Students create device to capture car tyre microplastic debris
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
It's an immense problem for sure.
While I fully admit that these are all engineering challenges that people could make progress on, there's also much simpler and more immediately actionable ways to improve this situation. Like encouraging walkable neighborhoods.
So, presumably non synthetic tires are actually fine. Though, it’s not clear if that was the intent of the article.
While it's true that regenerative brakes are not frictionless, none that I'm aware of rely on friction. One could imagine using a clutch to controllably wind/unwind a spring, for example, but auto manufacturers aren't rinky-dink steampunkers and even so you'd still do everything you could to minimize clutch slippage.
They rely on the friction between the tire and the road, wearing the tire down, releasing the microplastic particles.
I don't think the tire is what people mean when they talk about the brakes. They mean the brake pads and other brake components.
I thought the resistance was provided by magnets in the motor? How do you think they capturing energy from friction?
> Regenerative brakes rely on friction just like any other. Pollution is a given.
The article is about pollution from tires. Regenerative breaking can't cheat the laws of physics. That force has to be applied to the road through tires, just like any other form of wheel braking. And tires have significantly more mass to shed over their lives than brake pads.
However both are inferior to a bicycle if you are really serious about your environmental impact.
> Tires have one engineering principle that’s unlikely to change: they shed. The friction of rubber on abrasive surfaces is what allows a heavy vehicle to grip roads and stop when needed, sloughing off bits and pieces of the tire. A 2017 scientific literature search of 13 industrialized and industrializing countries found that an average car loses between a quarter kilogram and two kilograms of tire fragments annually. In the car-happy United States, the amount jumps to nearly five kilograms—or about the weight of a cat.
Plastic is organic. As it breaks down, it does so in an endless variety of organic molecules. These being similar to biological molecules, they readily interact with all sorts of biological systems. Those systems have all seen a few billion years of optimisation, making it unlikely for any random interference to be beneficial.
1. https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/when-rubber-hits-the-...
[0] https://dx.doi.org/10.3390%2Fijerph14101265 [1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.137823
What's interesting is that the thickness of the layer deposited as it rolls (from this simplified model) 1.5E-3/(50E60.250.8)=3nm which is about 0.15nm or a monolayer.
Let's say there are on the order of 100,000,000 cars in regular use in America. That's 300,000,000 liters of of plastic waste generated each year?
That's hundreds of thousands of tons of waste thrown into the environment every year! I had no idea that car tires shed that much.
That's like finding 20 empty two liter bottles just lying there. (Based on a bottle using 50 grams of plastic.)
So yeah, seems like a lot to throw out every year from every car.
Put another way, if every driver threw an empty two liter bottle on the side of the road every two weeks, you'd have an equivalent amount of plastic being shed into the environment.