TYRED EMISSIONS
A recent report found that pollution from tyre wear can be 1,000 times worse than what comes out of a car’ s exhaust …
With this issue published right in the middle of the Coronavirus lockdown which started in mid- March it’ s anyone’ s guess how it will affect the engine rebuilding industry in the long run. I guess it depends very much on the size of the business and the number of staff involved.
Larger employers will, of course, have had to exercise social distancing or shut up shop altogether for the period, while the smaller sole trader or‘ father and son’ businesses may well take the opportunity of the lockdown to catch up on their work or perhaps to do some much-needed‘ spring cleaning’ of the workshop.
What is interesting on a global scale is the short-term effect in terms of reduced air pollution, with the sudden decrease in transport use, in particular the dramatic reduction in aircraft use, leading to a huge reduction in the CO 2
, NOx and particulate emissions that have caused so much concern in recent years. Whether it will remain at a reduced level when the crisis is over is another question. Some suggest that there may well be an upsurge as world economies rush to re-establish manufacturing and communications capability.
But it’ s also interesting to take on board a recent report by
Emissions Analytics which found that pollution from tyre wear can be 1,000 times worse than what comes out of a car’ s exhaust. While we all know that tyres wear, we never really think about what happens to all that material as it is slowly eroded in small fragments, but harmful particle matter from tyres – and also brakes – is a very serious and growing environmental problem.
Ironically, it is a problem that has been exacerbated by the increasing popularity of large, heavy vehicles such as the SUVs which are all the fashion at the moment, but also by the growing demand for electric vehicles, which are not only heavier than standard cars because of their batteries but also quite rapid due to the high torque of their electric motors.
So, although exhaust emissions have been greatly reduced by car manufacturers as a result of the pressure placed on them by European emissions standards, such that new cars now emit very little in the way of particulate matter, there’ s growing concern about‘ non-exhaust emissions’( NEE). These are the particles released into the air from brake wear, tyre wear, road surface wear and resuspension of road dust during on-road vehicle usage.
NEEs are currently believed to constitute the majority of primary particulate matter from road transport – 60 per cent of PM2.5 and 73 per
cent of PM10 – and in a 2019 report by the UK Government’ s Air Quality Expert Group( AQEG), it was recommended that NEEs are immediately recognised as a source of ambient concentrations of airborne particulate matter, even for vehicles with zero exhaust emissions – such as EVs.
Indeed, Emissions Analytics performed some initial tyre wear testing using a popular family hatchback running on brand-new, correctly inflated tyres and found that it emitted 5.8 grams per kilometre of particles, compared with regulated exhaust emission limits of 4.5 milligrams per kilometre. That means that tyre wear emission is higher by a factor of over 1,000 and it can be even worse if tyres are underinflated, road surfaces are rougher, or the tyres used are from an inferior quality budget range.
While exhaust emissions have been tightly regulated for many years, tyre wear is totally unregulated – and with the increasing growth in sales of heavier SUVs and battery-powered electric cars, non-exhaust emissions( NEE) are a very serious problem which needs to be addressed. Z
You can find out more about the work of Emissions Analytics here: www. emissionsanalytics. com
46