Evidence mounts on toxic pollution from tires
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
(1) Cars and trucks are evil, get rid of them.
(2) Too bad, nothing we can do, get over it.
Neither is helpful. We're going to need lots of tires for a long time. Trains don't (and can't) go everywhere. Bikes can't carry everything, and any imaginable bike that could would have the exact same problem. Trucks of all kinds, and buses, are indispensable and need tires. The question is how to make the tires better. Fortunately-people are working on this.
Bridgestone: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/04/eco-friendly-tires-brid...
Goodyear: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/goodyear-unveils-90... (specifically using soybean oil in place of 6PPD)
What we need to do is not argue tires vs. no tires, but keep the pressure on these makers and others to continue developing less-harmful tires. And the best way to do that is with our wallets. If there's demand for less toxic and more sustainable tires, they're more likely to be made.
We also need to reduce the average weight of passenger vehicles, and reduce the need for vehicular travel to accomplish daily needs. That includes everything from urban design to WFH, but those efforts are largely orthogonal to the issue at hand.
As with many things, scale matters.
You are correct in saying that bikes can't carry everything, but a significant portion of vehicle trips are private car owners driving alone (whether for shopping, commuting, etc) and over shorter distances bikes can serve a very similar purpose. Likewise, while nobody is seriously suggesting replacing (say) long-haul trucking with bikes, mail carriers have made good use of cargo bikes for last-mile delivery within cities.
You are correct in saying that trains don't go everywhere, but they can go more places than they do now. (And in the US, they used to!)
The discussion shouldn't be a binary choice between "eliminate cars and trucks" and "do nothing" - there's room in between those two for reducing our reliance on motor vehicles. To the extent that the problem of tire dust (among other things) scales with the number of vehicles on the road, reducing the number of vehicles on the road will help to mitigate it.
And yes, we do also need to pressure tire manufacturers to develop less harmful tires. But I don't think the other concerns are as orthogonal to the issue at hand as you say they are.
Yes it’s fairly obvious we need them in some situations (you carry equipment on a farm).
But fixing the car problem is going to take proper activism and a greater push given it has such inertia and driving is so embedded. Not to mention corporate interests trying to preserve it.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/office-space/
And that's just the building part. You also have to deal with the fact that cities are already overstressed, creating ecological disasters as soon as you go outside of the privileged core. Don't look at walkable Manhattan or Brooklyn without also looking at uber-ugly Bronx or Newark, which have to exist to serve those central cores. Or the dumps all over New York state. Or the toxic plumes in the air and water. The transit system, the water and sewage, trash removal, etc. would all creak under the strain of even more population, not to mention the problem of increased demand making housing even more unaffordable for all but the most privileged. Repeat for LA, Houston, Chicago, etc. No, "everyone move to the mega-city" is not the solution some think it is. The fact is that big cities aren't free of these problems; they just export them elsewhere.
It actually turns out that it would be a lot easier to convert residential in commercial than the other way around, in suburbs and small towns where they are. There's still lots of complexity, of course. You have to fix zoning. You have to make that "good infrastructure" work in many places instead of a few. You have to convince people to pay for it, and yes, there will still be a lot of tearing down and rebuilding with all of the environmental costs that entails. As GP mentioned. It's not easy by any means, but creating less car-centric environments this way is more feasible than mass migration to cities and more sustainable too. Some day cars will not be necessary for the majority of the population, I really do hope we get there in my lifetime, but that day is not today and getting there will take orders of magnitude more effort than the "abolish cars now" crowd seems capable of imagining.
Magic-wand thinking doesn't get us anywhere. Practical, incremental improvements do. And reducing particulates from tires is one of those.
It’s worth remembering how quickly large scale shifts like using private cars and highway infrastructure happened in the first place. Core blocker for such change isn’t the inability to change infrastructure, its lack of urgency to change.
You need to change something more fundamental than the tire design to make dramatic improvements.
P.S. for the aforementioned un-ironic picador: As I already said, we should address this problem in many ways. "Reduce trips" is one part of the equation, but doesn't eliminate the need to make the trips that remain more ecologically benign. Suggesting that this is "don't address the last 1%" is a total strawman, more insulting to people's intelligence than anything I've said and more injurious to the curious conversation that the guidelines recommend.
Saying we can eliminate 99% of pollution but that last 1% is hard therefore why bother isn’t a rebuttal, it’s just insulting the intelligence of your reader.
Well, if that person appears, then this would be a good reply to them. Well, actually it'd be pretty heavy-handed and unconvincing, but still. You know.
Definitely not by everyone riding the car to workplace.
Later, once the kids are gone, fuck up your knee (or back, hips, etc).
Don’t get me wrong, I like city life, but it’s not for everyone and doesn’t eliminate all use cases for cars.
