When the world talks about the environmental tradeoffs associated with EVs, the discussion often revolves around mining, battery recycling, and — more recently — tire wear. Electric cars, with their significantly heavier curb weights than ICE-powered cars (and high torque/regenerative braking), tend to absolutely chew through tires, and this sends tiny microplastics out into the environment and potentially into our lungs. So what can we do about that? Well, one British Startup thinks the answer could be: Just collect that tire particles before they ever gets out into the environment, and then recycle them. Here’s how The Tyre Collective plans to do this.
I think on some level it’s always been pretty obvious that tires send dust out into the environment. I mean, you buy a new tire, it has X amount of tread on it, you drive 40,000 miles, and it now has less thread on it. That material has to go somewhere, and it’s only recently that people began to realize that these microplastics are a big deal. Again, it’s not exactly a new concept, with the California Air Resources Board referring to tire wear as a “non-exhaust source of inhalable particles,” and noting that they could become a dominant source of vehicle emissions: From CARB:
Vehicles emit inhalable particles from two major sources: the exhaust system, which has been extensively characterized and regulated; and non-exhaust sources including brake wear, tire and road wear, clutch wear and road dust resuspension. The non-exhaust sources have not been regulated because they are difficult to measure and control. However, with increasingly stringent standards for exhaust emissions, the non-exhaust fraction has become increasingly important. Model predictions (both MOVES and EMFAC) suggest that traffic-related emissions of both PM2.5 and PM10 will eventually be dominated by non-exhaust sources.
Additionally, there is concern that exposure to these particles may increase in California because proposed regional land use and transportation plans may lead to denser cities and a higher proximity of people to major roadways. Given the increased relevance of non-exhaust emissions, new studies are needed to better estimate their magnitude and to assess the potential to control them. But before an effective method to control these emissions can be devised, a greater understanding of their physical and compositional characteristics as well as overall emissions is needed.
The study of non-exhaust sources is highly complex…
Tire Wear Is Bad For The Environment And Human Health
But as the world struggles with its ICE-EV transition, tire wear has jumped into the limelight as tension brews between EV proponents and EV detractors. To EV detractors, the tire issue is one they can point to to show that EVs aren’t exactly perfect, and that’s fair enough, even if headlines like The Atlantic’s “EVs Are Sending Toxic Tire Particles Into the Water, Soil, and Air” and Grist.org’s “EVs are a climate solution with a pollution problem: Tire particles” seem a little slanted. Still, despite those headlines, both stories do note that gas car tires pollute, too, it’s just that EVs have really highlighted the extent of the problem. Grist.org’s piece notes the difference in tire wear between EVs and gas cars:
The average battery for an EV on the market today is roughly 1,000 pounds, with some outliers approaching 3,000 pounds — as much as an entire gasoline-powered compact car. Emissions Analytics has found that adding 1,000 pounds to a midsize vehicle increased tire wear by about 20 percent, and also that Tesla’s Model Y generated 26 percent more tire pollution than a similar Kia hybrid
The story goes on to say that, per the founder of a London-based emissions testing company, tires are a “fundamentally open system, so there is no viable way to capture the polluting particles that fly off of them.” The story also says that a single car emits just under nine pounds of tire wear each year. “Globally, that amounts to six million metric tons of tire pollution annually, with most of it coming from wealthier countries where personal car use is more prevalent,” the piece says. This is bad for both the environment and for people:
The researchers found that one tire will shed between two and fourteen pounds of rubber particles due to road wear (from initial use to initial disposal). These particles may be small enough to be picked up by wind and carried for up to a month before they are deposited on land. Larger particles can be caught in stormwater runoff and transported along curbs and through stormwater systems where they are typically deposited into a local waterway. Constituents of these particles, pollutants such as microplastics, heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and other toxic chemicals can then pollute local water and soil.
As for the smaller particles? Grist.org writes:
Smaller bits of tire particulate linger in the air, where they can be inhaled, and the smallest of this particulate matter — known as PM 2.5, because each particle is 2.5 micrometers or less — can directly enter the bloodstream. A 2017 study estimated that tire wear is responsible for 5 to 10 percent of oceanic microplastic pollution, and 3 to 7 percent of airborne PM 2.5 pollution.
