The tire industry's environmental efforts focused primarily on the reuse, recycling, and safe disposal of scrap tires. Reuse programs include retreading, a well-established niche of the tire industry, as well as new anti-erosion programs. Recycled tires are used in asphalt-based road coverings, shoes, household items, and even new tires. Nevertheless, hundreds of millions of tire discards went to landfills in the 1990s and early twenty-first century.
Some processes attempted to avoid the problem of scrap tires before it began. Goodyear patented a process that allowed around 80 percent of a tire's rubber to be recovered and reused in rubber products, including recycled tires. The specialized devulcanization process, whereby the tire's essential ingredients are broken apart from the sulfur and other tire components so that they may be reused, could generate dramatic waste reduction.