Hankook Tire & Technology won a gold award at the A' Design Award 2026, one of the world's most prestigious international design competitions. [Hankook Tire & Technology]
Hankook Tire & Technology won a gold award at the A' Design Award 2026, one of the world's most prestigious international design competitions. [Hankook Tire & Technology]

Hankook Tire & Technology announced Tuesday that it won a gold award at the A' Design Award 2026, one of the world's most prestigious international design competitions.

The A' Design Award is a highly regarded annual competition that draws tens of thousands of entries from more than 100 countries, recognizing outstanding work across more than 100 categories including product design, architecture, fashion and graphics. Hankook Tire earned the gold — given to only the top 3 percent of all entries — for the "Brada Upcycling Series," a product of its upcycling project "re:move."

"re:move" is Hankook Tire's flagship ESG (environmental, social and governance) project, which creates value by cycling the "brada" — an inner skin used in tire molding — generated during tire production into a new resource.

The winning "Brada Upcycling Series" was co-developed with the Circular Design Lab "Disco Lab" at Seoul National University. The series earned high marks for its creative expression of circular-resource values across three pieces: upcycled furniture made through 3D printing that preserves a curved-layer texture; upcycled bricks that use repurposed tire molds to create a dynamic kinetic wall; and upcycled lifestyle keyrings crafted through a handmade process.

The series was first unveiled at the Seoul Design Festival in 2025. This marks the first time Hankook Tire has entered the A' Design Award, and the company claimed gold on its debut, demonstrating global design competitiveness that extends beyond mobility into materials and lifestyle. The winning works will be permanently displayed at Museo del Design, a design museum in Como, Italy.

A Hankook Tire official said the company will "continue to pursue the recycling and repurposing of various waste materials while further strengthening its competitiveness as a global brand that leads the future mobility era through sustainable design innovation."

Meanwhile, Hankook Tire recently held a kickoff event at its high-tech research center Hankook Techno Dome in Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, for a project to develop tire manufacturing technology using sustainable materials — part of the Ministry of Climate, Environment and Energy's "2026 Environmental Technology Development Project."

The national research and development project aims to advance South Korea's circular economy by securing high-quality raw materials from waste tires and commercializing them into products. Hankook Tire plans to advance its research into tire manufacturing technology using waste-tire-derived materials, targeting a sustainable material content of at least 85 percent and a carbon emissions reduction of more than 50 percent, with the goal of commercializing next-generation low-carbon, high-performance tires.


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