Category Archives: Plastic Pollution Articles & News

Plastic has seeped into every aspect of our existence. Can we live without it?Of the 8,300 million tonnes of virgin plastic produced up to the end of 2015, 6,300 million tonnes has been discarded. Most of that plastic waste is still with us, entombed in landfills or polluting the environment. Microplastics have been found in Antarctic sea ice, in the guts of animals that live in the deepest ocean trenches, and in drinking water around the world. In fact, plastic waste is now so widespread that researchers have suggested it could be used as a geological indicator of the Anthropocene.
But what if we could wave a magic wand and remove all plastics from our lives? For the sake of the planet, it would be a tempting prospect – but we’d quickly find out just how far plastic has seeped into every aspect of our existence. Is life as we know it even possible without plastic?
Humans have been using plastic-like materials, such as shellac – made from a resin secreted by lac insects – for thousands of years. But plastics as we know them today are a 20th Century invention: Bakelite, the first plastic made from fossil fuels, was invented in 1907. It wasn’t until after World War Two that production of synthetic plastics for use outside the military really took off. Since then, plastic production has increased almost every year, from two million tonnes in 1950 to 380 million tonnes in 2015. If it continues at this rate, plastic could account for 20% of oil production by 2050.
Today, the packaging industry is by far the biggest user of virgin plastic. But we also use plastic in plenty of longer-lasting ways too: it’s in our buildings, transport, and other vital infrastructure, not to mention our furniture, appliances, TVs, carpets, phones, clothes, and countless other everyday objects.
All this means a world entirely without plastic is unrealistic. But imagining how our lives would change if we suddenly lost access to plastic can help us figure out how to forge a new, more sustainable relationship with it.
In hospitals, the loss of plastic would be devastating. “Imagine trying to run a dialysis unit with no plastic,” says Sharon George, senior lecturer in environmental sustainability and green technology at Keele University in the UK.Plastic is used in gloves, tubing, syringes, blood bags, sample tubes and more. Since the discovery of variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD) in 1996 – caused by misfolded proteins called prions that can survive normal hospital sterilisation processes – standard reusable surgical instruments have even been replaced by single-use versions for some operations. According to one study, a single tonsillectomy operation in a UK hospital can result in more than 100 separate pieces of plastic waste. While some surgeons have argued that single-use plastic is overused in hospitals, right now many plastic medical items are essential, and lives would be lost without them.
Some everyday plastic items are also vital for protecting health. Condoms and diaphragms are on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines, and face masks – including plastic-based surgical masks and respirators, as well as reusable cloth masks – have helped slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus. “A mask that you have for Covid is related to our safety and the safety of others,” says George. “The impact of taking that away could be loss of life, if you took it away on a big scale.”In hospitals, the loss of plastic would be devastating (Credit: Kseniia Zatevakhina/ Alamy)Our food system would also quickly unravel. We use packaging to protect food from damage in transit and preserve it long enough to reach supermarket shelves, but also for communication and marketing. “I cannot imagine how [plastic] would be replaced completely in our system,” says Eleni Iacovidou, a lecturer in environmental management at Brunel University London.
It’s not just consumers that would need to change their habits – supermarket supply chains are optimised for selling packaged produce, and would need overhauling. In the meantime, highly perishable goods with long journeys between farm and supermarket, such as asparagus, green beans, and berries, might end up left in fields, unpicked.
If we could solve those supply chain issues, fruit and vegetables could be sold loose, but we might need to shop more frequently. Research by UK waste reduction charity WRAP found that plastic packaging extended the shelf life of broccoli by a week when kept in the fridge, and bananas 1.8 days at room temperature – though for apples, cucumber, and potatoes, the plastic made no difference. In fact, the research found that food waste could even be reduced by selling fruit and veg loose, as it allowed people to buy only what they needed.
Even tins of tomatoes and beans would be out – they have an inner plastic coating to protect the food – so we’d have to buy dried pulses in paper bags and cook them at home instead. “People have relied too much on getting the thing they need in the most convenient and easy way,” says Iacovidou. “I think we need to get a little bit uncomfortable.”
Swapping out plastic packaging would have knock-on environmental effects. While glass has some advantages over plastic, such as being endlessly recyclable, a one litre glass bottle can weigh as much as 800g compared to a 40g plastic one. This results in
