21 ms·

Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

407 points by clouddrover 7y ago

kevingadd 7y ago
When I first moved to the SF bay area I didn't have AC in my apartment so I had to leave the windows open during the summer. After a year of leaving them open there was a thick coat of tire dust all along the windowsill since my window faced a road. :x
- asah 7y ago
  Los Angeles has entered the chat. :-)
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        New Delhi has entered the <cough, cough> ... ... <NO CARRIER>
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- hanniabu 7y ago
  How do you know it was tire dust and not just regular dust?
  - Eric_WVGG 7y ago
    ... because he opened multiple windows and the only one to gather grime was facing the street.
  - pshc 7y ago
    I had the same experience, in SF too. Second floor corner apartment on Fell St, a wide and busy road along the park. The windowsills on that side accumulated black dust unlike the other side of the corner.
- a3n 7y ago
  In the 70s I live in an apartment adjacent to Interstate H-1 in Honolulu. Same experience. Lanai furniture black. Don't know if tire or exhaust caused, but it was black and disturbing and probably in my lungs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_H-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_H-1
LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
We need more hovercrafts!
- twic 7y ago
  Or walking draglines.
0ldblu3 7y ago
So to visualize this I'm thinking of a rectangle 2.5 feet long, 8 inches wide, and a half-inch thick times 4. That is what comes off my tires every 5 years so that I have to replace them. Every set of tires sold is to replace that.
- speedgoose 7y ago
  It's a bit confusing to me. You changed the body part in the middle.
- pjsg 7y ago
  The numbers don't seem to add up. If an average set of tires lasts (roughly) 50,000km to 100,000km, and the average tire weights around 10kg, and you have 4 tires, then the (totally unrealistic) maximum loss per km is 4 * 10 * 1000 / 75,000 gms/km. This is 0.5g/km (and it assumed that there was no tire left). While these numbers are rough, I don't see any way to get to 5.8gm/km as quoted in the article. The brake pads aren't going to contribute all the rest (they aren't that heavy to start with). What about the road surface? Maybe you can erode 1cm of surface over 10 years with 2,000 vehicles per hour (average down to 20,000 per day. Volume eroded (per km) in cc is 400 (width) * 1 * 100,000 (length) = 4e7 cc. Density is around 2.5 gm/cc. Mass eroded is 1e8 gms. Cars is 20,000 * 10 * 365 = 73e6. Amount eroded by each car is around 1.3gm/km. Maybe someone could check my assumptions (and my math), but I still don't believe the numbers in the linked article.
  - mokus 7y ago
    To look at it the other direction, 5.8 g/km times 75,000 km means they have to somehow produce 435 kg of pollution per set of tires. Without some more explanation (are they building some kind of model to extrapolate to the entire supply chain?) that seems more than a little implausible. It seems most likely from the context that they are measuring shedding of brand new tires and trying to pass that off as a representative value. I guess the idea is that it’s a contributor to the acute dose in the car’s immediate vicinity, but without that context it seems like another misleading detail.
    - 7y ago
perlgeek 7y ago
Worse for what? For the humans nearby? For climate change? It would be nice if such articles stated their premises.
- diamondo25 7y ago
  A higher number is, in terms of emission, worse.
  - adrianmonk 7y ago
    Of course higher numbers are worse in an apples-to-apples comparison. The question is whether this is that. For example, maybe tail pipe emissions make climate change worse, but kicking up dust on the road gives people lung disease.
- alexandercrohde 7y ago
  Without defining the central term of its central thesis (let alone citing any sources) it's generous to even call this an article.
- xiphias2 7y ago
  I have a respiratory illness from air pollution, and never had problem with tire pollution created by electric vehicles. Even with LNG vehicles I feel somewhat better. Tires may create big particulates, but they are easy to filter. The small molecules that I am sensitive to are extremely hard to filter from the air.
the8472 7y ago
Headline > Pollution From Tyre Wear [is] 1,000 Times Worse Than Exhaust Emissions Article > But tyre wear pollution is unregulated and can be 1,000 times worse
- ajross 7y ago
  Also headline: "pollution", and article "harmful particle matter from tyres". The study was of particulate emissions only, where when we generally think of "car pollution" we're talking about carbon or unburned hydrocarbons or toxins, not smoke. And the comparison was to "what comes out of a car's exhaust", when the overwhelming contributor to the particulate composition of smog is reactions in the atmosphere and not the stuff in the pipe. Not a good headline at all. But still, no doubt tire pollution is reasonable significant and we should all be driving less anyway.
  - the8472 7y ago
    "Smoke" is underselling it a bit. Tyre wear creates PM2.5, which is toxic. I don't consider that outright misleading in comparison to misstating an upper bound as a tight bound.
    - ajross 7y ago
      As described in the article, the number they used for the "1000x" comparison wasn't PM2.5 due to car exhaust. It was PM2.5 IN car exhaust, which is quite literally the thing we call "smoke". The vast majority of smog particles due to automobile traffic appear in the atmosphere as reaction products, they aren't in the exhaust.
      - labawi 7y ago
        Are you talking about non-PM (particulate matter) pollution such as NOx, which comes from exhaust but can create ozone?
- benkuhn 7y ago
  It's true that they weakened the wording in that section of the body, but the description of the actual research does make it sound like the factor of 1,000 was a typical case, not the worst case: > Using a popular family hatchback running on brand new, correctly inflated tyres, we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles. > > Compared with regulated exhaust emission limits of 4.5 milligrams per kilometer, the completely unregulated tyre wear emission is higher by a factor of over 1,000. Of course, this assumes that the tyre particles captured by their methodology are (on average) equally bad as exhaust particles, and maybe brand-new tyres wear especially quickly or something. It does seem hard to square the factor of 1000 from this study with the estimate that non-exhaust emissions account for a mere 60% (rather than 99.9%) of PM2.5 emissions. Would be curious to hear from anyone who understands emissions testing better.
empath75 7y ago
If someone had told you that this would be the case in the 1960s, they probably would have jumped for joy. It’s more a positive signal for how much emissions technology has advanced. Obviously it’s something worth looking at and improving, still, but it’s definitely not a sign that things are getting worse, but rather the opposite.
- fjeifisjf 7y ago
  Challenge is, can we make tired that don’t wear or are made of friendly materials.
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    No. When things roll very tiny pieces break off both the rolling thing and the thing rolled over. If we want to travel by rolling (which seems like a yes) along the ground then that's going to produce PM 2.5 air pollution. Flying is definitely worse, for at least the medium term and perhaps forever, and magnetic levitation is so expensive you're just not going to do it at scale. The effect from pushing a stroller will be greatly (much more than linearly) smaller than from a goods delivery truck or a railway train, but it's there. We just have to consider this when deciding what's a good idea.
  - dharmab 7y ago
    A tire that doesn't wear is a tire that rapidly overheats and loses grip.
ori_b 7y ago
Non-exhaust, particulate pollution.
nottorp 7y ago
What I'd like to know is who this "leading authority" is. Release is a bit vague.
scythe 7y ago
> Using a popular family hatchback running on brand new, correctly inflated tyres, we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles. >Compared with regulated exhaust emission limits of 4.5 milligrams per kilometer, the completely unregulated tyre wear emission is higher by a factor of over 1,000. This is approximately as reasonable as declaring that a crossbow is more dangerous than a gun because it fires a heavier projectile. How large are the particles? What's their expected lifetime in the atmosphere? What proportion are smaller than 10 micron? 2.5 micron?
