For those wondering what the chemical is and its purpose:
>6PPD helps by reacting with ozone before it can react with the tire rubber, sparing the tires.
>But when 6PPD reacts with ozone, the researchers found that it was transformed into multiple chemicals, including 6PPD-quinone (pronounced “kwih-known”), the toxic chemical that is responsible for killing the salmon.
> 6PPD helps by reacting with ozone before it can react with the tire rubber, sparing the tires.
BTW, these kinds of molecules are known as "anti-oxidants". Use that knowledge to blow up the brains of people who think that "anti-oxidant" is some natural healing magic.
If you could finally stop humans oxidising, you could keep all that carbon in them nice and sequestered, and massively curtail lifetime carbon-intensive emissions. Another great win for antioxidants: nature's miracle cure for humanity!
6PPD-quinone is alone not enough to explain the salmon decline, the concentrations of 6PPD-Q mostly peak near urban areas after the start of the rainy season.
However, replacing 6PPD with a different anti-oxidant is a no-brainer. There are plenty of other alternatives, and this time the industry is making sure to pick something that won't be toxic to some form of bumblebee after exposure to nitrogen oxides.
I know here in BC there was a virus we determined to be a major factor in salmon deaths (largely spread by salmon farms along the coast), which lead to respiratory damage in the fish immediately before they would spawn.
At the time, our department of fisheries was saying “we know this isn’t the sole cause of the decline, but it’s a significant part of it” and other factors were thought to be overfishing, climate change, and pollutants. So, this dovetails nicely with that theory.
One of the things they stressed was that we probably wouldn’t be overfishing if the pollutants and disease factors were gone. This message, I believe, lead to a lot of bad press for fish farms which thankfully lead to a lack of support and the eventual removal of them from our waters (though we still have some remaining, eventually they will be gone). If we can solve the pollution factor, maybe we will see improved salmon returns. If people are aware of which pollutants to target, perhaps we will see a similar revolt against them like we did with fish farms. Here’s hoping.
I am quite certain that nobody ever claimed that banning 6-PPD was enough. I get your sentiment, it's totally not enough. Especially since it hasn't been banned, and to the extent progress has been made, it looks like they are slow-walking it.
The cuyahoga river caught fire in cleveland in 1969, the EPA was founded about 1.5 years later, the bill signed by Nixon. You are correct, we are not doing enough.
I live in Phoenix, and when I go out at night with a good flashlight, the amount of stuff in the air, visible in the beam, is crazy. I imagine some is dirt among other things, but wonder if the micropastics of the tires are airborne as well.
Since it hardly ever rains here it probably just accumulates on the roads and gets kicked up with activity.
I believe a lot of that is soot from diesel exhaust. And the two-cycle motors people use to mow their lawns and blow their leaves are amazingly polluting. Some of it might be the motor oil and partially-combusted gasoline they spew out. I'm curious what the balance is.
Its been 4 years since this was known, 8-10 since it was known that something in road runoff was fatal specifically to coho salmon. And basically nothing has been done. Sure tire companies or whatever are working on a fix. If I was "working on a fix" for 4+ years with no visible milestones I woudn't have a job. people love to complain about "overregulation" but 1) coho salmon fisheries are a multi billion dollar business and 2) those people are wrong, they've almost always been wrong, possibly even greedy and heartless. and if you happen to be religious they are complicit in destroying the gifts that God gave us.
Someone with more examples and a greater understanding, not to mention eloquence, than I ought to come out with a book going over, in tremendous detail, how much of our chemical engineering "miracles of science!" were created to replace mechanical processes or reduce power requirements. Polish regularly? No, we will just manufacture a coating! Filtering? No, flocculating agents! More insulation on that refrigerator? No, here's this new refrigerant! Sugar cane makes the vats hard to clean ... but high fructose corn syrup, that's the ticket. And that while a non-trivial portion of these chemical replacements are effective at what they do, we just have not considered the escape of these miracles into air, water, and soil. It just wasn't on anyone's horizon.
While I love science as much as anyone else does, I am wondering if a distant human future civilization (assuming we have one), will have switched to a "this new molecule is by default dangerous until proven otherwise, over decades." Chemical engineering would grind to a halt, but might perhaps be replaced by ever-finer mechanical processes for similar results.
