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Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

emissionsanalytics.com

141–150 of 336 posts

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#141

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 (6553…

Do you think that has any bearing on the triple trailer situation that seems to be developing?

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#142

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.

Shitty tires start with the same tread depth, but wear out in 25-35k miles. High quality tires usually go 50-60k.

The $400/corner tires on a sports car usually last about 5-8000 miles. They’re about as high quality as it gets.

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#143
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This fact is especially pertinent when folks with their F150s demand that road bikes be taxed equally to use bike lanes.

On the topic of tire wear, I find that my rear bicycle tire will last roughly 3000 miles/4800 kilometers. Even summer performance tires on cars will last about 8000 miles (and most all season tires will go for at least 20,000 miles).

I recall a buddy proselytizing on the virtues of rotating your bike tires every couple thousand miles, which for that group was about once a year (and replace in the spring)

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#144

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?

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 compari…

Can someone substantively reply instead of just downvoting this comment?

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#146
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fall out of the air. Into the sewers. Then into the rivers, and then the sea, where they are broken up into microplastics and return in the food chain.

Rubber turns into microplastics?

I think synthetic rubber is considered to be microplastics when small.

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#147

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/J...

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.

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#148
post #126
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take a 40t truck with 5 axles vs. a small car with a weight of 1t and two axles ... Truck driver. Not quibbling, just adding nuance. For your typical 40t scenario, allowed max weights are: 12,00 pounds on the front steering axle. It has one tire at each end. 34,000 pounds total on the two tandem "drive" axles on the truck. There are two tires at the end of each axle, so four per axle, eight total at the drive axles…

So it would be better to have a bunch of smaller trucks moving cargo. And that means a lot more work for truck drivers.

Lots of ways to cut that. Consider pounds-mile/gal for freight on my 80k truck carrying 45k freight, vs your vanagon or beemer.

My truck gets at least 6mpg, usually 7.5, sometimes 9, and I've seen 10 once.

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#149
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they were willing to retool, you’d think they’d just go with a maglev monorail design. Those have the capacity for the instantaneous acceleration of a railgun.

That would be a pretty rough ride. I wouldn't want to be a straphanger on one of those. The turns would be uncomfortable as well in a railgun railway car.

I didn’t mean to suggest you’d use it as a railgun. It just has the capacity for exactly as much torque as you need from it at any given moment.

Re: Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?

#150
post #132

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…

How do you know if that soot came from exhaust, tyres, or something else ?

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.

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