Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations (Bridgestone) celebrated the expansion of the company’s passenger tire manufacturing facility in Wilson, North Carolina, with an official groundbreaking ceremony yesterday. The five-year, $164 million investment to expand the 42-year-old, nationally recognized facility will improve the plant’s global competitive position by installing leading-edge technology, expanding production capacity and lowering costs. It also is currently one of the company’s most environmentally sustainable plants.
Phases one and two of the investment, which will total nearly $100 million, will focus on the addition of 167,000 square feet of manufacturing space to accommodate new tire assembly machines, materials handling systems, curing presses and associated equipment, to increase plant capacity by 3,000 tires per day. This will increase total daily production to 35,000 by 2018. The plant currently manufactures 32,000 passenger tires a day. The new equipment also will allow the plant to respond to the increase in global demand for higher rim size tires, as well as improve quality and productivity while reducing costs, the company says.
The Wilson plant was the first Bridgestone tire manufacturing facility to produce run-flat tires, and this year will begin producing the company’s DriveGuard tires, the first full line of premium, all season replacement tires engineered to go up to 50 miles to safety after a puncture.
The county’s single largest industrial employer, the plant last underwent an expansion in 1999, when it added 85,000 square feet to the facility. The plant team has achieved numerous safety awards, including marking the safest year in its 42 years of operations in 2012 – a record it broke in 2013 – and certification earlier this year as a Rising Star facility from the North Carolina Department of Labor. The plant also has received recognition for its environmental efforts, including three Green Factory Environmental Achievement Recognitions at Honda’s 22nd annual Environmental, Safety and Ergonomics Symposium in 2014. In addition, it was the first tire plant to earn ISO 50001 certification, reach Superior Energy Performance (SEP) Mature Pathway certification and the first plant in the world to achieve Underwriters Laboratories’ (UL) landfill waste diversion claim validation for Zero Waste to Landfill.