I see articles like this about microplastics turning up in the environment and it doesn't surprise me at all. Almost a century of millions and millions of cars going through tires how could it not. In the future they'll ask what killed everyone? It was tires man. Tires.
And with EV the problem would be bigger as the frequency of replacing EV tires is higher due to heavier weights of EVs.'Emissions Analytics found that a single car sheds almost nine pounds of tire weight per year, on average. Globally, that amounts to 6 million metric tons of tire pollution annually, with most of it coming from wealthier countries where personal car use is more prevalent.
The amount of tire pollution emitted per vehicle is increasing as more electric cars hit the road around the world — some 14 million of them this year, according to the International Energy Agency. EVs tend to be significantly heavier than gas-powered or hybrid cars due to their larger, heftier batteries. 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 found that a single car sheds almost nine pounds of tire weight per year, on average.
Is that referring to EVs? That number is surprising considering a tire only weighs ~25lbs. 9lbs/year means the tires are half-gone (and long since threadbare) in 5 years.
It is referring to the total from all four tires i.e. 4 kg per car per year [1].
Please note that car tires or anything really won't have uniform degradation. The first year will lose a lot of mass, then once the outer material is shed, there will be far less shedding [2]. So I understand the above number as global tire shedding in a year/total number of cars.
P.S. I just looked it up. I have no idea if the source is reliable.
Multiple sources suggest that 9 pounds is possible but on the very high end. It seems like something closer to 5 pounds is more usual. Being thread bare by 3-4 years seems common if you’re a relatively heavy commuter.
I am surprised. I thought it was a lot less. I’m worried by this too, knowing so many people drive on their tires much longer.
> EVs tend to be significantly heavier than gas-powered or hybrid cars due to their larger, heftier batteries. 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.'
This is basically oil industry propaganda. It's like saying "the average internal combustion engine is roughly 1,000 pounds[1], with some outliers approaching 3000 pounds[2] -- as much as an entire electric compact car[3]."
EV batteries weigh more than gas tanks per unit energy but EV motors weigh less than petrol engines and don't need transmissions, exhaust and emissions controls, large water cooling systems, etc. The result is that EVs weigh around the same as ICE cars of the same size, e.g. Tesla Model 3 vs. BMW 3-series. The difference is typically less than 10-20% and it can be zero.
The premise that they weigh a lot more mostly comes from the rarity of subcompact EVs, so then people compare EVs (typically midsized cars or larger) to the lighest ICE cars (subcompacts) and it's heavier because it's bigger. Here's an ebike with a >200 mile range that weighs under 100 pounds:
There is no reason you couldn't make a subcompact EV with that range that weighs the same as subcompact ICE vehicles. But EV production is still constrained by battery production, so they put the batteries into premium vehicles, which are bigger. And then people claim that they're heavier, even though there's nothing intrinsic about that.
Moreover, newer battery chemistries with a better energy density would make them lighter. Even 20-30% improvements would make a large difference because the battery makes up such a large fraction of the weight of the car. If anyone gets a battery chemistry production-ready that uses oxygen from the air as one of the reactants, ICE cars would be without purpose.
There’s nothing in your comment that actually backs the idea that EVs will make the problem significantly worse.
Yeah, batteries weigh a lot, but everything else weighs less. A battery can be a structural component, an ICE engine cannot.
I think you will find a bias towards heavier weight if you compare EVs and ICE cars actually sold. But in recent years car makers have focused mostly on crossovers/SUVs for EVs, because that’s where they make the most margins. VW launched their new line with ID.4, Hyundai with Ioniq 5, Kia with EV 6. But all of these car makers are launching smaller lighter models now. An EV SUV is heavier than an ICE, I’ll grant you that. We need a bit better energy density to make a reasonable light SUV, but a smaller car doesn’t have to be more heavy than an ICE equivalent.
I recently had to change tires on our old 2015 Kia Soul EV. Not because they were worn down, but because they’re too old. There still plenty of tread depth left. It has been driven a completely average amount in that period.
There are anecdotes from car fleet operators who say they don’t see any significant difference between their EVs and ICE.
