Our Strategy

“With volumes approaching a quarter million a year in San Francisco alone, it is incumbent upon us to find creative re-use solutions for this material.”

MANDANA MACPHERSON,
FOUNDER OF
USED RUBBER USA

The Rubber Impact Project is working directly with bike shops in the City of San Francisco to track the number of waste inner tubes that pass through their stores. An accounting of the number of tubes that go to landfill each year has never been done, however early estimates suggest numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Inner tube rubber is an extraordinary material that has many uses after it can no longer be used as a bicycle inner tube. We seek to create a waste flow that incorporates re-use of this material resource.

Collected works by Mandana Macpherson and exploration of materiality, Center for Impact exhibition, 2019

The Rubber Impact Project is developing sustainability curriculum modules that align with common core standards for use at SFUSD to teach material lifecycles to our youth. These modules include maker activities where students can work directly with the material to explore it’s qualities and create an array of projects. By engaging our young people early, we can more greatly impact a sustainable future through a mindset and culture of re-use.

The Rubber Impact Project is creating free D-I-Y project booklets distributed throughout San Francisco’s bike shop community to teach about the many upcycling opportunities that damaged inner tubes afford. The books are filled with fun and easy projects to inspire customers to upcycle their own waste tubes. This will help to spotlight the volume of this waste material and contextualize it within the framework of sustainability and material lifecycles, from source to end-of-life, raising awareness about the need to treat it as a re-useable material.