This leads in to the concept of induced demand, which has been shown to be true over and over in urban planning. Essentially, making traffic better with smarter lights, more lanes, etc. doesn't work because it causes more people to drive their cars rather than choose alternative modes. It is much more effective from a climate standpoint to reduce driving by making it harder relative to transit, walking, and biking. Obviously the better way to do that is to make those other modes easier, rather than making driving harder, but putting resources into making driving easier certainly isn't a good idea either.
"Increased tire wear can also contribute to air quality issues. In Oslo, Norway, where electric vehicles make two-thirds of registered vehicles but a higher proportion of traffic, the "air has unhealthy levels of microscopic particles generated partly by the abrasion of tires and asphalt," The New York Times reports."
from here: https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-unexpected-problem-with-evs-t...
What car owners (EV or otherwise) can do to relieve their conscience is to use tyres with the smallest possible dimensions. This should reduce the amount of particle emissions from tyre abrasions. As a plus, smaller tyres are also cheaper, lighter and increase the range.
The principal problem of hazardous chemicals in tyres and non-degradable micro abrasions appears solvable to me. Probably comes down to regulatory intervention and cost and not so much to an insurmountable chemistry challenge.
Even better would be to drive the car less and use an e-bike for most trips instead. Most bike tyres weigh less in total than the annual emissions of a set of car tyres according to the article.
With those German-made Continentals made of dandelion root, I hasten to add. (See article.)
The "even better" argument is pretty bad for 9/10 people. Cars are great pieces of technology, the same way air conditioners are great.
You just made a suggestion akin to fridge usage and instead opting to just eat room temperature food.
https://ntwonline.com/tire-shop-talk/revolutions-per-mile-ch...
The amount of rubber that gets shed is a function of a bunch of factors including the contact area with the road, the weight of the vehicle, the speed of the vehicle, and of course the miles done. It's hard to believe that tire size will change any of that much within the range of options for a given vehicle, so particle emissions per mile are going to be about the same regardless of tire size.
more weight means more friction means more tyre particulate.
The tankful of gas might last 500 km; tires 100,000 km.
> Those dimensions continue to place the model between VW's Polo and Golf in overall length, although the longer wheelbase allowed by the MEB architecture means that the interior space is actually closer to that of a Passat.
So the weight of a car you can comfortably fit a family of 5 into would be comparing apples with apples, not the weight of two cars with similar outward dimensions.
The big elephant in the room for me is people having to drive long distances to work because the companies managers all want to live near each other. We could put policies into place to put workplaces closer to where people live at the expense of managers. Or we can keep doing what we do now which is blame workers for commuting.
AKA
Hector works as a maintenance tech, commutes from Vallejo to Mountain View. Drives 30,000 miles a year. Hector is the problem.
Kieth is the VP of sales. He bicycles to work from Cupertino. Good job Kieth.
At best it’s clickbate reporting, and at worst it’s a biased agenda anti EV campaign.
Maybe like for like the weight of a vehicle of a given size contributes to increased tyre wear, but you can’t argue that generally vehicles are so large that we need further analysis of the overall impact etc….
The number Dual Cab Utes on the school run around us is just bonkers.
How true is this? Seems like we have been focusing on the wrong sources if this is true?
The tire particles are incredibly small, so there are lots of them.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64889284
Oceans littered with 171 trillion plastic pieces
The concentration of plastics in the oceans has increased from 16 trillion pieces in 2005, data suggests.
It could nearly triple by 2040 if no action is taken, scientists warn.
https://www.seaspiracy.org/facts
150 milion tons of plastic in the sea, 1 garbage truck every minute, 46% of plastic in the pacific garbage patch is fishing nets
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1001874
Remote work can slash your carbon footprint — if done right. Remote workers can have a 54% lower carbon footprint compared with onsite workers
I wonder what’s being accumulated into our veggies.
For example TFA talks about 6PPD-q which is acutely toxic to fish, but "no one has studied the impact of 6PPD-q on human health." So we don't know if you should worry about that one. What we do know is that toxicity for aquatic animals is extremely different from toxicity in mammals. Soap, for example, is very toxic to fish.
Another example that caught my eye: in one sentence there is a claim that 3.5 trillion tire microparticles are washed into the SF Bay per year. Then a couple of sentences later, there is a claim that a car emits 1 trillion microparticles per kilometer driven. So the cumulative distance driven across everyone in the Bay Area is around 2 miles per year??
When two different estimates disagree by nine orders of magnitude, you're either doing astronomy or you're doing something very wrong.
Unfortunately the field of microplastics research is filled with work that is not just overly sensationalist, but that is very clearly wrong if you do a little napkin math. And almost without exception, the people involved are just plain bad at chemistry. I mean basic stuff like not understanding that a monomer has very different properties from the corresponding polymer. SMH.
