The influence of consumer behavior on the environmental footprint of passenger car tires

Understanding the influence of consumer behavior on the life cycle of products can provide further insights into effective mitigation strategies. Here, we developed a stochastic model to quantify the influence of consumer behavior on midpoint and endpoint impacts of European passenger car tires. The life cycle included resource extraction, production, use, and end-of-life stages of a passenger car tire with a functional unit of driving 50,000 km. The combined influence of variability in the lifetime, rolling resistance, size and inflation pressure of the tire, and mass and engine efficiency of the car on a range of environmental footprints was assessed via Monte Carlo simulations. We found that differences in consumer behavior can change the environmental impacts of tires with a factor 1.6 to 2.1 (95th/5th percentile). Environmental savings over the life cycle of tires are effectively achievable by stimulating the use of smaller cars and fuel-efficient tires with longer lifetimes. We found that a shift in consumer behavior specifically related to tires can result in mitigations of the tire's life cycle impacts ranging from 13% for human toxicity to 26% for climate change. Our findings show that a detailed variability analysis can provide case-specific and realistic recommendations to mitigate environmental footprints.