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Turns out most car pollution is actually from rubber tires flaking off and putting microplastics in your lungs.
This gets worse the heavier the car is, and because electric cars are heavier, theres a chance that EVS could actually be worse for particulate emmission than moderately efficient regular cars.
Would using good tyres, and maintaining them, not be a solution to that problem?
Wear is nonlinearly dependant on number of cycles, materials, and load. I've not seen anything in the litterature that indicates rubbers can maintain safety while decreasing their amount of particulate pollution. In fact, ive seen that they are a direct trade with one another.
Lighter cars being forced to drive slower, would do something about it. Also, simply restricting the number of cars in a city the same way we restricted the density of coal burning power plants in a city would also solve the problem in the exact same way.
Non-rubber materials such as steel do not have this problem, which is why trains are good.
From https://evmagazine.com/sustainability/how-much-pollution-comes-from-electric-vehicle-tyres
Emissions Analytics provides various samples from its tests to give an all-round view of tyre pollution. The team has now tested more than 300 tyres on the European market, identifying 78 organic compounds and recognising 46 hazards codes. It turns out the least toxic tyre compound is 85% less polluting than the most toxic version.
I think the answer does lie in using less toxic tyres, as a starting point, something I was suspecting.
Another source says:
The International Union for Conservation of Nature pegs tires as the second leading source of microplastic pollution in oceans, and one 2017 study found a global per capita average of .81 kilograms in tire emissions per year, ranging from .23 kg per year in India to 4.7 kg (roughly 10 pounds) in the US. That may seem minor stacked up against the nearly 300 pounds in plastic waste the average American generates each year, but microplastics are tiny by definition — and an insidious source of toxins that researchers are only beginning to understand.
There is a colossal difference between India (where I live) and US, for example.
Also another article points out only large BEVs will be heavy, as usual BEVs will become similar in weight to normal fossil fuel cars by 2025.
Motorcycles produce exponentially lower pollution than cars, and cycles more or less produce none, which should be used, but cars are a need due to shitty designing of cities, and capitalist growth chasing.
Oh that's excellent news. I hope this won't be used an excuse to neither lower vehicle speeds nor improve the places that we live. I also don't know if this will offset the doubling or tripling of the average automobile in terms of weight that is happening. Also, I fear that if these tires are even slightly less profitable to create, they will not be adopted, rendering fixation on them worse than useless.
It's also a massive issue that some tires and asphalts are far quieter than others, which makes the people forced to live near high speed car infrastructure substantially less miserable. Noise induced stress is one of those health effects that I'm personally too anxious to read in detail about, as it scares the hell out of me. It'd be wonderful if quieter asphalt and tires were also the same kind that were less polluting, but I have learned that tech brained ideas pitched by car companies claiming to solve their massive problems rarely do.
Also, perhaps "EV magazine" has a vested interest in portraying inherent problems with automobiles as non-inherent?
I don't want less car induced lung cancer, I want no car induced lung cancer.
Halving vehicle weights or ranges or top speeds would also nonlinearly decrease tire wear while also decreasing vehicle cost and danger to others, but here in the US none of those things are happening. Instead, every possible negative attribute is worsening, along with corresponding fluff pieces and propoganda to convince truck owners that they aren't doing the harm that they are doing. I also feel terrified that these fluff pieces are poisoning wells of activism around the world, harming the entire human species rather than just the imperial core.
It's true that smaller, two wheeled vehicles are drastically better for the environment, and the fact that so many cities in europe and southeast asia are able to exist with so few "cars" is a disagreement I have with your last, excellent sentence. I very much wish I posessed the intelligence to separate Private automobile ownership from Commercial automobile ownership, but I forget to most of the time. I do genuinely believe that private automobile ownership should be as rare as policy can make it, just like it is (kind of) for airplanes in the US.
Thank you for the excellent link.
I only shared the EV magazine link as I saw fair amount of neutrality. I knew this was going to come up, conflict of interest usually does become a problem, but it looks OK here on this topic.
Its all about the Pareto's principle, no matter what it is. Find the Pareto frontier, and target it, but with proper assumptions as there can be more than 1 case targets. So that would look like, in no order:
- an actual (and not for media optics) cutdown on speeds
- less weight of cars without compromising safety
- methods to hinder tyre particles from getting out at all (Tyre Collective built a device releasing next year, as these particles are electrostatic)
- using less cars and more motorcycles
- better and less toxic tyres
- any tyre companies penalised, and tyre industry regulated for tyre pollution like how tailpipe pollution got regulated and successfully controlled