glass bottles having a higher overall environmental impact
compared to plastic containers for milk, fruit juice, and fizzy drinks, for example. When those heavier bottles and jars need to be transported over long distances, carbon emissions grow even more. And if the vehicles they’re transported in don’t contain plastic, they themselves will be heavier, which means even more emissions.
In some ways, though, changing food packaging would be the easy part. You might buy milk in a glass bottle, but plastic tubing is used in the dairy industry to get that milk from cow to bottle. Even if you buy vegetables loose, sheets of plastic mulch may have helped the farmer who grew them save water and keep away weeds. Without plastic, industrial agriculture as we know it would be impossible.
Instead, we’d need shorter food chains – think farm shops and community-supported agriculture. But with over half of the global population now living in cities, this would require huge changes in where and how we grow food. It wouldn’t be an impossible task, says Iacovidou, but “we have to devote the time to do it, and we have to also cut the amount of things that we eat”.If we ditch synthetic clothing materials, cotton production would have to be scaled up significantly (Credit: Getty Images)Living without plastic would also require a shift in how we dress. In 2018, 62% of the textile fibres produced worldwide were synthetic, made from petrochemicals. While cotton and other natural fibres like hemp would be good substitutes for some of our clothing, scaling up production to match current demand would come with a cost. Cotton already grows on 2.5% of arable land worldwide, but the crop accounts for 16% of insecticide use, risking the health of farmers and contaminating water supplies. Without plastic, we’d need to ditch fast fashion in favour of more durable items we can wear again and again.
We’d also quickly run out of shoes. Before widespread synthetic plastics came along, shoes were often made out of leather. But today there are many more people on Earth, and we get through many more pairs each: 20.5 billion pairs of footwear were manufactured in 2020. “We couldn’t go to leather shoes for every person on the planet… that’s just not feasible,” says George.
There would be upsides to a world without plastic, though: we’d escape the harmful effects it has on our health.
Turning oil and gas into plastic releases toxic gases that pollute the air and impact local communities. What’s more, chemicals added during the production of plastics can disrupt the endocrine system, which produces hormones that regulate our growth and development. Two of the most well-studied of these endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are phthalates, used to soften plastic but also found in many cosmetics, and bisphenol A (BPA), used to harden plastic and commonly used in the lining of tins.
“While these phthalates or BPA are important for the structure of the plastic, they are not chemically bound to it,” says Shanna Swan, professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. That means when these chemicals are used in food packaging, they can leach into the food itself – and end up in our bodies.
Some phthalates can lower testosterone production, reducing sperm counts and increasing fertility problems in men. BPA, on the other hand, mimics oestrogen and has been linked with an increased risk of reproductive problems in women. But the effects extend beyond fertility. “The breadth of the potentially disruptive influences of EDCs is striking,” writes Swan in her book, Count Down. “They have been linked to numerous adverse health effects in almost all biological systems, not just the reproductive system but also the immunological, neurological, metabolic, and cardiovascular systems.”
Exposure to EDCs during critical periods of foetal growth can have long-lasting effects. “If the mother is pregnant, and she is exposed to plastics or other chemicals that alter the development of her foetus, those changes are lifelong, irreversible changes,” says Swan. This means that, while going cold turkey on plastics would reduce our exposure, their effects would still be felt for at least the next two generations. “Your grandmother’s exposure is relevant to your reproductive health and your health in general,” says Swan.Plastics have been found in Antarctic sea ice and in the guts of animals living in the deep ocean (Credit: Getty Images)At some point, we’d want to address the plastic that’s already in the oceans. Could we ever clean it all up? “You have some materials that are on the seafloor and they’re not going to go anywhere, they’re just part of the ecosystem,” says Chelsea Rochman, assistant professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto. But with the floating plastics, she says, we have a fighting chance.
Researchers now think that most plastics floating in the ocean will eventually get washed up or buried along our shorelines. At the moment some of those shoreline plastics are removed with trash-traps and old fashioned beach cleans. Keeping that removal up would make a difference to marine wildlife. “You would have fewer animals washing up on the beach with plastics in their bellies, and less entanglement,” says Rochman. “A lot of what’s being ingested by animals is not the stuff that’s in the deep sea, it’s the coastal stuff.”