If you really want to get into it, have a look at the article “Where the rubber meets the road: Emerging environmental impacts of tire wear particles and their chemical cocktails,” which was written, in part, by EPA researcher Paul Mayer. Here’s a little snippet going into the health implications of tire wear particles:
Some tire chemicals are known toxicants to terrestrial organisms and humans (e.g., many metals, PAHs), but the potential toxic effects of many tire-derived chemicals on terrestrial organisms remain unknown. For humans, oral and dermal exposure to tire particles is expected to be minimal compared to inhalation exposure (Kreider et al., 2020). While the larger fraction of particles is primarily in the non-respirable size range (5 μm–220 μm, mode approximately 75 um; Kreider et al., 2010), smaller sized tire particles (PM10 and PM2.5) contribute to particulate air pollution that can get deep into the lungs and into the bloodstream. Du et al. (2022) found 6PPD and 6PPD-quinone in the urine of children and adults including pregnant women in China, showing that tire-derived chemicals can get into the bloodstream, presumably from inhalation exposure to tire particles. While tires are a major source, other rubber materials such as belts hoses and cables also may emit 6PPD and 6PPD-quinone (Bohara et al., 2024; Cao et al., 2022), and facilities such as sports fields constructed wth tire crumb may be exposure points for humans (Skoczyńska et al., 2021). Mice exposed orally to 6PPD and 6PPD-quinone showed signs of hepatotoxicity from bioaccumulation in liver tissue along with disorders of lipid metabolism and inflammatory immune response due to gene upregulation, suggesting potential health risks to mammals (Fang et al., 2023).
The toxicity of tire particles has been investigated in various in vitro studies, which have consistently shown DNA damage and inflammatory effects, while in vivo studies using rats and mice have found inflammatory response and pulmonary toxicity from exposure to tire particles (Baensch-Baltruschat et al., 2020).
Improving Tire Emissions
It’s bad. So what’s the solution, you may wonder? Well, “Where the rubber meets the road” says opportunities basically involve changing the tires or collecting the wear particles:
Potential mitigation opportunities for uncontrolled environmental release of tire particles and chemicals include actions by four sectors: tire manufacturers, vehicle manufacturers, government, and the general population. Approaches for mitigating tire particle and related chemical pollution range from prevention (e.g., reformulating tires to remove toxic ingredients and reducing tire wear debris formation and emissions) to collection and treatment (e.g., capturing tire particles or tire-related chemicals after dispersal into the environment)
You may have already read about the former option — changing up tires. Canary Media, a website devoted to clean energy, recently wrote “Tires wear out fast on EVs. This startup wants to fix that.” The startup in question is a tire company in Britain; from the article:
To try and solve that problem, U.K. startup ENSO Tyres has been developing tires designed for EVs that it says can slash particulate emissions by lasting longer than competing products. Late last month, the company, which was a finalist for the Earthshot Prize in 2023, announced it had signed a letter of interest with the U.S. Export-Import Bank to build a $500 million factory in the U.S., set to open in 2027. The company hasn’t selected a location yet but named Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Georgia as potential options, and said it is exploring how it can use Inflation Reduction Act tax credits to finance the project.
[…]
The secret to creating higher-quality tires that take longer to wear down is not one Erlendsson was willing to reveal. But beyond using higher-grade, longer-lasting materials, ENSO tires are also made to have lower rolling resistance; when a car starts moving, the tires don’t hold a vehicle back as much, reducing friction and causing less wear.
Startup Says It Wants To Collect Tire Wear Particles
But you likely haven’t heard about any solution that collects wear particles; I hadn’t until I stopped by the future innovations section of the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where — among the various robots and autonomous cars and flying cars and other things that are neat but probably not happening anytime soon — I stumbled upon a booth displaying how much tire dust cars and buses emit everyday, and showcasing a strange contraption that mounts behind each wheel to collect that dust.