lazyjones 7y ago
This is, as it stands in the headline, classic "fake news" that is being spread by people who want to exaggerate the problems with cars.
- natch 7y ago
  We don't know who it is being promoted by. Possibly the oil industry or the legacy gasoline car industry.
kieranmaine 7y ago
For those people wondering about what percentage of PM2.5 and PM10 are caused by non-exhaust emissions. "NEEs are currently believed to constitute the majority of primary particulate matter from road transport, 60 percent of PM2.5 and 73 percent of PM10 – and in its 2019 report ‘Non-Exhaust Emissions from Road Traffic’ by the UK Government’s Air Quality Expert Group (AQEG), it recommended that NEE are immediately recognised as a source of ambient concentrations of airborne particulate matter, even for vehicles with zero exhaust emissions of particles – such as EVs."
thinkcontext 7y ago
> Using a popular family hatchback running on brand new, correctly inflated tyres, we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles. So this is based on n=1, very suspicious. If tires really were this big a source of PM emissions then how would levels in US cities gone down through vehicle pollution control measures. Something is not adding up here.
- furtive808 7y ago
  At that rate you would burn through the whole set of tires in less than 50,000km, so how is it possible? Could it be those nubs on new tires are accounting for a majority of the waste up front?
  - fefe23 7y ago
    Maybe not all the particles come from the tyre? They could come from the road, or the brakes, or leaves / dust on the road.
  - taneq 7y ago
    Do most people’s tyres last longer than 50k kms? Maybe I’m doing something wrong...
    - landtuna 7y ago
      I think the 50k is to make the tires disappear
    - smt88 7y ago
      Good tires driving on mostly paved roads should last at least 120k kms. In the US, you pay $120-200 per tire for those, but they also come with a warranty that will replace them for free if they wear out before the distance advertised.
      - sokoloff 7y ago
        That's not how treadwear warranties work. They're not "replace them for free"; they're pro-rated, and there are all kinds of restrictions and limitations. https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/tires/why-tread-life-warranties-are-next-to-useless https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/tires/why-tread-life-war...
annoyingnoob 7y ago
The claims here seem dubious. They tested one type of brand new tire. Then they conclude that "high-quality" tires are somehow better without providing any evidence to support that claim. While tires may very well be a source of pollution I have to wonder where the money for the work came from.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Shitty tires start with the same tread depth, but wear out in 25-35k miles. High quality tires usually go 50-60k.
  - allannienhuis 7y ago
    Tread wear isn't a measure of quality, it's a measure of the how much 'grip' a tire is designed to have. High performance tires are softer to grip better, but wear out much much faster than tires designed for higher mileage. The higher mileage tires have worse performance characteristics - greater stopping distance, etc.
    - thedance 7y ago
      High-performance tires also produce larger particles.
  - selectodude 7y ago
    The $400/corner tires on a sports car usually last about 5-8000 miles. They’re about as high quality as it gets.
    - blattimwind 7y ago
      Tyres are designed on a performance - life continuum. High performance means softer rubber, with better grip, but thus lower life. Long life means harder rubber, with less grip, thusly reduced performance.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
_Microft 7y ago
Maybe offtopic but a surprising bit of extra information regarding wear and vehicles: Road wear scales with the fourth power of axle load, so heavier vehicles do much more damage than one might expect. Take a 40t truck with 5 axles vs. a small car with a weight of 1t and two axles (e.g. VW Polo, maybe an older VW Golf might only weigh 1t as well): (8t axle load / 0.5t axle load) = 16^4, i.e. the truck puts 2^16 (65536) times as much wear on the street as the car. (8t axle load / 1t axle load (SUV)) = 8^4 = 2^12, even comparing it with an SUV and an axle load of 1t each, the truck is still 4096 times worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road#Maintenance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road#Maintenance https://books.google.de/books?id=7Yqxyefv-VAC&pg=PA252&dq=4th+power+of+axle+weight&redir_esc=y&hl=de#v=onepage&q=4th%20power%20of%20axle%20weight&f=false https://books.google.de/books?id=7Yqxyefv-VAC&pg=PA252&dq=4t...
- abyssin 7y ago
  I remember a hitchhiking ride in France with a man working in the building and infrastructure industry telling me about these figures, and the intense lobbying against transporting goods on rails...
  - dukoid 7y ago
    In France the rubber tyre lobby is so strong, the got them on subway cars. No joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-tyred_metro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-tyred_metro
    - forkexec 7y ago
      At Michelin, we're more than just Green guides, we put our tires on the subway cars and encourage protesters to use ours for all their tire fire needs.
      - tomohawk 7y ago
        Maybe the study should also take into account this use of tyres.
toss1 7y ago
Yes, the tires wear, and the wear can be easily measured by the mass difference between a new tire, worn tire, divided by the distance. Plausible that the total wear is 1-3 orders of magnitude total mass greater than modern tailpipe emissions. A huge question that is never answered is how much of those worn particles actually become airborne, how many stay airborne for how long, and what is their effect on organisms breathing them. While the Precautionary Principle says we should assume harm, this entire article seems to assume that every microgram is automatically the most harmful possible pollutant, which is likely untrue, unnecessarily alarmist, and undermines their thesis.
- sjg007 7y ago
  It will be dose dependent.
  - toss1 7y ago
    Exactly. Question is, what is the dosing level that would cause harm, and what are the routes that this material takes that might rise to such a level, vs how much is, e.g., stuck on the pavement and washed into the ditch with every rain?
    - labawi 7y ago
      > stuck on the pavement and washed into the ditch with every rain? This is also an important problem - there is a lot of synthetic rubber particulate in waterways and oceans - a notable fraction of all microplastics.
      - toss1 7y ago
        Exactly, so while the authors are ringing alarms about the particles from a health POV, they might be a irrelevant to that threat, but a major threat to certain ecosystems, or nothing at all. Certainly bears good investigation, but far too soon for conclusions (an I'm usually biased towards acting based on Precautionary Principle, but this just seems far too indirect to even make assumptions, let alone conclusions).
ip26 7y ago
Testing only a brand new tire seems like a serious limitation. What if, for example, tires shed particles in a bathtub curve, or exponential decay? I find myself slightly suspicious they knew a new tire to shed the most and were going for that shocking headline.
muro 7y ago
Weigh used tires, compare to new, divide by distance used for. Wash them thoroughly if you want to be extra precise.
seemslegit 7y ago
This talks specifically about particle pollution ( not CO2 emissions ) which has already been largely regulated out, "up to" 1000x of a very small amount can still be quite insignificant. Given the misleading nature of the press release title I think I'll avoid reading the actual result and mentally mark "Emission analytics" as one of those companies.
kazinator 7y ago
What does "worse" mean? Are tire particles, more than exhaust gases, contributing to the greenhouse effect that causes global warming? How about the total carbon? How many tankfuls of gas does a car incinerate in between tire changes?
gambiting 7y ago