I’m willing to bet that driving style can have much more impact, and EVs can go both ways. Due to high torque you can drive more aggressively and chew through tires. You’ll certainly find stories of EV drivers like this. But you can also enable ECO mode and one-pedal driving, which I’m sure will result in way less jerk on the tyres than what most people can achieve with an ICE cars. It’s really easy to drive super smoothly with EVs, and I think most people will prefer that style of driving. Especially if it becomes common knowledge that it saves both on energy cost and avoids premature tire replacements.
I’m not too worried about the long term trend here. Car makers have so many incentives to drive down the weight of battery packs as it has exponential impact on costs. There are several next generation battery chemistries in early stage production phases that can potentially eliminate the weight disadvantage for a reasonable battery size.
Salmon bring a limiting factor to growth (phosphorous if I remember correctly) from the ocean to the land, then the bears and other animals eat them and distribute it throughout the forests through their dung. (The Native Americans around the PNW had a name for this but we just figured they were talking about nature spirits or something.)
That’s remarkable investigative work done by researchers. I hope schools keep fostering this type of education to improve communities and bring change to fast-moving industries.
so we're a long way from testing before widespread use or the like, but at least when something dramatic shows up it can sometimes lead to potential mitigations.
For those wondering what the chemical is and its purpose:
>6PPD helps by reacting with ozone before it can react with the tire rubber, sparing the tires.
>But when 6PPD reacts with ozone, the researchers found that it was transformed into multiple chemicals, including 6PPD-quinone (pronounced “kwih-known”), the toxic chemical that is responsible for killing the salmon.
> 6PPD helps by reacting with ozone before it can react with the tire rubber, sparing the tires.
BTW, these kinds of molecules are known as "anti-oxidants". Use that knowledge to blow up the brains of people who think that "anti-oxidant" is some natural healing magic.
If you could finally stop humans oxidising, you could keep all that carbon in them nice and sequestered, and massively curtail lifetime carbon-intensive emissions. Another great win for antioxidants: nature's miracle cure for humanity!
I don't think anyone things anti-oxidants in tires are natural healing magic, so brains are unlikely to be blown.
Plenty of people think that anti-oxidants _in_ _general_ are magical healing dust.
6PPD-quinone is alone not enough to explain the salmon decline, the concentrations of 6PPD-Q mostly peak near urban areas after the start of the rainy season.
However, replacing 6PPD with a different anti-oxidant is a no-brainer. There are plenty of other alternatives, and this time the industry is making sure to pick something that won't be toxic to some form of bumblebee after exposure to nitrogen oxides.
There's a report with the list of best alternatives so far: https://www.ustires.org/largest-global-tire-industry-consort...
I know here in BC there was a virus we determined to be a major factor in salmon deaths (largely spread by salmon farms along the coast), which lead to respiratory damage in the fish immediately before they would spawn.
At the time, our department of fisheries was saying “we know this isn’t the sole cause of the decline, but it’s a significant part of it” and other factors were thought to be overfishing, climate change, and pollutants. So, this dovetails nicely with that theory.
One of the things they stressed was that we probably wouldn’t be overfishing if the pollutants and disease factors were gone. This message, I believe, lead to a lot of bad press for fish farms which thankfully lead to a lack of support and the eventual removal of them from our waters (though we still have some remaining, eventually they will be gone). If we can solve the pollution factor, maybe we will see improved salmon returns. If people are aware of which pollutants to target, perhaps we will see a similar revolt against them like we did with fish farms. Here’s hoping.
I am quite certain that nobody ever claimed that banning 6-PPD was enough. I get your sentiment, it's totally not enough. Especially since it hasn't been banned, and to the extent progress has been made, it looks like they are slow-walking it.
The cuyahoga river caught fire in cleveland in 1969, the EPA was founded about 1.5 years later, the bill signed by Nixon. You are correct, we are not doing enough.
Ah yas, I knew I read about this before on here several times:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25431550 343 points on Dec 16, 2020 | 152 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40223253 177 points 4 months ago | 166 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25311636 88 points on Dec 5, 2020 | 49 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25298850 51 points on Dec 4, 2020 | 8 comments
And probably more...
I wonder if we are inhaling this.
I live in Phoenix, and when I go out at night with a good flashlight, the amount of stuff in the air, visible in the beam, is crazy. I imagine some is dirt among other things, but wonder if the micropastics of the tires are airborne as well.
Since it hardly ever rains here it probably just accumulates on the roads and gets kicked up with activity.
