Pollution from car tires is killing off salmon on US west coast | Hacker News Reader

Pollution from car tires is killing off salmon on US west coast

theguardian.com

51 pointsviburnum7 comments

Sadly, electric vehicles emit significantly more tire and brake dust than internal combustion vehicles due to the heavy weight of their batteries.

Most electric vehicles I know recuperate the power instead of braking. There are reports of rusty brake pads, even.

Besides, this is about tires, which may be worn down more by electric vehicles (as they have more wroooom, or rather they don't, but can still accelerate better)

Regenerative braking is still braking and requires friction, literally, where the rubber meets the road.

The culprit is rubber itself, not brake pad dust (a concern on its own).

Not so sure about that. EV's use regenerative braking, which results in some people using their physical disc brakes so little that they are barely worn down after many years of vehicle operation.

Even my 2009 Honda Civic Hybrid only needs new pads after 3-5 years. It has minimal regenerative braking, but I'm good at maximizing it without annoying other drivers. I'd estimate it reduces my need to dump energy in to the physical brakes by at least 40% when coming to stops off the freeway.

Now the tire dust, I could understand. If you look through the Tesla subreddit, you see lots of people burning through tires after 20,000 miles, when those tires are warrantied to 40,000 or more. The weight plays a part, but so do operators who do not maintain proper tire pressures (and alignment and balance), and those who floor the accelerator pedal any chance they get. (Heh, I can't blame them. Those things are like rollercoasters!)

Time to go after the tire companies.

In today's NY Times also.

I was in the rubber industry for 5 years as a researcher and believe me, it's no God damn "mystery". We (a very large tire manufacturer you have heard of) spent several million a year coming up with plausible deniability for what we were doing to avoid this, mainly using more natural rubber. We spent more on advertising the "green" natural rubber tires then we did on actually manufacturing them.

Sorry to be cynical but I am so sick of this BS where big industry pollutes for decades while academics are eating right out of their hands then they pretend like it's a surprise when they "discover" the source of the pollution.

We have know FOR DECADES that tire pollution is arguably WORSE for the environment than tail pipe emissions. Don't buy this BS as if this is new research, it's just been successful ignored until it couldn't. Same as recycling plastics but ya'all ain't ready to talk about that scam yet apparently as I keep seeing people diligently filling their blue buckets with unrecyclables as if they are "doing their part".

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