For a great, graceful piece of business journalism, check out this piece from Business Week’s Brian Hindo on the growing business of retreading giant tires. In addition to providing an excellent account of how markets coordinate the economic decisions of far-flung entrepreneurs and workers through the mechanism of price, Hindo also succeeds in conveying the sensory experience of his reporting. The lede features a North Carolina firm:


On the plant floor at RDH Tire & Retread in Cleveland, N.C., about
60 workers do nothing all day but retread giant tires that have come
off of mining equipment?giant meaning 12 feet tall, 40 feet around, and
13,000 pounds. A tire retreading shop is fairly quiet as factory
settings go. You’ll hear lots of dull thuds as hammers whack away at
the vulcanized rubber that makes up most of the tire. There’s an
occasional whoosh of an air hose sweeping away debris and dust. Now and
then, high-pitched whines pierce the air as workers grind broken bits
of metal that make up the tire’s interior radial belt.

What’s more remarkable are the smells. Before a new tread is put on
a tire, the old, worn-down one has to be buffed off. As that happens,
each tire gives off its own olfactory signature, depending largely on
the job it used to do. On a recent winter day at RDH, a 10-foot-tall
tire, caked in white limestone after half a year in a Florida quarry,
rotated on the spindle of a giant buffing machine like a fat LP on a
turntable. As bits of rubber from the shaved tread flew, the smell was
sweet, almost like ginger. Then it turned pungent. “What you’re
smelling is burning rubber,” says Wilhelm Brau, general manager at RDH.

Normally, retreading these giant tires is the slenderest of niche
businesses. It’s an industry made up of a handful of small shops that
earn a living by performing a service the big tire manufacturers
disdain. But as the demand for raw materials exploded over the past
five years and the pace of mining production picked up dramatically,
miners began to wear through tires faster than new ones could be made.
By 2005 the world was looking at an acute shortage.

In one of the more unusual ripple effects of high prices for
commodities such as copper, gold, iron, and, of course, oil, used tires
that can be retreaded or repaired have become a sort of precious raw
material in their own right. Over the past three years, a varied set of
players, from multinational mining powerhouses to freelancing ex-tire
salesmen, have been scouring the globe in a frenzied search for used
tires.

Highly recommended.