I also wonder about pollution from shoes with plastic soles - pretty much every pair I have ever owned, the sole just wears out gradually until there's nothing left. Where does this plastic go? It's just ground into fine powder and stays on our pavements? Is then washed with rainwater and goes into our soil? How come this isn't a problem yet? Or if it is - why isn't anyone talking about it?
- BenoitEssiambre 7y ago
  Because plastic is not a significant pollutant. What's next, we're going to remove soil from the environment? Soil is full of, mold, bacteria, virus, metals, minerals, fungi, urine, feces, decomposed insects, thousands of chemicals like rust, alumina, silica, heavy metals, many carcinogens, lung irritants etc. It can give you "Farmer ’s Lung" and it's _everywhere_ in nature. Plastic is quite clean and tame by comparison.
  - computerphage 7y ago
    Can someone substantively reply instead of just downvoting this comment?
    - hinkley 7y ago
      Attempted.
    - Fjordbored 7y ago
      No
    - modwest 7y ago
      Look man anyone trying to convince you in 2020 that "plastic is not a significant pollutant" is not arguing in good faith. Please, for the love of god, learn about the climate and the impact of human industry on it.
      - BenoitEssiambre 7y ago
6510 7y ago
OT: I was thinking: Imagine how easy self driving trains are to make. Then I naively pondered if air filled tires are all that efficient. I cant imagine bending the rubber gives back a lot of energy? I just looked it up: "An average truck gets around 150 ton-miles per gallon of diesel. Trains get around 600 ton-miles per gallon."
helsinkiandrew 7y ago
Presumably they meant 5.8 milligrams/km rather than grams - thats 290 grams over 50,000km. The following literature review(2014) mentions an estimate of 0.1-10% tyre wear becoming airborne - because the majority is relatively large particles: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC89231/jrc89231-online%20final%20version%202.pdf https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  They must have meant grams because that is the basis of their 1000X statistic. The other number is also single digit but is in milligrams. That doesn't mean they're right, but it's the only way I can interpret what they're saying.
  - helsinkiandrew 7y ago
    But 4.5g/km implies 225kg after 50000 km which doesn’t seem possible. Something definitely smells fishy.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      That seems to be some heavy tyres, that's for sure.
hootbootscoot 7y ago
PARTICULATE pollution. big difference. CO2 and methane and unburned hydrocarbons are not particulates. this article is playing fast and loose with terminology and math. (1000 times worse, they claim...)
- agoodthrowaway 7y ago
  Particulate pollution has a big impact on human health and children in particular.
gpapilion 7y ago
Having lived next to a freeway, I found everything in my apartment covered with a sticky black dust that took hours to remove. I found embedded on books and other items years later. So, I think this has been true for a long time. What I didn’t find mentioned is these emissions were more or less localized to a small distance from the road. For example when I moved it went away. That said I’m sure it’s a nightmare for the watershed.
- ajnin 7y ago
  How do you know if that soot came from exhaust, tyres, or something else ?
  - hinkley 7y ago
    We moved a young coworker into a first floor appt in downtown and there was black soot on all the windowsills. I taught him about soap and vinegar and we suggested an air filter and being judicious with opening the windows, or finding a window fan with a prefilter. It had just not occurred to me that the busses and trucks were pumping out that much soot in the modern era.
    - pas 7y ago
      It's not always soot, a lot of it is also simply dust.
  - gpapilion 7y ago
    You could see it was tiny sticky pieces of rubber.
agoodthrowaway 7y ago
I used to live about 4 blocks from CA-17 (a 6 lane freeway) and when we’d leave the windows open a layer of black soot would form on the window sill after a few hours. I always thought that this soot was a combination of rubber from tires and diesel soot. When we moved away, we can leave our windows open and there’s no black soot. I’ve always felt like living near the freeway was like living next door to a heavily polluting factory.
fouric 7y ago
I wonder if the pollution from electric vehicles is worse because of their torque curves...
dayaz36 7y ago
Wow the hit pieces against EV adoption are getting more desperate and creative. This blog is just comical.
ThinkingGuy 7y ago
Cecil Adams of "The Straight Dope" had a column about this issue back in 2006: https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2661/when-the-rubber-meets-the-road-where-does-it-go/ https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2661/when-the-rubb...
thesilversurfer 7y ago
Considering a mazda with tyre size of 215/45 R18 with 1/4inch useable tread depth, that lasts 30K miles: The mm^3 of rubber lost over lifetime (circumference * how wide the tire is * tyre tread depth) is approximately 2375922.431 Considering density of rubber at 650kg/m3, the weight lost over 30,000 miles is 1.54kg, which equates to 31mg/km and nowhere near 5g/km as claimed in the article. What am I missing?
hinkley 7y ago
Last time I looked at tires, Michelin was advertising tires with natural oils in them that somehow improved handling at 50% wear level. I wonder if that even moved the needle on environmental footprint of their tires?
adrianmonk 7y ago
Assuming that this really is a problem (which other comments have thrown into doubt), I see potential conflicts between vehicle safety and fixing this. One obvious solution is harder tires that don't wear as much. But these tend to have worse grip, which means worse braking performance (and cornering, etc.). They also mentioned that reducing the weight of cars would help, but one of the reasons cars have gotten heavier over the last few decades is the addition of a bunch of safety equipment.
ratel 7y ago
Hold on: The claim is this: > "Using a popular family hatchback running on brand new, correctly inflated tyres, we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles." It does not seem to be a mistake: > "Compared with regulated exhaust emission limits of 4.5 milligrams per kilometer, the completely unregulated tyre wear emission is higher by a factor of over 1,000." A tire might way up to 15 kilograms for a 20 inch type. Lets assume 10 kilograms for a normal tire which is on the high side. 4 tires is 40 kilograms. Even if we assume half of the particals are not coming from the tire (but from where?). That still leaves 40,000 / 2.9 = 13793 kilometers for the tires to be completly consumed (weighing nothing anymore). That is definitely not happening. So without an explanation on where the matter is coming from this does not read right.
- sschueller 7y ago
  Most of it must come from the asphalt.
  - _rrnv 7y ago
    I agree. But tires do shed a lot. Consider a brand new tire has grove depth of about 8-10mm, and many drivers change tires when their groves are 0-2mm (yes, some idiots keep driving until they have slicks or "a pop").
    - cormacrelf 7y ago
      Turns out you don’t need to measure air pollutants, you can just divide lost rubber by the distance travelled. It won’t be anywhere close to what was measured, but then again actual particles are a much more useful number because you can’t breathe a worn down groove.
  - IshKebab 7y ago
    Then budget tyres surely wouldn't make a difference?
- kungtotte 7y ago
  They're torn up from the road and rubbed off from the tyres themselves. The majority is obviously coming from the road. There's been studies done here in Sweden since we've banned studded winter tyres in some areas of Stockholm in an effort to reduce road wear and improve air quality. I don't know of any sources in English off the top of my head though. The last time I read an article about it though (2+ years ago, during Diesel-gate), the findings was that the danger in the particles comes from their size with smaller particles being more dangerous for humans. And that road particles were something like an order of magnitude larger than exhaust fume particles from diesel engines. We've since banned diesel engines inside Stockholm as well so the whole thing is moot here.
MobileVet 7y ago