Taking out bigger pieces of plastic waste would also stop them breaking up into microplastics. Most of the microplastics found away from coastlines are from the 1990s or earlier, suggesting that bigger pieces take decades to break down. That means if we simply stopped adding new plastic pollution to the oceans tomorrow, microplastics would continue to increase over the next decades – but by removing the existing debris as well, we could stop that surge. “Maybe we reach a time where every animal we pull out of the water doesn’t have microplastics in it,” says Rochman.In a plastic-free world, making new kinds of plastic out of plants might start to look tempting.
Bio-based plastics that have many of the same qualities as petrochemical plastics are already in use. Corn starch-based polylactic acid (PLA), for example, is used to make straws are almost indistinguishable from their fossil fuel plastic counterparts – unlike paper straws that can end up soggy before you finish your drink. Bio-based plastics can be made from the edible parts of plants like sugar or corn, or from plant material that isn’t fit for consumption, like bagasse, the pulp left over after crushing sugarcane. Some, but not all, bio-based plastics are biodegradable or compostable. But most of those plastics still need careful processing, often in industrial composting facilities, to ensure they don’t persist in the environment – we can’t just throw them into the sea and hope for the best.
Even if we did create the infrastructure to compost them, bio-based plastics might not be better for the environment – at least not right away. “I think initially we’d see all impacts increase,” says Stuart Walker, a research fellow at the University of Exeter and author of a recent review looking at environmental impacts of bio-based and fossil fuel plastics.Supermarket supply chains are optimised for selling packaged produce and would need overhauling if we stopped using plastic (Credit: Getty Images)Clearing land for crops would impact ecosystems and biodiversity. Fertilisers and pesticides come with carbon emissions attached and can pollute local rivers and lakes. One study found that replacing fossil fuel plastics with bio-based alternatives could require between 300 and 1650 billion cubic metres of water (300-1650 trillion litres) each year, which is between 3 and 18% of the global average water footprint. Food crops could end up being used to produce plastic instead, risking food security. Once they have been grown, crops need more refining to reach the bio-based equivalent of crude oil, which requires energy, resulting in carbon emissions.
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But trying to compare the environmental impacts of bio-plastics with conventional ones is tricky, not least because fossil fuel-based plastics have a head start. “We’ve been making these things for so long at such scale that we’re really good at it,” says Walker. “In time it would shift and we’d see that with bioplastics, the emissions would reduce.” As countries around the world decarbonise their electricity supplies, the carbon emissions from producing bio-based plastics would decrease further.
However, making plastic from plants wouldn’t necessarily solve health problems stemming from the material. While research on the topic is scarce, it’s likely that similar additives to those used in conventional plastics would also be used in bio-based alternatives, Iacovidou says. This is because the properties the materials need are the same. “The fate of the additives is what concerns me the most,” she says. If bio-based plastics are mixed with food waste and composted, whatever is in the plastic enters our food system.
It’s clear that replacing one material with another won’t solve all our plastic problems.CARBON COUNTThe emissions from travel it took to report this story were 0kg CO2. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Find out more about how we calculated this figure here.There’s already a push to figure out which plastics are unnecessary, avoidable, and problematic, with several countries, including the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands region, aiming to phase these out. To go even further than that, we could decide to only use plastics that we really, truly need. In a recent book chapter, George describes a framework to help us figure out which plastics are vital. By considering whether the item fulfils an essential need – such as food, shelter, or medicine – and also whether reducing the amount of material, or replacing the plastic with something else, would affect its use, we can start to see which plastics we can and cannot live without.
But these essential plastics are context-specific and not set in stone. In some places, the only safe drinking water comes in plastic, for example. “That means we need to develop drinking water infrastructure there so that we don’t have to rely on packaged water, but right now that [plastic] is necessary,” says Jenna Jambeck, professor of environmental engineering at the University of Georgia.
Thinking through the whole life cycle of any new materials, including what we do with them when they no longer serve their purpose, would be essential. “We’ve kind of forgotten that recycling isn’t the gold standard of what we can do with stuff when we’re finished with it,” says Walker.
