Seventy-Five Years of Rubber

Goodyear has been making tyres in Luxembourg for 75 years. The Colmar-Berg factory celebrated the anniversary on Tuesday with Grand Duke Guillaume in attendance. Around 3,400 people work for the company in Luxembourg. They produce roughly 5,500 tyres per day, mainly for lorries and diggers.[1]

The number alone is striking. 3,400 workers is not a small operation in a country of 670,000. Goodyear is one of those employers that quietly holds up a section of the economy, and has done so across generations. The first tyre produced in Luxembourg was on display at the ceremony. It carries signatures from former employees, which is the kind of detail that makes you realise this is not just a factory. It is a working archive of the people who passed through it.

Made in Luxembourg

Deputy Prime Minister Xavier Bettel used the occasion to talk about the "Made in Luxembourg" label. He said he is often reminded of it when drinking coffee from a Villeroy & Boch cup proclaiming the same mark, and feeling proud. Then he added the warning: the case of Villeroy & Boch also shows that industry can disappear.[2]

He is right. Villeroy & Boch once made Luxembourgeois ceramics. Now the label is a memory. Industry does not stay because it has always been there. It stays because it finds reasons to stay.

Rice husks

Goodyear's reason to stay, at least in part, is innovation. The Colmar-Berg factory is the first within the Goodyear group to manufacture tyres using silica, which reduces rolling resistance and lowers fuel consumption. But the interesting part is where the silica comes from.

It can be extracted from quartz or sand, the usual chemical sources. But Goodyear Luxembourg uses silica derived from the ashes of burnt rice husks. In countries with high rice production, the husks are burned partly to generate energy. What remains is ash. Goodyear takes that ash and extracts silica from it. Production Director Alex Schumann called it sustainable, and he is not wrong. They are making use of a material that was previously discarded.[3]

This is the kind of thing that sounds like a footnote but is actually the whole story. A tyre factory in Luxembourg is the first in a global group to use rice husk ash as a raw material. Not because Luxembourg has rice. Because someone at Colmar-Berg figured out how to make it work, and someone else decided to invest in making it happen there.

What stays

Bettel's point about Villeroy & Boch is the uncomfortable counterpoint. "Made in Luxembourg" is not a birthright. It is a result of continuous decisions: by companies to invest, by workers to show up, by governments to create conditions where investment makes sense. Goodyear has been making those decisions for 75 years. The rice husk silica suggests they intend to keep making them.

But 3,400 jobs in a small country is also a vulnerability. If Goodyear ever decided to leave, the hole would be significant. Celebrating 75 years is appropriate. Resting on it would be a mistake. The factory stays because it adapts. The day it stops adapting is the day the signatures on that first tyre become pure history.