In just over a month, the Earthshot Prize will announce its 2023 winners in Singapore. Enso Ltd is one of 15 global finalists for this year’s prize, and company founder and chief executive officer Gunnlaugur Erlendsson was amongst a handful of climate tech entrepreneurs who yesterday met with Earthshot Prize founder and Council member, Prince William.
Tyres may be a key beneficiary of research conducted by a team of chemists from MIT and Duke University in the USA who claim to have discovered a “counterintuitive way to make polymers stronger.” The talk is not only of increasing tyre lifespan, but also of reducing microplastic emissions.
The ETRMA has spoken in support of the European Union’s (EU) goal of delivering cleaner mobility via its recently proposed Euro 7 emissions rules. However, the association which represents tyre manufacturers across Europe, also suggested that future rules on tyres should be based on “robust scientific evidence of their real-world impact on emissions”. Specifically, ETRMA supports the use of a UN-validated test method, which is currently being developed, to establish future EU tyre abrasion limits.
The European Commission published details of the new Euro 7 standards on 10 November 2022. According to the commission, Euro 7 will “ensure cleaner vehicles on our roads and improved air quality, protecting the health of our citizens and the environment.” The transport industry has become familiar with the increasingly demanding Euro series of standards over the years. Up till now, they have focused on vehicle exhaust emissions, something that tyres can only indirectly affect through reduced rolling resistance and its impact on fuel consumption and therefore emissions. This time round however, Euro 7 brings with it standards relating to particle emissions from tyres and brakes.
The Audi Environmental Foundation has developed filters for urban runoff in conjunction with the Technical University of Berlin. They prevent tyre wear particles and other substances from being washed into sewers and bodies of water along with rainwater. Initial field and lab tests have now demonstrated the efficiency of the UrbanFilter project.
The Tyre Collective – winners of the James Dyson Awards 2020 – have designed a device to capture tyre particulate at source. According to the UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs’ “Air Quality: Brake, Tyre and Road Surface Wear” report, tyre-wear accounts for nearly half of road transport particulate emissions. Furthermore, a reported half a million tonnes of tyre particles are produced annually in Europe alone, from vehicles accelerating, braking and cornering. As we move towards electric vehicles in the future, exhaust emissions will reduce but tyre particles will continue. The Tyre Collective estimate that tyre emissions may even increase, as electric vehicles become heavier due to the added battery weight. For both reasons, this year’s UK national James Dyson Award winners attempt to address this issue.
The University of Plymouth published government-funded research into what happens to particles released from vehicle tyres back in May. This comparatively recent report – as far as academic research is concerned – was launched with no-small media fanfare amid claims that tyres “could be a significant and previously largely unrecorded source of microplastics in the marine environment”. Be that as it may, the research also highlighted a number of significant knowledge gaps in this field of research.
Tyre Recovery Association members have called a new proposal to ban the use of tyre-derived rubber infill in sports surfaces as “incomprehensible and counter-intuitive”. The European Chemical Agency (ECHA) wants to ban the reuse of materials containing ‘intentionally added’ microplastics such as tyres from 2028. The TRA estimates that in the course of their service lives, car tyres alone shed some half a million tonnes of micronized rubber annually across the continent of Europe.
In mid-November, the Green Party in the EU Parliament put out a statement on twitter saying: “tyres release more than 500,000 tonnes of microplastics into the environment?”. Stating that this means it is “time to reinvent the wheel”, the green party added: “Yesterday [13 November] we fought hard and we managed to convince the EU to label tyre abrasion in order to tackle plastic pollution”. With this in mind, Tyres & Accessories asked ETRMA what the pan-European tyre industry is adding to the discussion.
Professor Richard Thompson OBE, who leads the International Marine Research Unit at the University of Plymouth, has questioned claims made by the Marine Conservation Society relating the role played by tyre wear in marine microplastic pollution.
According to a new report undertaken by Eunomia Research and Consulting for Friends of the Earth, up to 19,000 tonnes of microplastic pollution could be entering UK waterways every year from vehicle tyres. The report, titled Reducing Household Contributions to Marine Plastic Pollution, listed tyres in its ‘top ten’ list of items of concern, commenting that interventions and innovation, as well as governmental, business and scientific collaboration, may be required over the coming five years to solve the issue.
The UK government identifies tyres as potentially responsible for up to ten per cent of the microplastics in the world’s oceans, and some research conducted abroad suggests this proportion could be much higher. A study from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) indicates that 28.3 per cent of all primary microplastics may come from tyre/road wear (this figure rises to 46.2 per cent when the IUCN includes both natural and synthetic rubber in its scenario), and earlier this year a marine biologist from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research singled out tyres as a “major influence” upon the presence of microplastics in our oceans. Taking such research at face value, it is feasible that the ‘dieselgate’ scandal could be followed at some stage by ‘tyregate’. Yet the tyre industry asserts that tyre/road wear isn’t the environmental and health risk some claim it to be. Continental’s Nikolai Setzer recently discussed this side of the argument.
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Lukasz Kobus; European Union
Audi
The Tyre Collective
Tookapic; Pixabay