I can definitely believe tire wear is a significant contributor... but is Emissions Analytics a reputable source? It feels like someone grabbed a domain and wrote a post with minimal experimental rigor.
elidourado 7y ago
Fake news. Smaller particles from exhaust are way worse for you than larger particles from tires. Within a category like PM2.5, mass is a terrible metric. A given mass of fuel exhaust will contain orders of magnitude more particles because they are tinier. Smaller particles can penetrate deeper into your lungs and can go into your bloodstream.
maxhedrome 7y ago
I am literally tripping balls... who spells tire like this?
superpermutat0r 7y ago
I live next to a very busy road (6-lane). When I moved in, the closets were filled with black stains. My brother-in-law cleaned it and said he never saw that kind of dirt. The closets are dirty again. As time passed I also never encountered that amount of dust. The dust was also extremely different from the dust when I lived in the forest, dark colored and plentiful. It accumulates very quickly, it gets abandoned-house-dusty in a week. My breathing also got worse compared to the forest, especially during nights. So there's definitely something dusty around the road. It was also quite interesting to see that the bathroom gets dusty as quickly too, despite being closed most of the time. It's like the whole ventilation system of the building naturally permeates dust.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  If you have a central air heating system like most houses do, you should add a filter near the fan. You won't catch all the dust, but you'll collect a lot of it, making your air healthier to live in
  - sjg007 7y ago
    I would run a couple standalone couple hepa aircleaners as well.
labawi 7y ago
They fitted brand new tires and called it a read world test, as if people get new tires every week. Then they measured particulate weight and compared it to ICE emission regulation as if weight was the deciding factor: 5800 ug of rubber particles vs 4.5 ug of PM soot. The rubber could be 1x 5g chunk or 1000x 1ug or whatever. New cars produce mostly small soot, so 4.5 ug can be about 10 000 000 particles¹. I'm not saying non-exhaust emissions are irrelevant, but I am quite sure exhaust is a much bigger issue, overly so in eastern EU, where people often even remove DP filters and enforcement is lacking. ¹ PM count estimates: coal density: 929 kg/m³ PM10 particle size: 10 um PM10 volume: 4/3 * pi * (5um)^3 ~ 4 * (5e-6 m)^3 ~ 5e-16 m³ PM10 mass: 5e-16m³ * 1e3 kg/m³ = 5e-13 kg = 5e-7 ug = 0.5 pg If exhaust PM was PM10, 4.5 ug would be about 4.5 ug / 5e-7 ug ~ 1e7 = 10M particles, give or take an order of magnitude.
unbalancedevh 7y ago
If the idea is to focus on tires, then why not just look at how many tires are manufactured each year? 100% of tires end up polluting something, somewhere. Or, again if the focus is tire wear, there must be pretty good data about how much of a tire gets worn off before replacement, and how often they're replaced. It doesn't seem like it should be very complex to calculate how much tire is being emitted due to road wear.
mrich 7y ago
The German Post designed the Streetscooter a while back which is an electric delivery van. They also claim "zero fine dust driving". But how does that work? It is quite hard to have a fully closed system so no particles can escape. Well, their solution is quite clever: They are filtering the air in general, so can also consume particles emitted from other cars, even when the vehicle is not moving. So they could even get to net negative fine dust emissions :) https://www.dekra-solutions.com/2018/01/fine-dust-free-driving/?lang=en https://www.dekra-solutions.com/2018/01/fine-dust-free-drivi...
- blattimwind 7y ago
  Streetscooter is in the process of being shut down.
gentleman11 7y ago
This is the perfect opportunity to link people to Robert Heineken’s story: the Roads Must Roll. In it, there are a series of road towns, where roads are more like moving sidewalks. Very neat stuff, I read it as a teenager and then re-listened to a great audiobook version recently too (bundled with the man who sold the moon, which is the prophecy foretelling of Elon musk) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  > Robert Heineken’s story: the Roads Must Roll. One beer too many? Or an illiterate autocorrector? Should be Robert Heinlein. :-)
bryanmgreen 7y ago
All these articles are important, but they end up missing the point of the auto industries weightiest concern. At the end of the day, it really comes down to the weight of the vehicles. There is absolutely zero justification for any standard-use car to weigh more than 3,200 pounds, and that's for a SUV. More weight affects EVERYTHING. Material logistics/sourcing/shipping/construction costs and emissions/waste-disposal, end-product shipping/distribution/operating-costs and emissions/repairs/waste-disposal, as well as infrastructure construction/maintenance. That's just hard costs. I could go on in more granular fashion and add soft costs like less traffic and less road noise as well. I drive a very loaded gasoline powered Fiesta hatchback. It's got cruise control, a great entertainment system with car play, even stupid neon lighting I didn't want. It weighs only 2,600 pounds and even though it isn't fast, I don't have any issues getting up to speed. My mileage is consistently 29 in LA traffic and 34 driving fast on long highway trips. It's nearly 2 feet (22 inches!!) shorter than a Camry and I can park it basically anywhere. Because it weighs so little, tires last forever. It cost me less than $20,000 brand new. My point is that a freaking heavy and large 3,400lb sedan, or 4,500lb SUV is 100% supremely unnecessary. Multiply hundreds or thousands of weight savings per-car over millions and millions of new cars sold in the US alone would insanely positive and tangential effects on the planet. Eventually those gains would reach the economy and infrastructure too. It just infuriates me that there is a relatively simple way to mitigate so many issues and it's so blatantly ignored or not even known.
- spaginal 7y ago
  Unnecessary for you and your usage, but there a lot of situations, environments, and applications where a heavier, larger vehicle is necessary. If you live rural you aren't driving a small Fiesta hatchback everywhere. If you have a large family, an SUV is a basic requirement of modern living to move the family around. Conversely if you live in a city with tight quarters as a single person with no kids, an SUV or pickup may not be necessary at all. There is a reason we don't dictate choice or consumption with something as necessary and basic as transportation because it isn't one size fits all. People buy what they generally need.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
trekrich 7y ago
Expect this in a Greta speech soon. We need to stop using Tyres on our cars!
totalZero 7y ago
Tires contain fossil fuel products like carbon black and synthetic rubber. The roadway contains bitumen, another fossil fuel product. The numbers in this experiment seem dubious and are probably not representative, but they do reflect our over-dependence on refined petroleum. We have to find new ways to make these things.
bborud 7y ago
This is a press release. Is there a link to the underlying research this press release is talking about? I can't really do anything with this.
nvader 7y ago
This article, and the whole website looks so suspicious. Quotes come mostly from its own organization, "Emission Analytics", and there is no reference to an existing or upcoming publication. In addition, and I realize I'm nitpicking, the stock photo, the composition of the copy and the general... feel of the website seems off. The overall effect is to make me actively distrust their conclusions and want to ask about their agenda and source of funding.
TheWoolRug 7y ago
Here in Seattle folks are starting to look at salmon "pre spawn mortality" suspecting chemicals from worn tires. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b03287 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b03287
timbo1642 7y ago
Easy solution: Use longer lasting tires like 50k tires rather than 30k tires and FIX THE ROADS so there is less wear. Roads in Los Angeles for example are absolutely horrible. And we have emission laws here that aren't enforced. Tons of illegal exhausts and mods and NOTHING is done. Cops ignore it. I've seen so many smoking cars as well.

