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Comment by hereme888 | Hacker News Reader

How would you go about dealing with tire dust pollution in a sensible way that doesn't destroy the global economy?

I'm all for it, I'm for policies that "force" people to change certain careers or lifestyles in a sensible way, and I'm sure there's a good solution however imperfect it may be.

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> How would you go about dealing with tire dust pollution in a sensible way that doesn't destroy the global economy?

Just thinking off the top of my head, but build out rail infrastructure to decrease long-distance truck transport and replace it with rail freight? Trains have metal wheels, so no tire dust.

For some of the other stuff, I'd really like to see durability/repairability prioritized over lowest initial purchase cost, as well as disposability be greatly discouraged (at least when it comes to plastic). My intuition is that could also lead to a lower TCO for a lot of products.

Rail freight paired with autonomous last-mile(s) robo-delivery ? If the bots are small enough, their tires contribute effectively zilch, yes ? Because tire wear is an exponential power of load ? "Small" loads would be luggage, boxes (up to white goods), bodega resupply, single large pieces of furniture, cases of beer.

Freight isn't just Amazon packages though, and I'd imagine most of it isn't.

That was sposta be my point. Unclear i guess.

They have metal dust from the outer rims, made of softer metals. They also have brake pads, which are (experimentally for now in some regions, mandatory in others) being exchanged with plastics, because less noise.

https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/238333-quieter-safer-and...

https://www.projectfutura.com/

https://nachhaltigkeit.deutschebahn.com/en/measures/whisperb...

https://www.bund-naturschutz.de/wirtschaft-umwelt/leise-guet...

http://www.gegen-bahnlaerm.de/flusterbremsen/

https://nachhaltigkeit.deutschebahn.com/de/dialog/veroeffent...

I hear train engineers are not that fond of them, because they brake like shit, depending on the downgrade (because heating, rapidly changing braking characteristics), and weather. It's one last drop bursting the barrel, for some I personally know to go into early retirement, amongst all the other shit happening within DB-Cargo/Schenker/whatever they wanna be called at the day.

Pick your poison…

The same way we reduced pollution from tailpipes. Studies, tests and legislation.

Weirdly enough in the US there is the UTQG (Uniform Tire Quality Grading) which includes treadwear, and the EU tire label does not. The EU label does include noise, but the US one does not.

In general treadwear warranties are a thing here in the states, but I've never seen them in Europe.

I wonder if this is why tires are louder here in the states, are harder tires last longer.

That's the problem with populists (not bashing OP here, just general observations) - its trivial to pinpoint failings or potential problems down the line in modern society, we are all hyper-exposed to various info about them from all directions.

Now coming up with a reasonable acceptable good solution that would actually work long term and not bring down civilization to its knees, that's another level very rarely seen.

Something much better than 'X is a problem, although with 10,000 side effects, dependencies and benefits, so lets attack X mindlessly full force with no second thought'. It would appeal to me when I was maybe in 15-18, but understanding how hyper complex and connected whole world is can be sometimes quite depressing.

Less trucks, more trains. Pulling a random internet quote:

The Association of American Railroads estimates that on average, a freight train can move 1 ton of freight about 484 miles on just one gallon of fuel.

For comparison, a semi will burn about 7 mpg hauling 23 tons, so that's 161 ton-miles per gallon, about 1/3rd as good as the listed train value. And trucks have tire dust.

Figure I've got (from Bill McKibben's Eaarth IIRC) is that lorries average 59 ton-miles/gallon, whilst barges on canals net 514 ton-miles/gallon. (McKibben doesn't include rail, which is slightly less efficient though you can think of rail as effectively steel barges.)

I suspect the reason lorries are rating lower is that they're not typically filled to maximum weight capacity, and likely have greater idling losses.

Though a more recent (2017) source gives a better showing for overland transport:

The study shows that barges can move a ton of cargo 647 miles with a single gallon of fuel, an increase from an earlier estimate of 616 miles. In contrast, trains can move the same ton of cargo 477 miles per gallon, and trucks can move the same ton of cargo 145 miles per gallon.

<https://maritime-executive.com/article/barge-transport-wins-...>

The study being "A report commissioned by the U.S. National Waterways Foundation".

"A Modal Comparison of Domestic Freight Transportation Effects On the General Public: 2001–2014"

<https://nationalwaterwaysfoundation.org/file/31/final%20tti%...> (PDF)

Upshot regardless is that water transport is efficient, if not always convenient.

We can require that different tire material be used—more natural rubbers can be used (albeit at a slightly higher cost) that produce less harmful dust.

What is the evidence that natural rubber is less harmful?

You don't start with evidence, you don't even start with a hypothesis, you start with an aesthetic intuition and chase it, like a heliocentric model with ptolemaic epicycles vs newton's model, both describe the phenomena at hand, how do we pick the one that guides our next questions?

The intuition that we should globoindustrially produce man-made materials and dispose of novel waste materials in our water supplies until proven toxic and cancerous is a mistake, and we should be coming at the question from the other side, assume naturally occurring materials are less harmful than man-made ones until we have evidence indicating otherwise.

It turns out that it is really, really hard and motivated work to find evidence of the harmfulness of many materials, and there is no commercial incentive to do so, and the health of human beings and the natural world are suffering because we accept "three papers in the last 2 years checked this novel plastic and couldn't find much evidence of harm" as a good enough answer before we start manufacturing thousands of tons of it and dumping the manufacturing wastes into our rivers.

