Maintaining your tires in good shape is paramount to car safety. But as it turns out, old tires can also contribute to safety, when mixed with asphalt and used to pave roads. A new compound, called RuBind, is already being used to pave tricky roads in Israel.

A new "green" project in Israel intends to recycle the rubber from old tires, and use as many as 1,400 tires per kilometer of new paved highway. In a pilot trial, a 1.1 kilometer section of road was paved using an experimental mixture that included hundreds of recycled tires and a blend of asphalt.