407 points by clouddrover 7y ago

When I first moved to the SF bay area I didn't have AC in my apartment so I had to leave the windows open during the summer. After a year of leaving them open there was a thick coat of tire dust all along the windowsill since my window faced a road. :x

asah 7y ago
Los Angeles has entered the chat. :-)
- asah 7y ago
  New York has entered the chat.
  - asah 7y ago
    Bangkok has entered the chat.
    - asah 7y ago
      Beijing has entered the chat.
      - WA 7y ago
        Reddit has entered the chat. Wrong channel.
      - ttul 7y ago
        New Delhi has entered the <cough, cough> ... ... <NO CARRIER>
        danogentili 7y ago
        Turin has entered the chat, dioporco
hanniabu 7y ago
How do you know it was tire dust and not just regular dust?
- Eric_WVGG 7y ago
  ... because he opened multiple windows and the only one to gather grime was facing the street.
- pshc 7y ago
  I had the same experience, in SF too. Second floor corner apartment on Fell St, a wide and busy road along the park. The windowsills on that side accumulated black dust unlike the other side of the corner.
a3n 7y ago
In the 70s I live in an apartment adjacent to Interstate H-1 in Honolulu. Same experience. Lanai furniture black. Don't know if tire or exhaust caused, but it was black and disturbing and probably in my lungs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_H-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_H-1

LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago

We need more hovercrafts!

twic 7y ago
Or walking draglines.

0ldblu3 7y ago

So to visualize this I'm thinking of a rectangle 2.5 feet long, 8 inches wide, and a half-inch thick times 4. That is what comes off my tires every 5 years so that I have to replace them. Every set of tires sold is to replace that.

speedgoose 7y ago
It's a bit confusing to me. You changed the body part in the middle.
pjsg 7y ago
The numbers don't seem to add up. If an average set of tires lasts (roughly) 50,000km to 100,000km, and the average tire weights around 10kg, and you have 4 tires, then the (totally unrealistic) maximum loss per km is 4 * 10 * 1000 / 75,000 gms/km. This is 0.5g/km (and it assumed that there was no tire left). While these numbers are rough, I don't see any way to get to 5.8gm/km as quoted in the article. The brake pads aren't going to contribute all the rest (they aren't that heavy to start with). What about the road surface? Maybe you can erode 1cm of surface over 10 years with 2,000 vehicles per hour (average down to 20,000 per day. Volume eroded (per km) in cc is 400 (width) * 1 * 100,000 (length) = 4e7 cc. Density is around 2.5 gm/cc. Mass eroded is 1e8 gms. Cars is 20,000 * 10 * 365 = 73e6. Amount eroded by each car is around 1.3gm/km. Maybe someone could check my assumptions (and my math), but I still don't believe the numbers in the linked article.
- mokus 7y ago
  To look at it the other direction, 5.8 g/km times 75,000 km means they have to somehow produce 435 kg of pollution per set of tires. Without some more explanation (are they building some kind of model to extrapolate to the entire supply chain?) that seems more than a little implausible. It seems most likely from the context that they are measuring shedding of brand new tires and trying to pass that off as a representative value. I guess the idea is that it’s a contributor to the acute dose in the car’s immediate vicinity, but without that context it seems like another misleading detail.
  - 7y ago

perlgeek 7y ago

Worse for what? For the humans nearby? For climate change? It would be nice if such articles stated their premises.

diamondo25 7y ago
A higher number is, in terms of emission, worse.
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  Of course higher numbers are worse in an apples-to-apples comparison. The question is whether this is that. For example, maybe tail pipe emissions make climate change worse, but kicking up dust on the road gives people lung disease.
alexandercrohde 7y ago
Without defining the central term of its central thesis (let alone citing any sources) it's generous to even call this an article.
xiphias2 7y ago
I have a respiratory illness from air pollution, and never had problem with tire pollution created by electric vehicles. Even with LNG vehicles I feel somewhat better. Tires may create big particulates, but they are easy to filter. The small molecules that I am sensitive to are extremely hard to filter from the air.

the8472 7y ago

Headline > Pollution From Tyre Wear [is] 1,000 Times Worse Than Exhaust Emissions Article > But tyre wear pollution is unregulated and can be 1,000 times worse

ajross 7y ago
Also headline: "pollution", and article "harmful particle matter from tyres". The study was of particulate emissions only, where when we generally think of "car pollution" we're talking about carbon or unburned hydrocarbons or toxins, not smoke. And the comparison was to "what comes out of a car's exhaust", when the overwhelming contributor to the particulate composition of smog is reactions in the atmosphere and not the stuff in the pipe. Not a good headline at all. But still, no doubt tire pollution is reasonable significant and we should all be driving less anyway.
- the8472 7y ago
  "Smoke" is underselling it a bit. Tyre wear creates PM2.5, which is toxic. I don't consider that outright misleading in comparison to misstating an upper bound as a tight bound.
  - ajross 7y ago
    As described in the article, the number they used for the "1000x" comparison wasn't PM2.5 due to car exhaust. It was PM2.5 IN car exhaust, which is quite literally the thing we call "smoke". The vast majority of smog particles due to automobile traffic appear in the atmosphere as reaction products, they aren't in the exhaust.
    - labawi 7y ago
      Are you talking about non-PM (particulate matter) pollution such as NOx, which comes from exhaust but can create ozone?
benkuhn 7y ago
It's true that they weakened the wording in that section of the body, but the description of the actual research does make it sound like the factor of 1,000 was a typical case, not the worst case: > Using a popular family hatchback running on brand new, correctly inflated tyres, we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles. > > Compared with regulated exhaust emission limits of 4.5 milligrams per kilometer, the completely unregulated tyre wear emission is higher by a factor of over 1,000. Of course, this assumes that the tyre particles captured by their methodology are (on average) equally bad as exhaust particles, and maybe brand-new tyres wear especially quickly or something. It does seem hard to square the factor of 1000 from this study with the estimate that non-exhaust emissions account for a mere 60% (rather than 99.9%) of PM2.5 emissions. Would be curious to hear from anyone who understands emissions testing better.

empath75 7y ago

If someone had told you that this would be the case in the 1960s, they probably would have jumped for joy. It’s more a positive signal for how much emissions technology has advanced. Obviously it’s something worth looking at and improving, still, but it’s definitely not a sign that things are getting worse, but rather the opposite.

fjeifisjf 7y ago
Challenge is, can we make tired that don’t wear or are made of friendly materials.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  No. When things roll very tiny pieces break off both the rolling thing and the thing rolled over. If we want to travel by rolling (which seems like a yes) along the ground then that's going to produce PM 2.5 air pollution. Flying is definitely worse, for at least the medium term and perhaps forever, and magnetic levitation is so expensive you're just not going to do it at scale. The effect from pushing a stroller will be greatly (much more than linearly) smaller than from a goods delivery truck or a railway train, but it's there. We just have to consider this when deciding what's a good idea.
- dharmab 7y ago
  A tire that doesn't wear is a tire that rapidly overheats and loses grip.

ori_b 7y ago

Non-exhaust, particulate pollution.

nottorp 7y ago

What I'd like to know is who this "leading authority" is. Release is a bit vague.

