2050. The 195 parties who signed the Paris Agreement committed to net-zero emissions by 2050. Even The Stones have promised their 2050 World Tour will be carbon neutral. I’m an optimist or try to be sometimes, so I believe everyone promising these things has done so in good faith, but when I hear that date, a quarter of a century out, one thing keeps sticking in the gears way at the back of my head. All of these people currently at the height of their careers in corner offices with real plants someone else cares for, will have been sipping tea on the deck of their retirement villa in Southern Spain for at least a decade prior to 2050. I suppose those commitments are easy to make for your successor. So it’s what the company is doing now that really matters.

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