Edit: For soil specifically, there has been ample research showing that burying large amounts of tires in the ground is safe:
"There is no evidence that tyre bales embedded in the ground represent a real or potential source of pollution, or pose a threat that water and soil quality in the vicinity will deteriorate."
I dunno about that. Soap is toxic to fish because they're effectively inhaling it. Inhaled soap is toxic to humans too, and for the same reason. Our biochemistry is not radically different.
(You can't build a new school or playground on polluted ground, for example.)
Let's compare an SUV from 2000 to one from today:
------------------------------------------
2000 Toyota 4Runner
Weight: 3,440 to 3,975 lbs
MPG: Up to 18 city / 23 highway
------------------------------------------
2023 Toyota 4Runner
Weight: 4,400 to 4,805 lbs
MPG: Up to 16 city / 19 highway
------------------------------------------
After 23 years of R&D the same model of SUV gained ~1000lbs of weight and lost MPG. The 2023 model does make more horsepower and that added horsepower does offset the added weight in terms of power / weight ratio. Of course horsepower can't make up for handling, braking, fuel economy, tire / mechanical wear, etc.
Electric cars push this disturbing trend even further: an SUV like the Rivian R1S weighs 7000 lbs... but don't worry you got 835 horsepower; I just hope you have some brake pads and tire tread left too.
I hope we start seeing some vehicles that benefit from technology that allows them to be lighter than the vehicles from decades ago. I fear that this will not happen because light vehicles are seen as unsafe when the potential exists to be hit by a 7000 lb under-maintained SUV whose driver lost control and jumped a divider into oncoming traffic while attempting to brake after running an 11 second quarter mile while texting.
It says that the stuff they use to hold the tires in place didn't hold. So instead of a nice reef, you had thousands of lose tires smashing marine life that tried to settle there.
the problem isn't somebody eats a chunk of it once, it's when the school is beside a road and kids are breathing the dust in all day, every day, for twelve years.
I suspect you either don’t have children or you are an extremely militant helicopter parent if you can tell us with a straight face you’ve met that bar.
This is not a high bar.
And yes, it's a full time job (at certain ages), and no it's hardly the primary responsibility, it's one of many.
And I think you misread; I said it was one of the primary responsibilities of a parent to keep toxic things out of your child's mouth.
Apparently you've never met an infant.
It is not a tenable position to suggest that children will unavoidably poison themselves, and that's just part of life...
Most parents will sit on the side and watch their kids. They can remove the tire material from their mouths, but they can't stop it from entering in the first place.
Also, having watched many a young child, this isn't normal behavior for children you leave alone to play on playgrounds, precisely for this reason.
Tire shred playgrounds always remind me of the Sigur Ros Untitled 1 / Vaka music video.
Thus a very large number of hig h school fields have astroturf and rubber crumbles.
On pro-football broadcasts, you can occasionally see clouds of rubber dust during a tackle.
But, causation is hard to prove in court, so cancer for kids it is!
Source please.
Sounds like 6PPD is essentially required for modern tires. People are researching alternatives but haven't scaled any yet.
Other emissions from modern tires are also bad. People are researching alternatives but haven't scaled any yet.
Regulatory agencies are pushing to speed this up.
What's the issue? It sounds like things are working as intended.
It's a fundamental fact: introducing anything new to an environment disrupts the status quo. In a living environment, that means health problems for living things. You either stop creating synthetic materials or you have unforeseen consequences. You can mandate more research and more rigorous standards, but that has diminishing returns. Some things will slip past.
> What's the issue? It sounds like things are working as intended.
Studying and reporting about pollution is part of how things work as intended.
Maybe you sincerely expected something different when you clicked the link, but it comes off like you're seeking out this material and then complaining that it exists.
Also, EV’s produce much less brake dust, and the article doesn’t compare that decrease to the 20% increase in tire dust.
Anyway, this mathematical bound holds in the absolute worst case for EV’s. If tailpipe emissions used to be 51% of the problem and brakes were zero, then switching entirely to EVs would leave us with 60% as much particulate emission as we had before.
It’s likely much lower than 60% of course.
Much better to not generate it in the first place, i.e. make a conscious effort to reduce what you buy and consume where possible.
"This will likely come as no surprise to longtime readers, but according to National Geographic, an astonishing 91 percent of plastic doesn’t actually get recycled. This means that only around 9 percent is being recycled. As if that weren’t enough, nearly all of that plastic that does get recycled is actually downcycled, which means it gets less and less useful every time, eventually becoming so flimsy that it can no longer be recycled properly.
As it is, that 91 percent just sits in landfills, piling up and breaking down slowly into arguably more dangerous microplastics. National Geographic reports that by 2050, approximately 12 billion metric tons of plastic will be sitting in landfills across the globe. For scale, that amount of plastic weighs approximately 35,000 times more than the whole Empire State Building."