Car tyres produce vastly more particle pollution than exhausts, tests show:
Emissions from tailpipes in developed countries are much lower in new cars, with those in Europe far below the legal limit.A
Almost 2,000 times more particle pollution is produced by tyre wear than is pumped out of the exhausts of modern cars, tests have shown.
The tyre particles pollute air, water and soil and contain a wide range of toxic organic compounds, including known carcinogens, the analysts say, suggesting tyre pollution could rapidly become a major issue for regulators.
Air pollution causes millions of early deaths a year globally. The requirement for better filters has meant particle emissions from tailpipes in developed countries are now much lower in new cars, with those in Europe far below the legal limit. However, the increasing weight of cars means more particles are being thrown off by tyres as they wear on the road.
The tests also revealed that tyres produce more than 1tn ultrafine particles for each kilometre driven, meaning particles smaller than 23 nanometres. These are also emitted from exhausts and are of special concern to health, as their size means they can enter organs via the bloodstream. Particles below 23nm are hard to measure and are not currently regulated in either the EU or US.
"Tyres are rapidly eclipsing the tailpipe as a major source of emissions from vehicles," said Nick Molden, at Emissions Analytics, the leading independent emissions testing company that did the research. "Tailpipes are now so clean for pollutants that, if you were starting out afresh, you wouldn't even bother regulating them."
[...] Other recent research has suggested tyre particles are a major source of the microplastics polluting the oceans. A specific chemical used in tyres has been linked to salmon deaths in the US and California proposed a ban this month.
"The US is more advanced in their thinking about [the impacts of tyre particles]," said Molden. "The European Union is behind the curve. Overall, it's early days, but this could be a big issue."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @07:39PM (4 children)
Note that this compares tire particles and exhaust particles (and says nothing about the gaseous pollutants in exhaust that are regulated to various extents). Because of all the diesel cars in Europe, I guess they put particle filters on their exhaust systems? Gasoline burns much cleaner than diesel--when discussing particles.
This may be one case where the USA is not the biggest problem. In USA, tires are frequently designed for long tread life, this is particularly so for replacement tires that are sold with a pitch like "60,000 mile tread wear". In Europe, the tires are generally biased toward better grip and better wet grip, which means softer rubber compounds and faster wear.
Tire particle generation has been discussed in industry publications for awhile now. At least one article I saw discussed a passive vacuum collection system (clever aerodynamics) that was able to collect some of the tire wear particles--this may be one way forward?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @07:53PM (2 children)
I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening?
Microplastics!
T[i|y]res must be loaded with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @08:36PM
Are you trying to seduce me?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12 2022, @07:00AM
> Microplastics!
Aww I thought this was going to be a yo momma joke.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @09:25PM
Found the AC that didn't FTFA.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 10 2022, @07:51PM (7 children)
In Miami I accumulated tire particulates on my windshield, scrubbing with soap and abrasive waxes would not remove the hazy goo. Remember also: you're breathing this stuff, maybe not so much in a closed cabin with fresh super-filters on the incoming air, but every time you step out of the car, spend any time near a highway outside, etc.
Funny thing: hurricane Andrew gave that windshield a 6 hour pelting with oak leaves and high pressure water, kind of like being in a bead blast chamber, windshield was sparkly clean like new after the storm. A year later, the goo was back.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @08:19PM (6 children)
Interesting. What leads you to blame this goo on tire particulates?
My windshield has been covered in similar sounding goo that wouldn't wash off easily, when commuting on a freeway (N Central USA). Stop commuting (work from home) and the goo slowly went away. Drive across the USA on relatively uncrowded rural interstates, no goo.
I always assumed the goo was mostly from truck exhaust--a lovely(sarc) mix of heavy petroleum fractions that were not burned, mixed with pre-exhaust-filter exhaust particulates. But never did any research, just tried to scrub it off from time to time.
While I'm sure there is plenty of fine rubber dust/particles in the air near highways, the amounts per car are very small. Consider that tires last perhaps 50K miles (80K Km) and lose a pound or two of tread rubber over that time.
I'm sure there are several pounds of plastic packaging in our household trash every *week*, but of course this is solid and would only be in the air if the trash was incinerated improperly.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 10 2022, @08:39PM (5 children)
I lived in Miami in the 1980s, did a lot of driving on the freeways. My goo was a light grey and described to me by people I respected as knowledgeable at the University as a mixture of silicates and rubber that dusts off of the tires as they wear and ends up on just about everything, but seems to have a special affinity for windshield glass (maybe something about the silicates?) Anyway, proof? No. Reasonable explanation that superceded all previous explanations in my head and hasn't been displaced since? Yes.