Along with colleagues at the University of Sheffield, he investigated the environmental impacts of disposable and reusable takeaway containers. They found that a durable plastic container would only need to be used between two and three times to be better, in terms of climate impact, than a single-use polypropylene one, even taking into account washing. Stainless steel containers reached the same break-even point after 13 uses – takeaways, thankfully, wouldn’t need to be a thing of the past in a plastic-free world.
The biggest shift we’d face, then, would be re-evaluating our throwaway culture. We’d need to change not just how we consume items – from clothes and food to washing machines and phones – but how we produce them too. “We’re too quick to buy something cheap and disposable, where we ought to be making things so they are compatible, and there’s more standardisation, so things can be swapped out and mended,” says George.
Without plastic, we might even have to change the way we talk about ourselves. “Consumer is inherently a single-use term,” says Walker. In a world where packaging is reused and repurposed, not thrown out, we might become citizens instead.
Perhaps we’d also discover that, for all the genuine good plastic has done, not all of the lifestyle changes it has enabled have been positive. If it’s plastic packaging that allows us to grab lunch to eat on the go, and plastic-heavy devices that mean we are always contactable, without it our schedules might need to be a little less frantic. “If that was all taken away, life would slow down,” says Jambeck. “Would that be such a bad thing?”
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While we know where the plastics came from, the origin of this particular tar wasn’t clear. But generally speaking, whenever oil spills, it floats around and partially evaporates, thickening over time into tar balls, which then wash ashore. It’s basically super-toxic Play-Doh. “Once it gets stuck to the rock, the wave brings microplastics or any litter and pushes it into this Play-Doh,” says Hernández-Borges. “Microplastics arrive constantly, constantly, constantly. The microplastics that we’re finding in the tar are the same ones that we’re finding on the coast.” These tiny bits add to the noxiousness of plastitar, because plastics are loaded with thousands of their own chemicals, many of which are known to be toxic to humans and other animals. These researchers can’t yet say what effect the plastitar might have on the organisms living on the beaches of the Canary Islands. But the problem could be twofold. “If there were algae or whatever, those rocks are completely covered by that, so they will die for sure,” says Hernández-Borges. Secondly, plastitar is darker than the rock, meaning it absorbs more of the sun’s energy. “If you touch it, you will see that it’s also very, very, very hot,” he says. That could significantly raise temperatures at ground level, with unknown implications for the organisms that live there. In a previous study on a remote island in the Pacific, a separate team of researchers found that plastic particles raised the temperature of beach sand. That could imperil sea turtles, whose sex is determined by the temperature of the sand the eggs are laid in—if it gets too hot, they’ll all turn out female, which is no good for the sexual reproduction of a species.The discovery of plastitar adds yet another layer of complexity to the problem of oceanic plastic pollution. For a long while, environmentalists were primarily concerned with the big stuff, like floating bottles and bags. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that scientists started investigating microplastics in earnest, subsequently finding that almost the entirety of Earth is tainted. The particles are blowing in the atmosphere and reaching the highest mountains. Up in the sky, they may be having a climate effect—although it’s not clear if they will ultimately help heat or cool the planet. People are eating and drinking loads of microplastics, and babies are drinking still more in their formula, but scientists are only beginning to investigate what that might mean for human health.Even more recently, researchers have been discovering “new plastic formations,” of which plastitar is only the latest. When plastic burns in beach campfires, for instance, it forms a gnarly matrix of polymer mixed with sand and other debris. “Plasticrust” forms in a similar way to plastitar, when waves smash plastic into coastal rocks, only without the involvement of tar. (High outdoor temperatures heat the rocks, which can help the synthetic material meld into them.) And scientists are beginning to investigate what they’re calling anthropoquina, or new sedimentary rock made of plastic and other human-made materials. “If someone in thousands of years finds one of these rocks, they will find probably plastic, and they will see how we lived,” says Hernández-Borges. “So that’s sort of a geological record.” And—because someone is going to think it—to be abundantly clear, we should not take inspiration from plastitar to rid the sea of microplastics. “I read this and went nooo,” says Allen. “Some idiot out there is going to go: Just put oil all over the top of the surface, and then clean it up. But no.”

