Why tires — not tailpipes — are spewing more pollution from your cars
Why tires — not tailpipes — are spewing more pollution from your cars
Planning a summer road trip? What to know about two major sources of pollution coming from your car: tires and brakes.
“One, it hasn’t been regulated. Second, its chemical composition can be potentially more toxic, especially for brakes’ [particulate matter] … they’re all metallic.”
Here's another reason why the 15 minute city will win. No one wants particulate matter in their lungs!
Counterpoint: an electric vehicle does most of its braking by regenerating power into the battery. Brake pads are replaced super rarely.
Going by mass and comparing with fuel use on an IC vehicle - a set of tyres every 4 years weighs about 40 kilograms. What amount of rubber is destroyed? Maybe 10%, so maybe 4 kg of tyre-based pollutants escape into the environment as fine dust.
To compare, the amount of fuel is huge - at 5 l / 100 km, driving 1000 km/month: 600 liters per year, 2400 liters per 4 years. Clearly fuel is the dominant pollutant by mass. Tyre materials would have to be 600 times more toxic to be an equal health risk.
The immediate pollutants are primarily water and CO2. One has basically no health risk and the other primarily on a global scale, not local.
True. But also (not necessarily in that order) carbon monoxide, incompletely combusted hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides. Trying to figure it out, I stumbled on a Wikipedia article about it here.
They have a quantity analysis based on the average US car, saying 35 kg of hydrocarbons per year, 261 kilograms of carbon monoxide per year, and 17 kilograms of nitrogen oxides...
...alongside 5 tons of carbon dioxide (my driving scenario of 2400 liters per 4 years was not based on averages or the US, but my own consumption before going electric). On the other hand, this kind of driving will probably also increase the amount of tyre pollution - these average cars will be changing tyres more frequently.