scythe 7y ago

> Using a popular family hatchback running on brand new, correctly inflated tyres, we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles. >Compared with regulated exhaust emission limits of 4.5 milligrams per kilometer, the completely unregulated tyre wear emission is higher by a factor of over 1,000. This is approximately as reasonable as declaring that a crossbow is more dangerous than a gun because it fires a heavier projectile. How large are the particles? What's their expected lifetime in the atmosphere? What proportion are smaller than 10 micron? 2.5 micron?

lazyjones 7y ago

This is, as it stands in the headline, classic "fake news" that is being spread by people who want to exaggerate the problems with cars.

natch 7y ago
We don't know who it is being promoted by. Possibly the oil industry or the legacy gasoline car industry.

kieranmaine 7y ago

For those people wondering about what percentage of PM2.5 and PM10 are caused by non-exhaust emissions. "NEEs are currently believed to constitute the majority of primary particulate matter from road transport, 60 percent of PM2.5 and 73 percent of PM10 – and in its 2019 report ‘Non-Exhaust Emissions from Road Traffic’ by the UK Government’s Air Quality Expert Group (AQEG), it recommended that NEE are immediately recognised as a source of ambient concentrations of airborne particulate matter, even for vehicles with zero exhaust emissions of particles – such as EVs."

thinkcontext 7y ago

> Using a popular family hatchback running on brand new, correctly inflated tyres, we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles. So this is based on n=1, very suspicious. If tires really were this big a source of PM emissions then how would levels in US cities gone down through vehicle pollution control measures. Something is not adding up here.

furtive808 7y ago
At that rate you would burn through the whole set of tires in less than 50,000km, so how is it possible? Could it be those nubs on new tires are accounting for a majority of the waste up front?
- fefe23 7y ago
  Maybe not all the particles come from the tyre? They could come from the road, or the brakes, or leaves / dust on the road.
- taneq 7y ago
  Do most people’s tyres last longer than 50k kms? Maybe I’m doing something wrong...
  - landtuna 7y ago
    I think the 50k is to make the tires disappear
  - smt88 7y ago
    Good tires driving on mostly paved roads should last at least 120k kms. In the US, you pay $120-200 per tire for those, but they also come with a warranty that will replace them for free if they wear out before the distance advertised.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      That's not how treadwear warranties work. They're not "replace them for free"; they're pro-rated, and there are all kinds of restrictions and limitations. https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/tires/why-tread-life-warranties-are-next-to-useless https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/tires/why-tread-life-war...

annoyingnoob 7y ago

The claims here seem dubious. They tested one type of brand new tire. Then they conclude that "high-quality" tires are somehow better without providing any evidence to support that claim. While tires may very well be a source of pollution I have to wonder where the money for the work came from.

Spooky23 7y ago
Shitty tires start with the same tread depth, but wear out in 25-35k miles. High quality tires usually go 50-60k.
- allannienhuis 7y ago
  Tread wear isn't a measure of quality, it's a measure of the how much 'grip' a tire is designed to have. High performance tires are softer to grip better, but wear out much much faster than tires designed for higher mileage. The higher mileage tires have worse performance characteristics - greater stopping distance, etc.
  - thedance 7y ago
    High-performance tires also produce larger particles.
- selectodude 7y ago
  The $400/corner tires on a sports car usually last about 5-8000 miles. They’re about as high quality as it gets.
  - blattimwind 7y ago
    Tyres are designed on a performance - life continuum. High performance means softer rubber, with better grip, but thus lower life. Long life means harder rubber, with less grip, thusly reduced performance.
  - Spooky23 7y ago

_Microft 7y ago

Maybe offtopic but a surprising bit of extra information regarding wear and vehicles: Road wear scales with the fourth power of axle load, so heavier vehicles do much more damage than one might expect. Take a 40t truck with 5 axles vs. a small car with a weight of 1t and two axles (e.g. VW Polo, maybe an older VW Golf might only weigh 1t as well): (8t axle load / 0.5t axle load) = 16^4, i.e. the truck puts 2^16 (65536) times as much wear on the street as the car. (8t axle load / 1t axle load (SUV)) = 8^4 = 2^12, even comparing it with an SUV and an axle load of 1t each, the truck is still 4096 times worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road#Maintenance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road#Maintenance https://books.google.de/books?id=7Yqxyefv-VAC&pg=PA252&dq=4th+power+of+axle+weight&redir_esc=y&hl=de#v=onepage&q=4th%20power%20of%20axle%20weight&f=false https://books.google.de/books?id=7Yqxyefv-VAC&pg=PA252&dq=4t...

abyssin 7y ago
I remember a hitchhiking ride in France with a man working in the building and infrastructure industry telling me about these figures, and the intense lobbying against transporting goods on rails...
- dukoid 7y ago
  In France the rubber tyre lobby is so strong, the got them on subway cars. No joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-tyred_metro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-tyred_metro
  - forkexec 7y ago
    At Michelin, we're more than just Green guides, we put our tires on the subway cars and encourage protesters to use ours for all their tire fire needs.
    - tomohawk 7y ago
      Maybe the study should also take into account this use of tyres.

toss1 7y ago

Yes, the tires wear, and the wear can be easily measured by the mass difference between a new tire, worn tire, divided by the distance. Plausible that the total wear is 1-3 orders of magnitude total mass greater than modern tailpipe emissions. A huge question that is never answered is how much of those worn particles actually become airborne, how many stay airborne for how long, and what is their effect on organisms breathing them. While the Precautionary Principle says we should assume harm, this entire article seems to assume that every microgram is automatically the most harmful possible pollutant, which is likely untrue, unnecessarily alarmist, and undermines their thesis.

sjg007 7y ago
It will be dose dependent.
- toss1 7y ago
  Exactly. Question is, what is the dosing level that would cause harm, and what are the routes that this material takes that might rise to such a level, vs how much is, e.g., stuck on the pavement and washed into the ditch with every rain?
  - labawi 7y ago
    > stuck on the pavement and washed into the ditch with every rain? This is also an important problem - there is a lot of synthetic rubber particulate in waterways and oceans - a notable fraction of all microplastics.
    - toss1 7y ago
      Exactly, so while the authors are ringing alarms about the particles from a health POV, they might be a irrelevant to that threat, but a major threat to certain ecosystems, or nothing at all. Certainly bears good investigation, but far too soon for conclusions (an I'm usually biased towards acting based on Precautionary Principle, but this just seems far too indirect to even make assumptions, let alone conclusions).

ip26 7y ago

Testing only a brand new tire seems like a serious limitation. What if, for example, tires shed particles in a bathtub curve, or exponential decay? I find myself slightly suspicious they knew a new tire to shed the most and were going for that shocking headline.

muro 7y ago

Weigh used tires, compare to new, divide by distance used for. Wash them thoroughly if you want to be extra precise.

seemslegit 7y ago

This talks specifically about particle pollution ( not CO2 emissions ) which has already been largely regulated out, "up to" 1000x of a very small amount can still be quite insignificant. Given the misleading nature of the press release title I think I'll avoid reading the actual result and mentally mark "Emission analytics" as one of those companies.

kazinator 7y ago

What does "worse" mean? Are tire particles, more than exhaust gases, contributing to the greenhouse effect that causes global warming? How about the total carbon? How many tankfuls of gas does a car incinerate in between tire changes?

gambiting 7y ago

I also wonder about pollution from shoes with plastic soles - pretty much every pair I have ever owned, the sole just wears out gradually until there's nothing left. Where does this plastic go? It's just ground into fine powder and stays on our pavements? Is then washed with rainwater and goes into our soil? How come this isn't a problem yet? Or if it is - why isn't anyone talking about it?