Wikipedia says it’s in most people’s urine, so yes (unless most people lick tires). Health effects in humans are unknown.
That urban black dust that accumulates on lawn furniture etc., how much of that is tires? The colour seems right.
I believe a lot of that is soot from diesel exhaust. And the two-cycle motors people use to mow their lawns and blow their leaves are amazingly polluting. Some of it might be the motor oil and partially-combusted gasoline they spew out. I'm curious what the balance is.
Must be to some degree. And brake dust
They find microplastics in human brain tissue, we are thoroughly fucked
Its been 4 years since this was known, 8-10 since it was known that something in road runoff was fatal specifically to coho salmon. And basically nothing has been done. Sure tire companies or whatever are working on a fix. If I was "working on a fix" for 4+ years with no visible milestones I woudn't have a job. people love to complain about "overregulation" but 1) coho salmon fisheries are a multi billion dollar business and 2) those people are wrong, they've almost always been wrong, possibly even greedy and heartless. and if you happen to be religious they are complicit in destroying the gifts that God gave us.
Someone with more examples and a greater understanding, not to mention eloquence, than I ought to come out with a book going over, in tremendous detail, how much of our chemical engineering "miracles of science!" were created to replace mechanical processes or reduce power requirements. Polish regularly? No, we will just manufacture a coating! Filtering? No, flocculating agents! More insulation on that refrigerator? No, here's this new refrigerant! Sugar cane makes the vats hard to clean ... but high fructose corn syrup, that's the ticket. And that while a non-trivial portion of these chemical replacements are effective at what they do, we just have not considered the escape of these miracles into air, water, and soil. It just wasn't on anyone's horizon.
While I love science as much as anyone else does, I am wondering if a distant human future civilization (assuming we have one), will have switched to a "this new molecule is by default dangerous until proven otherwise, over decades." Chemical engineering would grind to a halt, but might perhaps be replaced by ever-finer mechanical processes for similar results.
I see articles like this about microplastics turning up in the environment and it doesn't surprise me at all. Almost a century of millions and millions of cars going through tires how could it not. In the future they'll ask what killed everyone? It was tires man. Tires.
And with EV the problem would be bigger as the frequency of replacing EV tires is higher due to heavier weights of EVs.'Emissions Analytics found that a single car sheds almost nine pounds of tire weight per year, on average. Globally, that amounts to 6 million metric tons of tire pollution annually, with most of it coming from wealthier countries where personal car use is more prevalent.
The amount of tire pollution emitted per vehicle is increasing as more electric cars hit the road around the world — some 14 million of them this year, according to the International Energy Agency. EVs tend to be significantly heavier than gas-powered or hybrid cars due to their larger, heftier batteries. 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 found that a single car sheds almost nine pounds of tire weight per year, on average.
Is that referring to EVs? That number is surprising considering a tire only weighs ~25lbs. 9lbs/year means the tires are half-gone (and long since threadbare) in 5 years.
It is referring to the total from all four tires i.e. 4 kg per car per year [1].
Please note that car tires or anything really won't have uniform degradation. The first year will lose a lot of mass, then once the outer material is shed, there will be far less shedding [2]. So I understand the above number as global tire shedding in a year/total number of cars.
P.S. I just looked it up. I have no idea if the source is reliable.
[1] https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/how-tyre-emissions-h...
[2] https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/gaining-traction-los...
Multiple sources suggest that 9 pounds is possible but on the very high end. It seems like something closer to 5 pounds is more usual. Being thread bare by 3-4 years seems common if you’re a relatively heavy commuter.
I am surprised. I thought it was a lot less. I’m worried by this too, knowing so many people drive on their tires much longer.
EVs with effective regenerative braking release less brake dust. Choose your poison.
Manual transmission ice cars also have this feature
> EVs tend to be significantly heavier than gas-powered or hybrid cars due to their larger, heftier batteries. 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.'
This is basically oil industry propaganda. It's like saying "the average internal combustion engine is roughly 1,000 pounds[1], with some outliers approaching 3000 pounds[2] -- as much as an entire electric compact car[3]."
