By Nduduzo Chala, Executive Director of the South African Tyre Manufacturers Conference (SATMC)
Every morning, millions of South Africans drive to work on tyres that, in an increasing number of cases, never set foot on a South African factory floor. They were built abroad, loaded onto container ships, moved through ports, trucked inland, and only then fitted to a car in Sandton, Soweto or Umlazi. This journey spans many thousands of kilometres and carries a carbon cost almost nobody in this country is currently counting.
South Africa has committed to net-zero emissions by 2050, and companies across every sector are being asked to demonstrate their environmental credentials. Yet our climate accounting still stops at the factory gate, measuring what the country produces rather than what it consumes. That gap widens quietly with every year that local manufacturing shrinks.
The tyre industry shows exactly how it is narrowing, and the numbers are stark. Since 2015, South Africa’s tyre manufacturing capacity has fallen from 11.6 million to 9.8 million units, while actual production has dropped further, from 9.7 million to 6.7 million units. Over the same period, imports have surged from 7.5 million to more than 10.1 million tyres a year, which is not merely an industrial statistic about lost capacity but a steadily growing volume of rubber crossing oceans before it ever touches a South African road.
To be clear, this is not a call to shut the door on imports, because trade remains essential to our economy and even local manufacturers import specialised tyres that are not made here. The point is simpler and harder to argue with: a tyre built closer to where it is sold generally travels a shorter, cleaner supply chain than one shipped from the other side of the world, and in a country trying to build a credible climate strategy, that difference ought to count for something.
For decades, climate policy has focused almost exclusively on what happens inside factories and power stations, while paying very little attention to the long journey to the shop floor. Every imported tyre carries hidden emissions from ocean freight, port handling, warehousing and inland trucking, and those emissions are every bit as real as the ones rising from a smokestack in Gqeberha, even though they are generated far beyond our borders. This is precisely what lifecycle carbon accounting is designed to capture, measuring a product’s full environmental cost from manufacture through transport to eventual disposal, rather than stopping arbitrarily at the point of production.
The rest of the world is already moving in that direction. The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism does not yet cover tyres, but it signals unmistakably where global trade is heading, as countries and companies will increasingly be judged not only on the price and quality of what they sell, but also on the carbon embedded in it. South Africa can either position itself ahead of that shift or wait to be caught flat-footed by it.
There is a genuine opportunity for us here. Backing competitive local manufacturing is not only about protecting industrial jobs, though in a country with unemployment as severe as ours, that alone would be reason enough; it is also a climate lever we have barely begun to pull. Producing more of what we consume closer to home cuts transport emissions, strengthens supply chain resilience, and gives businesses a concrete reason to invest in cleaner production. Recent shocks to global shipping have painfully shown what happens when a country depends too heavily on the other side of the planet for basic goods.
There is also a harder truth to confront, namely that climate change pays no attention to national borders. If our emissions appear to fall simply because production has moved to a factory in another country, the atmosphere notices nothing. Economists call this carbon leakage, and it is a standing reminder that genuine progress requires us to account honestly for what we consume, not only for what we still manage to produce.
Fortunately, we already have a working model in the tyre recycling levy, under which local manufacturers and importers both contribute to the responsible management of end-of-life tyres. The logical next step is to ask whether future procurement rules and incentives should also recognise the lower transport emissions of goods produced closer to the point of sale, not to punish imports, but to place a proper value on shorter, more resilient supply chains.
Net zero will not be won by what happens within our borders alone. It will be won by how honestly we account for the emissions embedded in everything we import and consume, beginning with something as ordinary and as thoroughly overlooked as the tyre under every South African car.
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