BenoitEssiambre 7y ago
Because plastic is not a significant pollutant. What's next, we're going to remove soil from the environment? Soil is full of, mold, bacteria, virus, metals, minerals, fungi, urine, feces, decomposed insects, thousands of chemicals like rust, alumina, silica, heavy metals, many carcinogens, lung irritants etc. It can give you "Farmer ’s Lung" and it's _everywhere_ in nature. Plastic is quite clean and tame by comparison.
- computerphage 7y ago
  Can someone substantively reply instead of just downvoting this comment?
  - hinkley 7y ago
    Attempted.
  - Fjordbored 7y ago
    No
  - modwest 7y ago
    Look man anyone trying to convince you in 2020 that "plastic is not a significant pollutant" is not arguing in good faith. Please, for the love of god, learn about the climate and the impact of human industry on it.
    - BenoitEssiambre 7y ago

6510 7y ago

OT: I was thinking: Imagine how easy self driving trains are to make. Then I naively pondered if air filled tires are all that efficient. I cant imagine bending the rubber gives back a lot of energy? I just looked it up: "An average truck gets around 150 ton-miles per gallon of diesel. Trains get around 600 ton-miles per gallon."

helsinkiandrew 7y ago

Presumably they meant 5.8 milligrams/km rather than grams - thats 290 grams over 50,000km. The following literature review(2014) mentions an estimate of 0.1-10% tyre wear becoming airborne - because the majority is relatively large particles: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC89231/jrc89231-online%20final%20version%202.pdf https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...

adrianmonk 7y ago
They must have meant grams because that is the basis of their 1000X statistic. The other number is also single digit but is in milligrams. That doesn't mean they're right, but it's the only way I can interpret what they're saying.
- helsinkiandrew 7y ago
  But 4.5g/km implies 225kg after 50000 km which doesn’t seem possible. Something definitely smells fishy.
  - hef19898 7y ago
    That seems to be some heavy tyres, that's for sure.

hootbootscoot 7y ago

PARTICULATE pollution. big difference. CO2 and methane and unburned hydrocarbons are not particulates. this article is playing fast and loose with terminology and math. (1000 times worse, they claim...)

agoodthrowaway 7y ago
Particulate pollution has a big impact on human health and children in particular.

gpapilion 7y ago

Having lived next to a freeway, I found everything in my apartment covered with a sticky black dust that took hours to remove. I found embedded on books and other items years later. So, I think this has been true for a long time. What I didn’t find mentioned is these emissions were more or less localized to a small distance from the road. For example when I moved it went away. That said I’m sure it’s a nightmare for the watershed.

ajnin 7y ago
How do you know if that soot came from exhaust, tyres, or something else ?
- hinkley 7y ago
  We moved a young coworker into a first floor appt in downtown and there was black soot on all the windowsills. I taught him about soap and vinegar and we suggested an air filter and being judicious with opening the windows, or finding a window fan with a prefilter. It had just not occurred to me that the busses and trucks were pumping out that much soot in the modern era.
  - pas 7y ago
    It's not always soot, a lot of it is also simply dust.
- gpapilion 7y ago
  You could see it was tiny sticky pieces of rubber.

agoodthrowaway 7y ago

I used to live about 4 blocks from CA-17 (a 6 lane freeway) and when we’d leave the windows open a layer of black soot would form on the window sill after a few hours. I always thought that this soot was a combination of rubber from tires and diesel soot. When we moved away, we can leave our windows open and there’s no black soot. I’ve always felt like living near the freeway was like living next door to a heavily polluting factory.

fouric 7y ago

I wonder if the pollution from electric vehicles is worse because of their torque curves...

dayaz36 7y ago

Wow the hit pieces against EV adoption are getting more desperate and creative. This blog is just comical.

ThinkingGuy 7y ago

Cecil Adams of "The Straight Dope" had a column about this issue back in 2006: https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2661/when-the-rubber-meets-the-road-where-does-it-go/ https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2661/when-the-rubb...

thesilversurfer 7y ago

Considering a mazda with tyre size of 215/45 R18 with 1/4inch useable tread depth, that lasts 30K miles: The mm^3 of rubber lost over lifetime (circumference * how wide the tire is * tyre tread depth) is approximately 2375922.431 Considering density of rubber at 650kg/m3, the weight lost over 30,000 miles is 1.54kg, which equates to 31mg/km and nowhere near 5g/km as claimed in the article. What am I missing?

hinkley 7y ago

Last time I looked at tires, Michelin was advertising tires with natural oils in them that somehow improved handling at 50% wear level. I wonder if that even moved the needle on environmental footprint of their tires?

adrianmonk 7y ago

Assuming that this really is a problem (which other comments have thrown into doubt), I see potential conflicts between vehicle safety and fixing this. One obvious solution is harder tires that don't wear as much. But these tend to have worse grip, which means worse braking performance (and cornering, etc.). They also mentioned that reducing the weight of cars would help, but one of the reasons cars have gotten heavier over the last few decades is the addition of a bunch of safety equipment.

ratel 7y ago

Hold on: The claim is this: > "Using a popular family hatchback running on brand new, correctly inflated tyres, we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles." It does not seem to be a mistake: > "Compared with regulated exhaust emission limits of 4.5 milligrams per kilometer, the completely unregulated tyre wear emission is higher by a factor of over 1,000." A tire might way up to 15 kilograms for a 20 inch type. Lets assume 10 kilograms for a normal tire which is on the high side. 4 tires is 40 kilograms. Even if we assume half of the particals are not coming from the tire (but from where?). That still leaves 40,000 / 2.9 = 13793 kilometers for the tires to be completly consumed (weighing nothing anymore). That is definitely not happening. So without an explanation on where the matter is coming from this does not read right.

sschueller 7y ago
Most of it must come from the asphalt.
- _rrnv 7y ago
  I agree. But tires do shed a lot. Consider a brand new tire has grove depth of about 8-10mm, and many drivers change tires when their groves are 0-2mm (yes, some idiots keep driving until they have slicks or "a pop").
  - cormacrelf 7y ago
    Turns out you don’t need to measure air pollutants, you can just divide lost rubber by the distance travelled. It won’t be anywhere close to what was measured, but then again actual particles are a much more useful number because you can’t breathe a worn down groove.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Then budget tyres surely wouldn't make a difference?
kungtotte 7y ago
They're torn up from the road and rubbed off from the tyres themselves. The majority is obviously coming from the road. There's been studies done here in Sweden since we've banned studded winter tyres in some areas of Stockholm in an effort to reduce road wear and improve air quality. I don't know of any sources in English off the top of my head though. The last time I read an article about it though (2+ years ago, during Diesel-gate), the findings was that the danger in the particles comes from their size with smaller particles being more dangerous for humans. And that road particles were something like an order of magnitude larger than exhaust fume particles from diesel engines. We've since banned diesel engines inside Stockholm as well so the whole thing is moot here.