Credit: MarkPiovesan/Getty Images

Plastic pollution is an escalating global problem. Australia now produces 2.5 million tonnes of plastic waste each year, while world-wide production is expected to double by 2040.

This pollution doesn’t just accumulate on our beaches: it can be found on land and other marine environments (heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?)

But according to a new study by Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, plastic pollution on Australia’s coasts has decreased by 29% since 2013.

The study, which assessed waste reduction efforts in Australia and their effect on coastal pollution, highlights that although Australia’s plastic use has remained constant since 2013, local governments are getting better at preventing and cleaning up pollution.

“Our research set out to identify the local government approaches that have been most effective in reducing coastal plastics and identify the underlying behaviours that can lead to the greatest reduction in plastic pollution,” says lead researcher Dr Kathryn Willis, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Tasmania.

“Whilst plastic pollution is still a global crisis and we still have a long way to go, this research shows that decisions made on the ground, at local management levels, are crucial for the successful reduction of coastal plastic pollution,” she adds.

The study has been published in One Earth.

Local government approaches work

The new research builds upon extensive 2013 CSIRO coastal litter surveys with 563 new surveys and interviews with waste managers across 32 local governments around Australia completed in 2019.

The results found that, although there was a decrease in the overall national average coastal pollution by 29%, some surveyed municipalities showed an increase in local litter by up to 93%, while others decreased by up to 73%.

Since global plastic pollution is driven by waste reduction strategies at a local level (regardless of where the pollution originates), researchers then focused on identifying which local government approaches had the greatest effect on these levels of coastal pollution.

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To do this they sorted local government waste management actions into three categories of human behaviour, including:

Planned behaviour – strategies like recycling guides, information and education programs, and voluntary clean-up initiatives.Crime prevention – waste management strategies like illegal dumping surveillance and beach cleaning by local governments.Economic – actions like kerb-side waste and recycling collection, hard waste collections and shopping bag bans.

Graphical abstract ofthe study. Credit: Willis et al (2022) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2022.05.008

They found that retaining and maintaining efforts in economic waste management strategies had the largest effect on reducing coastal litter.

“For example, household collection services, where there are multiple waste and recycling streams, makes it easier for community members to separate and discard their waste appropriately,” says co-author Dr Denise Hardesty, a principal research scientist at CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere.

“Our research showed that increases in waste levies had the second largest effect on decreases in coastal plastic pollution. Local governments are moving away from a collect and dump mindset to a sort and improve approach,” adds Hardesty.

Clean-up activities, such as Clean Up Australia Day, and surveillance programs that directly involved members of the community were also effective.

“Increasing community stewardship of the local environment and beaches has huge benefits. Not only does our coastline become cleaner, but people are more inclined to look out for bad behaviour, even using dumping hotlines to report illegal polluting activity,” says Hardesty.

Another piece of the solution to our plastics problem

This isn’t the be-all and end-all solution to Australia’s plastics problem – let alone globally – but this research does provide decision-makers with empirical evidence that the choices made by municipal waste managers and policymakers are linked to reductions in plastic pollution in the environment.