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The British startup is called The Tyre Collective, and it describes its goal on its website, writing: “Tyre wear is the second-largest source of microplastics in our oceans, toxic to marine life, and air particulate pollution. It gets into our waterways, the air we breathe and there is nothing to stop it! The Tyre Collective spearheads the capture and monitoring of tyre wear, accelerating the shift towards zero-emission mobility.”
The company’s display at Goodwood was compelling; it included clear boxes filled with the amount of tire wear buses and cars emit in a single day:
Tyres wear down every time a vehicle accelerates, brakes or corners. We discovered that tyre wear is charged by friction with the road. Our patent-pending device uses electrostatics and airflow to capture them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo-2b5JzTl8
The device The Tyre Collective showed at Goodwood essentially looked like a bunch of charged plates located just aft of a tire and lined up parallel to that tire’s direction of travel.
Here you can see where the device would be mounted:
The display also showed how these wear particles could be recycled into consumer goods:
Note that the company’s website includes images of a different design, which is lower to the ground and envelops the tire a bit more:
The company, which started out as masters project at both Imperial College London And Royal College Of Art, says it’s worked with Rivian and Volvo, and is currently doing trials with a delivery company in London. “The first commercial solutions are targeting logistic fleets, starting with delivery vans, before moving onto buses and HGVs. Long term, their aim is to integrate the technology into all EVs,” the company writes in its literature.
This all sounds great, though it does raise a few questions about adding complexity, cost, and weight to a vehicle, plus it may make you wonder if this would work with an off-road vehicle without harming ground clearance (maybe it could be deployable?), and then the big question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs. Can this device, or a variation of it, capture enough wear particles to warrant the compromises?
That wasn’t clear to me when I spoke to the representative at Goodwood. “First,” she said, “we’re focused on increasing selectivity, then looking at volume of capture…if you look at the mass we’re collecting, about 95 percent of what we have is tire wear.”
It’s cool that The Tyre Collective can ensure that they’re only grabbing tire dust and not dirt/grime from the roads; I’d love to see whether this can capture enough tire pollution, and whether it can be engineered into a package that could work for a consumer vehicle.
Either way, it’s cool to see how folks are trying to tackle this problem from different sides.
Images: David Tracy and The Tyre Collective
All we are is tyre dust in the wind….
Or just run more street sweepers on roads …
Have y’all done an article on the resurgence of drum brakes with BEVs?
Drum brakes inherently capture the brake dust unlike disc brakes.
Capture how? Yes, the particles might just falls down onto the drum wall, but the drum cant sequester them away somewhere permanently. My guess is that the wheels of a vehicle with drum brakes just look cleaner, since the dust is all shed inboard under the car rather than outboard where it soils one’s prized diamond-cut alloys.
I’d assume a very large part of it is contained within the drums until the need arises to rebuild them. Brake dust was definitely less of an issue in the time where drum brakes were standard, but maybe that’s just because SMOG was so present.
Brake dust is tiny with EVS because brake usage is tiny. Because of regenerative braking, I expect to never have to change my brake pads.
1) That has to be the most shoddy looking prototype I’ve ever seen someone bring to a trade show
2) It’s really hard to envision this having much net environmental benefit if you need a giant plastic contraption behind each tire just to catch some of the debris off that tire. Like how long would it take this thing to capture more material than what amount of material was wasted on the device itself?
I’ve seen worse. Who am I kidding, I’ve gone to trade shows with worse. I’ve gone to customers with much worse.
This looks like an *EARLY* prototype, set up to explain the mechanism more than show a realistic setup. If this were to go into a production vehicle, we’d see these fins in the wheel well behind the wheel (outside of suspension travel) with some way to clean and capture the particles. I’m imagining when the vehicle turns off, the fins will have to move against some brush over a pan to capture them. You can do it compactly in the vehicle, but the trick is in standard productionization of this stuff: minimizing complexity/weight/cost, maximizing reliability, making the whole thing servicable. And you need a way to easily retrieve the captured dust easily.
My best guess is that if we were to ever see this, it would be a local regulation (*cough* California *cough*) for trucks. On the bright side, this doesn’t look expensive to add to a large truck. It’s a few copper fins using a small amount of power – run it off the tail light power. The rest is some plastic housings, a brush, and some small moter/spring/actuator system for self cleaning the fins.