MobileVet 7y ago

I can definitely believe tire wear is a significant contributor... but is Emissions Analytics a reputable source? It feels like someone grabbed a domain and wrote a post with minimal experimental rigor.

elidourado 7y ago

Fake news. Smaller particles from exhaust are way worse for you than larger particles from tires. Within a category like PM2.5, mass is a terrible metric. A given mass of fuel exhaust will contain orders of magnitude more particles because they are tinier. Smaller particles can penetrate deeper into your lungs and can go into your bloodstream.

maxhedrome 7y ago

I am literally tripping balls... who spells tire like this?

superpermutat0r 7y ago

I live next to a very busy road (6-lane). When I moved in, the closets were filled with black stains. My brother-in-law cleaned it and said he never saw that kind of dirt. The closets are dirty again. As time passed I also never encountered that amount of dust. The dust was also extremely different from the dust when I lived in the forest, dark colored and plentiful. It accumulates very quickly, it gets abandoned-house-dusty in a week. My breathing also got worse compared to the forest, especially during nights. So there's definitely something dusty around the road. It was also quite interesting to see that the bathroom gets dusty as quickly too, despite being closed most of the time. It's like the whole ventilation system of the building naturally permeates dust.

londons_explore 7y ago
If you have a central air heating system like most houses do, you should add a filter near the fan. You won't catch all the dust, but you'll collect a lot of it, making your air healthier to live in
- sjg007 7y ago
  I would run a couple standalone couple hepa aircleaners as well.

labawi 7y ago

They fitted brand new tires and called it a read world test, as if people get new tires every week. Then they measured particulate weight and compared it to ICE emission regulation as if weight was the deciding factor: 5800 ug of rubber particles vs 4.5 ug of PM soot. The rubber could be 1x 5g chunk or 1000x 1ug or whatever. New cars produce mostly small soot, so 4.5 ug can be about 10 000 000 particles¹. I'm not saying non-exhaust emissions are irrelevant, but I am quite sure exhaust is a much bigger issue, overly so in eastern EU, where people often even remove DP filters and enforcement is lacking. ¹ PM count estimates: coal density: 929 kg/m³ PM10 particle size: 10 um PM10 volume: 4/3 * pi * (5um)^3 ~ 4 * (5e-6 m)^3 ~ 5e-16 m³ PM10 mass: 5e-16m³ * 1e3 kg/m³ = 5e-13 kg = 5e-7 ug = 0.5 pg If exhaust PM was PM10, 4.5 ug would be about 4.5 ug / 5e-7 ug ~ 1e7 = 10M particles, give or take an order of magnitude.

unbalancedevh 7y ago

If the idea is to focus on tires, then why not just look at how many tires are manufactured each year? 100% of tires end up polluting something, somewhere. Or, again if the focus is tire wear, there must be pretty good data about how much of a tire gets worn off before replacement, and how often they're replaced. It doesn't seem like it should be very complex to calculate how much tire is being emitted due to road wear.

mrich 7y ago

The German Post designed the Streetscooter a while back which is an electric delivery van. They also claim "zero fine dust driving". But how does that work? It is quite hard to have a fully closed system so no particles can escape. Well, their solution is quite clever: They are filtering the air in general, so can also consume particles emitted from other cars, even when the vehicle is not moving. So they could even get to net negative fine dust emissions :) https://www.dekra-solutions.com/2018/01/fine-dust-free-driving/?lang=en https://www.dekra-solutions.com/2018/01/fine-dust-free-drivi...

blattimwind 7y ago
Streetscooter is in the process of being shut down.

gentleman11 7y ago

This is the perfect opportunity to link people to Robert Heineken’s story: the Roads Must Roll. In it, there are a series of road towns, where roads are more like moving sidewalks. Very neat stuff, I read it as a teenager and then re-listened to a great audiobook version recently too (bundled with the man who sold the moon, which is the prophecy foretelling of Elon musk) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll

kwhitefoot 7y ago
> Robert Heineken’s story: the Roads Must Roll. One beer too many? Or an illiterate autocorrector? Should be Robert Heinlein. :-)

bryanmgreen 7y ago

All these articles are important, but they end up missing the point of the auto industries weightiest concern. At the end of the day, it really comes down to the weight of the vehicles. There is absolutely zero justification for any standard-use car to weigh more than 3,200 pounds, and that's for a SUV. More weight affects EVERYTHING. Material logistics/sourcing/shipping/construction costs and emissions/waste-disposal, end-product shipping/distribution/operating-costs and emissions/repairs/waste-disposal, as well as infrastructure construction/maintenance. That's just hard costs. I could go on in more granular fashion and add soft costs like less traffic and less road noise as well. I drive a very loaded gasoline powered Fiesta hatchback. It's got cruise control, a great entertainment system with car play, even stupid neon lighting I didn't want. It weighs only 2,600 pounds and even though it isn't fast, I don't have any issues getting up to speed. My mileage is consistently 29 in LA traffic and 34 driving fast on long highway trips. It's nearly 2 feet (22 inches!!) shorter than a Camry and I can park it basically anywhere. Because it weighs so little, tires last forever. It cost me less than $20,000 brand new. My point is that a freaking heavy and large 3,400lb sedan, or 4,500lb SUV is 100% supremely unnecessary. Multiply hundreds or thousands of weight savings per-car over millions and millions of new cars sold in the US alone would insanely positive and tangential effects on the planet. Eventually those gains would reach the economy and infrastructure too. It just infuriates me that there is a relatively simple way to mitigate so many issues and it's so blatantly ignored or not even known.

spaginal 7y ago
Unnecessary for you and your usage, but there a lot of situations, environments, and applications where a heavier, larger vehicle is necessary. If you live rural you aren't driving a small Fiesta hatchback everywhere. If you have a large family, an SUV is a basic requirement of modern living to move the family around. Conversely if you live in a city with tight quarters as a single person with no kids, an SUV or pickup may not be necessary at all. There is a reason we don't dictate choice or consumption with something as necessary and basic as transportation because it isn't one size fits all. People buy what they generally need.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago

trekrich 7y ago

Expect this in a Greta speech soon. We need to stop using Tyres on our cars!

totalZero 7y ago

Tires contain fossil fuel products like carbon black and synthetic rubber. The roadway contains bitumen, another fossil fuel product. The numbers in this experiment seem dubious and are probably not representative, but they do reflect our over-dependence on refined petroleum. We have to find new ways to make these things.

bborud 7y ago

This is a press release. Is there a link to the underlying research this press release is talking about? I can't really do anything with this.

nvader 7y ago

This article, and the whole website looks so suspicious. Quotes come mostly from its own organization, "Emission Analytics", and there is no reference to an existing or upcoming publication. In addition, and I realize I'm nitpicking, the stock photo, the composition of the copy and the general... feel of the website seems off. The overall effect is to make me actively distrust their conclusions and want to ask about their agenda and source of funding.

TheWoolRug 7y ago

Here in Seattle folks are starting to look at salmon "pre spawn mortality" suspecting chemicals from worn tires. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b03287 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b03287

timbo1642 7y ago

Easy solution: Use longer lasting tires like 50k tires rather than 30k tires and FIX THE ROADS so there is less wear. Roads in Los Angeles for example are absolutely horrible. And we have emission laws here that aren't enforced. Tons of illegal exhausts and mods and NOTHING is done. Cops ignore it. I've seen so many smoking cars as well.