So, we should consider materials dangerous because of aesthetic feelings, not evidence, and that lack of evidence should be taken as evidence they are dangerous?

I don't think you realize you've descended in self parody here.

How much evidence is sufficient to establish harmfulness or the absence of harmfulness? How do you determine, in general, the sufficiency of evidence to answer any given question where our primary access to knowledge is empirical correlation? You can keep yourself afloat a little longer with some yarn about basing that standard on some other empirical residue, but why that empirical residue and not another one? If you consider the question seriously, you will realize that at the bottom is not a set of empirical facts that control our investigations, and how we decide what their conclusions are, but aesthetic intuitions. As noticed by Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Schrodinger, et al.

And in my view, we have enough evidence that the standards of evidence used by the present regime of medical and ecological scholarship to establish the absence of long term environmental and health risks of novel materials, are seriously insufficient, and the solution must come externally, derived from the mode of knowledge which "science" is subject to and not master of. That mode of knowledge which is capable of hearing all the mountains of papers screaming that "we've checked and everything is all groovy man nothing wrong in this asbestos here!" and pointing at the world and saying, "Either your mode of investigation was flawed, or your evidence was fabricated, so we should check again."

I was asking for any evidence that natural rubber is less harmful. None was provided.

Natural rubber at least has the benefit that it is biodegradable.

But of what relevance is this to the issue of damage from ingested microplastics? The microorganisms that biodegrade refractory materials (like wood or rubber) would be attacked by our immune systems. Nor are the chemicals these microorganisms use -- strong oxidizers -- be something we'd want to have produced in our bodies.

Vulcanization reduces the rate of biodegradation of rubber, I understand. From what I looked up, it seems it takes natural rubber 300 years to biodegrade in the environment. This doesn't seem to me to be fast enough to significantly affect human exposure.

This seems like a barely connected rant about how nothing is real, but if you have evidence you should just link it.

I agree that it's much wiser to approach novel materials and chemicals we employ with a 'guilty until proven innocent' approach, and that there should be much more stringent requirements to vet for safety.

In in ideal world this would extend to generational IQ changes with increased exposure, however I doubt this is practical and would probably involve testing on monkeys instead of mice.

Materials and chemicals that we've used for centuries or millennia without issue should probably go on the 'innocent until proven guilty' list, but should still be investigated.

I don't think that it's necessarily wise to classify this kind of thinking as an 'aesthetic intuition', though. I simply think that the longer we've been in contact with a substance or material as a species the more we know about its safety profile, and so it's wiser to start with the relatively newer or man-made materials/chemicals.

>The intuition that we should globoindustrially produce man-made materials and dispose of novel waste materials in our water supplies until proven toxic and cancerous is a mistake, and we should be coming at the question from the other side, assume naturally occurring materials are less harmful than man-made ones until we have evidence indicating otherwise.

>"we've checked and everything is all groovy man nothing wrong in this asbestos here!"

Asbestos being used as an example of a "globoindustrially man-made materials" and how we should "assume naturally occurring materials are less harmful" is absolutely great considering that asbestos is a naturally occurring material that has been in use since the Stone Age. Quite literally the opposite of the line of reasoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos

>Archaeological studies have found evidence of asbestos being used as far back as the Stone Age to strengthen ceramic pots

I don't think this is fair, it's a provocative point of view that sounds like the start of a pollution cleanup journey that may actually happen.

Besides, alcohol, which people also put in their bodies regularly, is known to cause also sorts of horrible problems, and yet it's a very legal drug. So we already live in a world where the counterfactual - that strong evidence of dangerousness demands regulation - is false.

As I understand it, a major problem with tyre pollution is the 6PPD-Quinone used.

https://avadaenvironmental.com/2024/05/27/the-environmental-...

And a chemical like this is needed to protect natural rubber from ozone.

However, I doubt this specific chemical could not be replaced in that role, now that we know it's a problem.

Tax it. Do a carbon tax too while we are at it.

So we pay more for tires, the pollution keeps happening, and the extra money is used for virtue signaling with minimal change?

No, investing in healthier tires becomes economically viable.

What does “healthier tire” mean and how will the taxman know which tire is healthier and which one is not?

You start out by measuring tires with some metric, like "pounds of of particulate released pe 50,000 miles when loaded at x", and tax tires with a worse rating higher. Them you're gonna have to keep an eye on additives to tires, because it's always possible someone will find something that makes tires wear slower but the particles more toxic.

It's not impossible.

There will be less pollution if polluting costs more

> So we pay more for tires, the pollution keeps happening, and the extra money is used for virtue signaling with minimal change?

It's often used to promote change, see Canada for instance where the money goes back to citizens et al: https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...

The wealthy (who do most of the polluting) will push any extra cost in taxes onto consumers and then continue polluting. The only way that a tax would help at all is if it were so expensive that many people were forced to stop driving and even then the usefulness is reduced by the fact that major polluters often have plenty of money and will insist on pushing any extra costs to them onto others. That means no reduction in the number of semi-trucks on the road, no reduction in, or penalty for, the pollution they cause, and the consumers getting sick by the dust are now also getting screwed by higher prices.

So execute them. Problem solved.

I suggest we look at recent examples from the US health insurance industry, which is leading the way in this area.

That's a trivial problem, lower speed limits. Tire wear scales super linearly.

In fact, there are few modern problems that can't be helped (if not solved) by drastically lowering speed limits.

Maybe it would be better to destroy the global economy though.

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