[1] e.g. https://www.cummins.com/engines/cummins-67l-turbo-diesel-202... (1070 lbs)
[2] https://www.dieselpartsdirect.com/documents/cummins-specs/cu... (3150 lbs)
[3] e.g. Fiat EV (<3000 lbs)
EV batteries weigh more than gas tanks per unit energy but EV motors weigh less than petrol engines and don't need transmissions, exhaust and emissions controls, large water cooling systems, etc. The result is that EVs weigh around the same as ICE cars of the same size, e.g. Tesla Model 3 vs. BMW 3-series. The difference is typically less than 10-20% and it can be zero.
The premise that they weigh a lot more mostly comes from the rarity of subcompact EVs, so then people compare EVs (typically midsized cars or larger) to the lighest ICE cars (subcompacts) and it's heavier because it's bigger. Here's an ebike with a >200 mile range that weighs under 100 pounds:
https://ridereview.com/products/fuell-flluid-22s
There is no reason you couldn't make a subcompact EV with that range that weighs the same as subcompact ICE vehicles. But EV production is still constrained by battery production, so they put the batteries into premium vehicles, which are bigger. And then people claim that they're heavier, even though there's nothing intrinsic about that.
Moreover, newer battery chemistries with a better energy density would make them lighter. Even 20-30% improvements would make a large difference because the battery makes up such a large fraction of the weight of the car. If anyone gets a battery chemistry production-ready that uses oxygen from the air as one of the reactants, ICE cars would be without purpose.
There’s nothing in your comment that actually backs the idea that EVs will make the problem significantly worse.
Yeah, batteries weigh a lot, but everything else weighs less. A battery can be a structural component, an ICE engine cannot.
I think you will find a bias towards heavier weight if you compare EVs and ICE cars actually sold. But in recent years car makers have focused mostly on crossovers/SUVs for EVs, because that’s where they make the most margins. VW launched their new line with ID.4, Hyundai with Ioniq 5, Kia with EV 6. But all of these car makers are launching smaller lighter models now. An EV SUV is heavier than an ICE, I’ll grant you that. We need a bit better energy density to make a reasonable light SUV, but a smaller car doesn’t have to be more heavy than an ICE equivalent.
I recently had to change tires on our old 2015 Kia Soul EV. Not because they were worn down, but because they’re too old. There still plenty of tread depth left. It has been driven a completely average amount in that period.
There are anecdotes from car fleet operators who say they don’t see any significant difference between their EVs and ICE.
I’m willing to bet that driving style can have much more impact, and EVs can go both ways. Due to high torque you can drive more aggressively and chew through tires. You’ll certainly find stories of EV drivers like this. But you can also enable ECO mode and one-pedal driving, which I’m sure will result in way less jerk on the tyres than what most people can achieve with an ICE cars. It’s really easy to drive super smoothly with EVs, and I think most people will prefer that style of driving. Especially if it becomes common knowledge that it saves both on energy cost and avoids premature tire replacements.
I’m not too worried about the long term trend here. Car makers have so many incentives to drive down the weight of battery packs as it has exponential impact on costs. There are several next generation battery chemistries in early stage production phases that can potentially eliminate the weight disadvantage for a reasonable battery size.
and they make us feel bad for using plastic straws...
Salmon bring a limiting factor to growth (phosphorous if I remember correctly) from the ocean to the land, then the bears and other animals eat them and distribute it throughout the forests through their dung. (The Native Americans around the PNW had a name for this but we just figured they were talking about nature spirits or something.)
Cars -> tire dust -> dead salmon -> reduced phosphorous -> sick forest
Not to worry, we are putting plenty of phosphorous into most waterways.
Do they bring that significant of an amount in the one time a year they come to breed?
I read a recent article[0] that corroborates this.
> certain tree species' ability to grow up to three times faster when supported by the nutrients salmon bring to a forest's ecosystem
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/the-picture-show/2024/09/03/g-s...
Nope. Fish is not the main source of phosphorus, it's the rock weathering.
That’s remarkable investigative work done by researchers. I hope schools keep fostering this type of education to improve communities and bring change to fast-moving industries.
And it appears to have resulted in a set of responses:
https://www.epa.gov/chemical-research/6ppd-quinone
https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-develops-6ppd-q-water-t...
https://www.ustires.org/largest-global-tire-industry-consort...
so we're a long way from testing before widespread use or the like, but at least when something dramatic shows up it can sometimes lead to potential mitigations.
6PPD -> 6PPD-quinone
Yet another con against the growing trend of car centric transportation.
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