Tire wear causes massive pollution... now what?
 

Some apparently old news made the headlines over here today.

Apparently half of the microplastics pollution is caused by tire wear...!
The rogues gallery of microplastics

I suspect someone is off a thousand in one of the calculations. After all, a set of tires lasts several years on the average car.
Yet, what if this is really true?

I never gave microplastic pollution as a factor any thought in selecting my car tires, but I might from now on.

LRR, I guess. Cuts down on pollution in more ways than one.

Now maybe alignment will be checked as part of emissions testing?

This doesn't surprize me, the only way to reduce pollution in a real sense is to have fewer miles driven on the road and get cars off the road.

Too much of anything is bad.

Especially people.

Yup

Oh malarkey, all this pollution propaganda. We have much bigger things to worry about.

Fantasy Football!!!

FWIW...anything that *wears* produces a 'waste by-product':

tyres = rubber dust
bearings = metal dust
plastic = plastic dust
wood = wood dust
fabric = lint dust

Duh!

humans = gray dust
:)

If it were that simple.
Tires used to be constructed from vulcanized rubber, soot, steel wire and fabric.
Nowadays most tires have very little rubber in them, if any.
It is all silicone and plastic.
They are stronger, last longer, have more grip, deteriorate less and smell better. All great.
Was this too good to be true, or not?

I wonder what will come out of this.
Are we going to select tires based on microplastic content?
Do tires with high plastic levels get banned?
Can we put a waste efficiency on tires, miles per dead polar bear style?
What are the alternatives?

Most likely nothing much changes except that tires will get more expensive...

I'm with Balto on this one; we've got bigger fish to fry.

People live longer than ever, so whatever harm we are doing to the environment isn't counteracting the progress we're making in standards of living and medical care.

A real threat is heart disease and type II diabetes. If the lifespan average ever decreases, you can bet it's due to obesity and diet, and not microplastics, GMO, or global warming.

You can kill any discussion by mentioning issues that are bigger.

I guess it is OK to roll coal because it kills less people than heart disease.
IS kills less people than heart disease, etc.
(Marine wildlife, if it had knowledge of the issue, might value its own mass extinction of higher importance than human heart disease btw)

Your choice of tire will have very little effect on heart disease, but it could effect microplastics pollution - more than anything else.

If it is true and if we had the data to make that choice.
Is it?
Do we really have a choice?
I'd love to ignore it all, but I'd rather be certain it is indeed doing no harm.

As with most things, it depends on your perspective.

Short-term, sure, heart disease is a more proximate problem than some environmental pollution if our goal is keeping currently-living humans alive. But long-term, we are at risk of making that environment uninhabitable in large swaths to humans as a whole, and that risk increases with every resource-consuming, pollution-producing human life we prolong (say, by mitigating the consequences of heart disease)--good for the individual in the short-term, bad for the species in the long-term. To suggest that because someone like RedDevil concerns himself with an issue of the latter (and note that he didn't say anything about the former; he could be fighting heart disease or any number of the "bigger [by which you mean "more-proximate"] fish" just as avidly, for all we know) he is a victim of "pollution propaganda," as Balto put it, seems pretty knee-jerk reactionary to me.

Isn't the real question: What's the alternative?

Oh and I want to correct one misconception. Tires are still made of pretty much the same materials they were 40 years ago. Carbon black (Soot?), natural rubber, synthetic rubber (No plastics, and silicone rubber if used at all, is used in very small quantities), steel, and fabric are still the major materials used. They just use less of them, because they've spent a lot of time and effort to make their designs more efficient (and less costly!)

Contraception.
Walking.
Short commutes.
Light vehicles with little light tires and slow wear.
Easy on the gas; easy on the brakes; easy around the corners.
Less "recreational" tearing around i.e. trip combine or maybe even get up off butt once in a while i.e. Don't drive a special trip three blocks to the store/post office/gas station.
Run 'em until the cords are showing.

...back to steel-wheels and rail-road tracks?

Dump that heavy tire consuming Tesla Model S for a tiny eco friendly VW Up! Diesel?

Playing the "Devil's Advocate" here: Then, you'd be just substituting diesel combustion particulates for rubber wear particulates (wink,wink).

Yes, but with a VW, you're only required to report 1/40th of the actual particulates!

Sorta like college education, where retention only counts during "tests" not later during real-world life usage? :rolleyes:

@Baltothewolf - please stay on topic. If you do not wish to discuss the effects of tire wear on pollution, then please disregard this thread.