Identifying the most effective approaches for reducing coastal litter is an important part of future plastic pollution reduction strategies. The CSIRO’s Ending Plastic Waste Mission is aiming for an 80% reduction in plastic waste entering the Australian environment by 2030.

“While we still have a long way to go, and the technical challenges are enormous, these early results show that when we each play to our individual strengths, from community groups, industry, government and research organisations, and we take the field as Team Australia, then we can win,” says Dr Larry Marshall, chief executive of CSIRO.

Carpet is made mostly of plastic fibers derived from oil and accounts for about 1 percent of the U.S. waste stream, according to the EPA. The vast majority ends up in landfills or gets burned for energy. | Edwin Remsberg/Getty Images

A national nonprofit that runs state programs designed to promote recycling of used carpet is trying to prevent more of them from forming.
The industry-run group Carpet America Recovery Effort kicked two members off of its board earlier this spring for supporting New York and Illinois bills that would create recycling programs similar to California’s, which it helps run. The state proposals would put a tax on new carpets and distribute the proceeds to collection and recycling companies to turn discarded material into other marketable products.

Carpet recycling companies like the programs because they make recycling economic, but manufacturers argue that the extra fees — about 35 cents per yard in California — make their products less competitive with other types of flooring.

The episode illustrates the tensions that emerge when an industry group regulates itself. How large a role industry should play relative to regulators has been a sticking point as states try to enact extended producer responsibility laws for carpets, packaging and other products.
“CARE can’t come to terms with its own contradictions,” said Franco Rossi, president of Aquafil USA Inc., which recovers nylon from old carpets. Rossi was booted from CARE’s board in late April, along with the president of another recycling company. “The carpet industry runs the stewardship program in California because they have to, but they don’t want it anywhere else because they think it will hurt carpet sales.”
After recyclers advocated for the New York and Illinois bills, CARE leadership said they had violated the group’s conflict of interest policy. The group’s executive director, Bob Peoples, said in an email that states are best served by market-based solutions, “not by mandating unrealistic and arbitrary targets.”
Recycling supporters say the dust-up points to the need for more accountability and enforcement mechanisms in legislation that gives industry control over recycling.
“This is not just about carpet. When industries control recycling programs, and there aren’t enough guardrails, things can go very wrong,” said Heidi Sanborn, executive director of the National Stewardship Action Council, which advocates for legislation to require manufacturers to take responsibility for their products’ full lifecycles.
CARE was set up in 2002 as part of a partnership with the EPA, states and environmental groups. Its memorandum of understanding expired in 2012 and wasn’t renewed. The group also runs a voluntary, nationwide recycling program that includes a directory of collectors, recyclers and guidelines that it says have helped divert more than 5 billion pounds of carpet from landfills. But it stopped giving out industry-funded incentives in 2020, and recyclers say it’s not very active.
“For more than a decade, CARE has pretended they’re going to find a market-based solution,” said Louis Renbaum, president of DC Foam Recycle Inc., the other board member who was terminated. “But we’re dealing with a low-value product that has little chance of being recycled without subsidies.”
Carpet is made mostly of plastic fibers derived from oil and accounts for about 1 percent of the U.S. waste stream, according to the EPA. The vast majority ends up in landfills or gets burned for energy.
In California, carpet recycling rates are about 28 percent — far above the national average of 9 percent in 2018, the latest figure available. But the program’s performance has been uneven, with CARE paying more than $1 million in penalties for failing to improve rates from 2013-16. It again failed to meet its target of 24 percent in 2020.
CARE also required companies that accepted its incentives to refrain from supporting legislation that would require manufacturers to manage products’ lifecycles. Recipients of recycling funding had to attest that they would support “voluntary market-driven solutions” and not “legislation or regulations” creating extended producer responsibility requirements for 18 months after receiving funding, according to a copy of an agreement reviewed by POLITICO.
California regulators said they were worried about the group’s stance and what it means for carpet recycling. “I am very concerned about CARE’s ability to operate as a product stewardship organization if their main tenet is opposing EPR,” said Rachel Machi Wagoner, director of CalRecycle, the state’s waste management agency. “I don’t know what politics are happening within the organization, in terms of picking winners and losers, but their job is to build a circular system for carpet recycling.”
The carpet industry is also lobbying against the bills. The Carpet and Rug Institute, which has an overlapping membership with CARE, urged Illinois lawmakers to oppose the carpet-recycling proposal, arguing that it was “modeled on a problematic California program” and would create “an entirely new state bureaucracy.” CRI also pointed to CARE’s voluntary program as an alternative, arguing that it diverts carpets from landfills “without any additional taxation of consumers.”
CRI President Joe Yarbrough, who also serves on CARE’s board, said mandatory carpet stewardship legislation leads to a “death spiral”: The cost of carpet increases, which in turn slows sales, reducing how much carpet is ripped out of homes and commercial buildings to be recycled.
The Illinois bill failed to advance, but the New York bill has passed both houses; Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) could sign it later this year.