Even a pound of tire tread turned to dust is a nasty bunch of particles. Take a 0.1 mile stretch of highway, run 250,000 cars a day across that stretch, that's a million tires, or 100,000 tire miles, you can figure 2 fully worn tires worth of dust per day per 0.1 miles of highway (and then you can start factoring in 18 wheeler trucks...) As the British study said: it's more significant than tailpipe emissions for new cars, and implied: will only be getting worse with the heavy torquey electric cars that are coming.
It's not like my windshield was caked 3mm deep with the stuff, it was just a little smudge that was virtually impossible to remove, it tended to accumulate at the outside edge of the windshield wiper range, but also would accumulate more thinly where the wiper blades ran too. As you say: in less traffic intense areas it doesn't happen. Even when I stayed in Miami but only drove 1000 miles a year on the highways instead of 20,000 miles, it didn't accumulate nearly as much.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 10 2022, @09:32PM
Extending that math: 2 worn tires per 0.1 roadway miles per day. 1 worn tire per 264 feet of roadway per day. Tires lose roughly 1kg over their lifetime as they age, on average. So, 1kg of tire tread dusted into 264 feet of roadway per day, and if it should settle onto the roadway, it can get dusted up again with each passing vehicle. Fully 50% of the day's traffic happens during about 4 hours of morning and evening rush hours, so you're getting 1kg of tire tread dusted into 528 feet of roadway in the space of about 4 hours, plus whatever dust gets recycled up from the road surface itself. Give this dust credit for reaching 15 feet up in the air, and spreading 100' wide, that's 1kg of dust sprayed into 792,000 cubic feet in the space of 4 hours. Let's say that the past 10 minutes of freshly worn tire particles are up and circulating in this near-road volume... sure it's getting to be swag to the fifth power, but what the hell... that's 10/240 of the time, or 1000/24 or ~40 grams of tyre dust in about 22 million liters of air, 2 grams per million liters, or 2 micrograms per liter. That's about 20% of the level in this mouse study (comparing mouse lung volume to human lung volume), which wasn't very good for the mice:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378427409002719 [sciencedirect.com]
The study concludes that varying tyre particle sizes do different bad things, 10ug particles create inflammatory response, while 2.5ug particles go straight to cytotoxicity.
There are many reasons to stay away from the big cities, tire dust is down the list, but on it.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Friday June 10 2022, @09:52PM (3 children)
Add brake dust to the lovely mix. Maybe they provide some silicates?
Some website said about 60% of tire rubber is synthetic- made from petroleum, of course. Maybe some silicates are added for "body", wear resistance, etc?
Edit: just found this: https://www.ustires.org/whats-tire-0 [ustires.org] yup- fillers contain silica.
I've never understood why people jog / run along busy roads (with no sidewalks) during rush hour. Breathing hard that tire and brake dust, exhaust, who knows what.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday June 11 2022, @03:02AM (2 children)
Yeah, I wouldn't think there's many silicates in rubber tire tread. But there's plenty in asbestos brakes and the gravel in the road. Not to mention just normal fine dust, which is largely very fine dirt - much of it organic material, but also plenty of heavily weathered rock particles (silicates)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday June 11 2022, @05:10AM (1 child)
You have to follow the link I made. It's free, and pain free! :) It tells you that tires are ~25% fillers, and some of that is silicates.
Oh, here you go:
So we don't know how much, but, it's not insignificant.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12 2022, @07:06AM
With Biden-flation at 8% people are more worried about their grocery bills than some political stunt by enviro-whackos. Tax cuts NOW!
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @08:04PM (8 children)
We don't use tyres. We use tires.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @08:37PM (4 children)
What colour are your tires?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @08:42PM (3 children)
They're black, and mounted to aluminum wheels.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @09:06PM
They're not really black. They're a very dark grey.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12 2022, @07:09AM
It's spelt aloooooooooooooooooooominum. Aluminum. Tomaydo. Aluminum tomaydo. Padadoe. Padadoe, ya damn furrinurs
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12 2022, @03:11PM
Ahem, i think they prefer to be called "tires of color," you regressive fossil, you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 11 2022, @04:44AM (2 children)
She tires of your American exceptionalism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12 2022, @03:15PM (1 child)
It is dangerous to mock others' grammatical usage or spelling when you yourself are ignorant. "Tyre" was clearly and unambiguously a chief city in Phoenicia, not a wheel made of rubber.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 13 2022, @01:52AM
And one possible root of tire is attire (the tire is the clothing on the wheel rim).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by drussell on Friday June 10 2022, @08:23PM (4 children)
What is 1tn?
