Seatbelt Webbing Rescue
TN Webbing Products started rescuing seatbelt webbing from landfills in 1991.
Automobile seatbelt webbing is built to meet government safety standards to protect you while in your car. Due to these very high standards, millions of yards of seatbelt webbing is rejected by automotive manufactures each year. Seatbelt webbing can be rejected for reasons as minimal as the color is not an exact match to customer specifications. Once rejected by an automaker, it can no longer be sold into the automotive industry. For years, it was simply dumped into landfills.
Seatbelt webbing, a material of superior quality and strength, becomes “waste” once it is rejected by the automaker. This webbing is still useful for a wide range of applications, it just can never be used for seatbelts in cars.
In the early 90’s the EPA started tightening down on what was being disposed of in landfills. The seatbelt manufacturers needing to dump their aftermarket webbing were now forced to pay to dump. The automotive seatbelt manufacturers needed another outlet for this excess aftermarket webbing they accumulated. That is where Tennessee Webbing Products came in.
We began purchasing this seatbelt webbing – rolling, cutting and converting it – for our customers in various industries. Our business has grown over the years to include many other offerings, but our roots began in finding alternative industries for automotive seatbelt webbing.
Rejected automotive seatbelt webbing is purchased by the truckload. Within this aftermarket seatbelt webbing we receive varying degrees of quality ranging from the nearly perfect down to the lowest “grade” called Leader. Leader webbing can have color consistency issues, change color completely within the rolls, have too many breaks (called splices) or all of these. The pallets come in mixed with various colors and “grades,” then our job begins with sorting each roll and pallet. We sort the webbing into like kinds so that we can inventory it and make it available for sale.