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.
Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?
31–40 of 336 posts
Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?
#32Maybe 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://books.google.de/books?id=7Yqxyefv-VAC&pg=PA252&dq=4t...
Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?
#33So 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.
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 pad…
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.
Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?
#34> 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.
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?
Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?
#35> 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.
My guess is that particulate solution due to those emitted from tires is probably very localized near highways.
Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?
#36Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?
#37Maybe 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 (6553…
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...
Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?
#38If 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.
Challenge is, can we make tired that don’t wear or are made of friendly materials.
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.
Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?
#39When 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
How do you know it was tire dust and not just regular dust?
... because he opened multiple windows and the only one to gather grime was facing the street.
Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?
#40Headline > 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
Nothing quite like a grandiose title to make you immediately question each and every word in an article.