Using the brakes produces both brake dust and tire wear.
Accelerating not only wears tires, but also produces emissions pollution.
Pushing your car wears the soles of your shoes.

I'm sure the European Commission will think of new laws and requirements to make all of us happy;)

So are there any biodegradable tires available or is the best option to reduce such waste to buy long treadlife tires? Besides the obvious driving less, alignment, etc.

Tires made with orange oil.

You mean these? The Science Behind Yokohama

Seems like the main point there is that the orange peel oil replaces the mineral oil normally used in tire production. Apparently it has better properties, so it makes the tires have lower rolling resistance and live longer without sacrificing grip.
Seems nice but who knows they might need double the dose of microplastics to keep the oranges in.
LRR and longevity is good though, mental note to self on that for my next set.

Rubber (caoutchouc) is STILL rubber, even with orange oil added in its mixture.

RedDevil -- Yes. I'm on a tablet for the next day or two. Entering text is painful. Copy and paste, ????

If you don't like it you simply don't have to read my replies :D. Thanks.

Is there a means to hide all your posts. Thanks.

Still on a tablet, but if you Google 'polyurethane car tires' you find that polyurethane and organosilanes are competitive with rubber. They have advantages and disadvantages.

More alternatives:

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r...ps50ouper4.jpg

Low Crr!
http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r...psn7pnnia6.jpg

^^ Need big wheels if you gotta push them horses ;)

Love it! Does this mean that Fiat-Chrysler is going to resurrect STUDEBAKER (ha,ha) ? ? ? ?

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r...psn7pnnia6.jpg
...and offer an "Amish" version Jeep?

At drill, we were moving a truck with a load and the rear tires were leaving tread marks on the pavement. Were they somehow dragging? What else could cause that?

Sooner or later, the rubber deposited on the concrete will wear off and scurry along Balto's floorboards when he is trying to sleep.

Polyurethane tires look very promising; see Will Polyurethane Replace Rubber for Tires? - Tom Dwyer Automotive and http://www.thomasnet.com/articles/pl...silicone-tires

Polyurethane tires will rub off loads of plastic microparticles. But - those would be polyurethane microparticles. And that matters.

As polyurethane is quite inert. So much so that it is the first choice for baby toys, pacifiers, etc.
I was looking for possible health hazards from PU microparticles but found hardly anything.
Now why is that?

This study Microplastics in the Marine Environment: A Review of the Methods Used for Identification and Quantification - ResearchGate grouped the results of other studies, listing what plastic types have been identified how often in those studies marine pollution samples.
The majority of studies found polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene.
Just one (out of 42) found polyurethane.

The properties (also listed in the above link) reveal why.
PE and PP are lighter than water, so they float in the surface layer and remain there when they break down to microscopic size. Polystyrene is just about as heavy as salt water, but is most used in foam. It floats until it breaks down.
PU is heavier than even salt water. It would sink to the bottom rapidly. It will deposit on the bottom of the wastewater channels and wherever the roads drain to. It won't float out to sea.

Those deposits do get polluted by PU particles, but that would be a relatively confined and concentrated pollution - by an inert material. Those deposits are most likely already heavily polluted anyway.
So not much harm done there, I guess?

Just the cost to worry about.
PU motor and shock mounts last longer than their rubber counterparts, but are not widely used because they are more expensive.
Would a set of PU tires be affordable enough to make them worthwhile?

Asbestos ONCE was a wonderful product, too.

Just like we had to stop using asbestos, we may one day be forced to change tires too.

I'll just drop this here. Where there's smoke there's fire.
http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Oh+...7f_5328571.png

RedDevil -- I have high hopes for your thread. I'm back where I can copy/paste and type with more than one finger.

The article I'd looked at is:

<<Tires: Urethane v. Silicone>>

It talks about polyurethane's problem, traction. It's an undated article, but states a farm implement tire was introduced that May. It also mentions organosilanes.

The first I ever heard about polyurethane tires was in an article in Popular Mechanix Illustrated some years ago. It played up the low capital investment and said manufacturing would be local on the scale of a re-capping shop and they'd make your tires on demand.

.

News regarding Polyurethane tires. Dated 7/22/2015.


http://www.rubbernews.com/article/20...pneumatic-tire




>

Ross Lovegrove did a car for Renault. He does bio-mimicry. His wheel is like:

http://designapplause.com/wp-content...t6-500x375.png
DesignApplause | Renault x ross lovegrove. Milan 2013.

That may be a rubber tire, but he does chairs that have veining and ribs like a leaf. That's probably not manufacturable yet.