The graph in the linked article says 36-73 milligrams of particles per km driven, presumably total of all sizes. What is tn?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @09:29PM
tn - no entry in The Register's list of esoteric unit of measure.
Maybe (from the context) short for trillion?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by vux984 on Friday June 10 2022, @09:32PM
I expect its short for trillion.
1 trillion ultrafine (sub 23 nanometre) particles with a collective mass of 36-73 milligrams sounds pretty plausible.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday June 10 2022, @10:11PM
One Tennessee.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 11 2022, @02:22AM
I thought at first it was a ton (metric ton), but that made absolutely no sense (WAY WAY WAY too much), so I gave up.
(Score: 4, Touché) by oumuamua on Friday June 10 2022, @08:35PM (3 children)
What is the actual chemical? Is it phthalates? then no worries, problem will self-correct:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/chemicals-in-plastic-electronics-are-lowering-fertility-in-men-and-women [pbs.org]
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 10 2022, @09:14PM (1 child)
Don't be so cock-sure. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) makes little girls with big boobies who hit puberty early: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5615581/ [nih.gov] why else do you think the conservative agenda is so rabidly against abortion?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @09:38PM
You say that like it's a bad thing (MDC).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @09:50PM
> What is the actual chemical?
Tires often have a couple of dozen different rubber formulations in them, each different kind of rubber has dozens of ingredients which are then vulcanized/polymerized/cured with sulfur (etc, etc), heat and pressure, leading to long chain polymers. The main constituents in tread are synthetic rubber (various kinds) and natural rubber (latex, sap of rubber tree), with the proportions depending on required performance and also economics (syn and natural rubber move up and down in price, more of the lower priced one will be used at any given time).
Bits of other ingredients (carbon black, silane/silica, etc, etc) are trapped between the long chain molecules.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday June 10 2022, @11:07PM
For 13 years I lived in a house that was maybe 60' above an 8 lane freeway (I-5 by Del Mar Heights road). The prevailing winds were from the house to the freeway. But we still had a lot of dust. Black dust. Maybe 4-5 times the amount of dust I've encountered anywhere else I lived. We assumed at the time it was a combination of tire stuff and diesel exhaust.
Don't listen to the sales person when they say "you'll get used to the noise". You may get used to it, but you'll never like it. It's annoying. It's like 50 gnats flying around your head 100% of the time.
Wish I still had that house, Zillow says it's worth north of $2 million. Bought in '97 for $245k, sold it 6-7 years ago for 700k.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 11 2022, @01:34AM (3 children)
Microplastics, rubber, various vapors. We've been polluting for a long time, it's everywhere, even in us now.
But at this point it's only being weaponized to stop personal vehicles and limit people's ability to travel. They even mandated a killswitch for your new car by 2035.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Saturday June 11 2022, @02:21AM
The M72 stun grenade. They call them bouncers.
(Score: 1, Troll) by PiMuNu on Saturday June 11 2022, @02:16PM
You are driving a vehicle which is, contributing to the deaths of hundreds of people including yourself every time you use it. Your vehicle is surely the weapon?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12 2022, @03:09PM
They don't want the plebes polluting their air, but rather living in pods and eating bugs. That way the global elites can enjoy pristine nature and clean air without the pesky humans photo bombing their perfect vistas.
(Score: 2) by TrentDavey on Saturday June 11 2022, @11:04PM (2 children)
Presumably they have tires and asbestos brake pads too. (yes I know - regenerative braking - but they must still have the fall-back friction braking)
Will we go back to wooden spokes and steel rims at 5 kilometers/hour?
We can't go to horses again 'cause ... horseshit ... many tons ... in the inner city.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12 2022, @01:29AM (1 child)
one word,
Bicycles
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12 2022, @03:05PM
Bicycles produce tire and brake dust also. Anything that moves and requires friction to stop, even walking, produces particulates.