How will this work in snow?
Those of us in the Midwest would love the answer to that question.
It won’t. Stupid product.
It will stick to the salt crystals.
What’s next? Our shoe soles? Those wear down, too, and there’s literally billions of feet scrubbing off something into the environment every day.
We’ll fix that by making everyone go barefoot!
Great, so now we’ll be breathing in even more foot skin-flake dust!
.
Interesting topic (Honestly)
I never thought about Tarticles (Tire particles) prior to reading this article and after doing so I have to say that i am feeling a bit deflated.
We treat Mother Earth like she’s some kind of Kumho, it seems like we have no respect for her. Kind of like when the Beatles had to deal with Yokohama.
I do think we really have to ask Mother Earth “Hoosier Daddy” for at the end of the day it surely cannot be mankind because we ruin everything.
Anyway, Tread lightly and have a Goodyear. 😉
“tarticles”, noun
portmanteau of ‘tire’ and ‘particles’. the microplastic/rubber particles resulting from wear & tear of automotive tires.
Coined by Shooting Brake, 2024
Also, slang: derogatory term for 13yo chavs often found at the local arcade
tarticles © 2024, Shooting Brake LLC. 😉
I started reading this article, because it’s sort of interesting. Then I thought; wait, if you drive down a dusty road once, won’t these clog basically instantly?
And then I remembered our governments actively throw salt all over our roads because we can’t all be expected to have snow tires….
The amount of damage this salt causes every year is pretty insane to think that it is allowed. It gets into runoff and slowly increases the salinity of our freshwater lakes and rivers as well as the billions of dollars in damage due to corrosion to not only our vehicles but our infrastructure itself.
It gets into concrete and starts spalling and weakening it which lets more water in which accelerates the process of degradation. Then the salt attacks the rebar that a lot of our bridges and highways are put together with.
Until they stop dumping literally hundreds of tons of a corrosive poisonous chemical on our roads, I don’t think they should go after tires.
Let’s not forget to add that the brine they spray before the salt is radioactive.
So a lightweight ICE without toxic child-slave-mined rare earth lithium using small tires that last 10x as long as EV tires has another bonus to fight banning… no need for expensive TEF filters.
They forced the DEF on the diesels, lets show them how fud feels by forcing these TEF (tire emission filters) on EVs only.
Then they can have the cars they like banned by other people over silly stupid stuff. Like “Yo dawg, my EV is in the shop for the expensive TEF replacement again, it would be better to just delete it and drive but the ICE nerds wont let us.”
Then similar to diesels older grandfathered in EVs will be all the rage because new ones are forced by idiots to have needless complex failure prone filters that ruin their rides.
Do onto them and all.
How many tires worth of virgin material goes into making one of these fantastic devices? CARB will eventually find that the manufacturing costs of the Tyrevac are a significant source of pollution.
Go start this fight with commercial aviation. That will get Senators involved. Then move to agriculture to get House members involved. Then try the armed services. You can come for us, the ones that aren’t actually profiting from industrial pollution, after the “dust” settles.
World population in 1900 before tire dust: 1.5 billion
Current world population: 8 billion
Conclusion: tire dust causing population explosion.
Now all I need to do is start a think tank and solicit funding.
Logic checks out.
Don’t forget, everyone currently dead spent years breathing air & drinking water. Better look into those, too.
More vaporware artists looking to suck money from rubes for the latter plan (though I could see this maybe working on buses and trucks where they could be maintained by staff and, as their greater weights make for more pollution, would be much better bang for the buck, I would be pleasantly surprised if it made it beyond a test program at best). For the former, I highly doubt there’s some magic Star Trek 4 formula to reveal, it’s just harder, shittier tires that don’t grip. What’s that about the safety excuse they use to force intrusive and expensive nonsense that doesn’t even work properly upon us and treat us all like particularly dumb children? Why do large vehicles still have a tiny fraction of the pollution controls of cars and vehicles for off road use (including construction, mining, etc.) virtually none? Car companies have had to deal with them for over 50 years.
Every time I see this kind of thing announcing future additional costs and the pawning off of more guilt on those of us who have little control over what’s happening and certainly no political clout to game the system to give ourselves a pass, my mind can’t help but wander to all the POS multi-millionaire and billionaire parasites with mega yachts the size of smaller-to-midsize WW2 naval combat ships with little to no pollution controls and launching massively-polluting tourist rockets into space so assholes can look through a window little different than viewing on a TV at home and see that, yup, it really is round, they saw it for themselves. You think they come back with a greater appreciation for the unity of all living things on this lonely planet, that they’ll turn their fortune over to good causes after their enlightening experience? Of course, not! Even if they say shit like that, that’s the extent of what they’ll do, no different than self-styled gurus, shamans, and life coaches who throw out inspirational office poster quotes and Yoda-isms while their own lives are disastrous trails of failure and who are really just out to take advantage of other damaged people. Sorry, I have a narc “shaman” for a neighbor who made an undesirable scene at a party. What were we talking about?
Hello computer.
I’m picturing a cabin in Montana.
OK Computer
“Tyre wear is the second-largest source of microplastics in our oceans, toxic to marine life, and air particulate pollution. It gets into our waterways, the air we breathe and there is nothing to stop it!”
Yeah I don’t buy that. Sunlight and ozone are both known to degrade tire rubber and will do so much more aggressively on such small particles.
There are also actinobacteria (and perhaps other microbes) that should find such synthetic rubber particles as delicious treats:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8235351/
Tires aren’t only composed of rubber.
That’s right.
There’s steel belts and radials and white walls in there too.
Among other things:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/productimages.goantiques.gemr/45407/2219073_fullsize.jpg
https://autoily.com/what-are-tires-made-of/
Those things work on plastics too.
I guess that’s why there’s no plastic trash anywhere…
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
If anybody knows about health risks to mammals, it’d be Fang.
I’m also leery of tires made under the Inflation Reduction Act.
Was Tom Brady involved?
So smokey burnouts are not good? Gonna be a hard sell for Dodge owners.
Added maintenance(regular cleaning/emptying), added expense, highly prone to damage, gets in the way of other maintenance or use, likely incompatible with tire chains.
This will never be installed on enough vehicles to matter, even a little. I’m all about cool ideas and innovation, but it is simply a waste of time and resources to develop an idea that was obviously impractical from the beginning.
If we are really that worried about microplastic pollution from tire wear, good news! Tires don’t have to have plastic in them! Natural rubber tires are an existing and mature technology!
Am I the only one that read that as a reduction in unsprung weight?
First heavy snow with new car equipped with the revolutionary TireVac system…
*strange rubbing noise*
“Do you hear that?”
*crunch*
“Did you just feel that?”
Dashboard warning light for TireVac systems turns on.
Wouldn’t it easier/cheaper just to put fly paper on your fender wells? Get and oil changed and new fly paper every 5000 miles
For real, tho, you should patent this.
Here’s a woman who’s eaten ~50 tires in her life. I’m not saying tire dust is a non-issue (I’m sure it is) I’m just pointing out WTF THIS WOMAN EATS TIRES!
https://youtu.be/hRIurg5ppOw
Donut shop closed, eh?
Based on their own numbers (a bus emitting literally 100x as much as a car), it seems like this kind of thing should really be targeted at commercial vehicles.
I am cool with this until I am on a muddy 2 track in the national forest or it just snowed 10 inches.
I wonder if the amount of waste generated would be significantly less on non-asphalt surfaces, to the point where the conditions you describe would negate the need for the device? If they’re no more difficult to deactivate/remove than, say, locking hubs, maybe it’s not either/or.
I would not have any issue with unplugging and removing some device for off road trips or winter driving and then reinstalling for everyday driving. no issue with that at all.
This tech won’t make it onto a single vehicle in the next 50 years. It would be nice if anyone but scientists cared about the environment without regulations forcing them to, but the simple truth is they don’t.
It turns out when companies talk about what’s “green” they mean cold hard cash, not the environment.
If they cared about the environment, they’d be pushing for emissions controls on heavy road vehicles instead of trying to sell a marble catcher that will fail before collecting its own weight in particles.