Car tyres produce vastly more particle pollution than exhausts, tests showToxic particles from tyre wear almost 2,000 times worse than from exhausts as weight of cars increases Almost 2,000 times more particle pollution is produced by tyre wear than is pumped out of the exhausts of modern cars, tests have shown.The tyre particles pollute air, water and soil and contain a wide range of toxic organic compounds, including known carcinogens, the analysts say, suggesting tyre pollution could rapidly become a major issue for regulators.Air pollution causes millions of early deaths a year globally. The requirement for better filters has meant particle emissions from tailpipes in developed countries are now much lower in new cars, with those in Europe far below the legal limit. However, the increasing weight of cars means more particles are being thrown off by tyres as they wear on the road.The tests also revealed that tyres produce more than 1tn ultrafine particles for each kilometre driven, meaning particles smaller than 23 nanometres. These are also emitted from exhausts and are of special concern to health, as their size means they can enter organs via the bloodstream. Particles below 23nm are hard to measure and are not currently regulated in either the EU or US.“Tyres are rapidly eclipsing the tailpipe as a major source of emissions from vehicles,” said Nick Molden, at Emissions Analytics, the leading independent emissions testing company that did the research. “Tailpipes are now so clean for pollutants that, if you were starting out afresh, you wouldn’t even bother regulating them.”Tyres produce far more particles than exhausts in modern carsMolden said an initial estimate of tyre particle emissions prompted the new work. “We came to a bewildering amount of material being released into the environment – 300,000 tonnes of tyre rubber in the UK and US, just from cars and vans every year.”There are currently no regulations on the wear rate of tyres and little regulation on the chemicals they contain. Emissions Analytics has now determined the chemicals present in 250 different types of tyres, which are usually made from synthetic rubber, derived from crude oil. “There are hundreds and hundreds of chemicals, many of which are carcinogenic,” Molden said. “When you multiply it by the total wear rates, you get to some very staggering figures as to what’s being released.”The wear rate of different tyre brands varied substantially and the toxic chemical content varied even more, he said, showing low-cost changes were feasible to cut their environmental impact.“You could do a lot by eliminating the most toxic tyres,” he said. “It’s not about stopping people driving, or having to invent completely different new tyres. If you could eliminate the worst half, and maybe bring them in line with the best in class, you can make a massive difference. But at the moment, there’s no regulatory tool, there’s no surveillance.” The tests of tyre wear were done on 14 different brands using a Mercedes C-Class driven normally on the road, with some tested over their full lifetime. High-precision scales measured the weight lost by the tyres and a sampling system that collects particles behind the tyres while driving assessed the mass, number and size of particles, down to 6nm. The real-world exhaust emissions were measured across four petrol SUVs, the most popular new cars today, using models from 2019 and 2020.Used tyres produced 36 milligrams of particles each kilometre, 1,850 times higher than the 0.02 mg/km average from the exhausts. A very aggressive – though legal – driving style sent particle emissions soaring, to 5,760 mg/km.Far more small particles are produced by the tyres than large ones. This means that while the vast majority of the particles by number are small enough to become airborne and contribute to air pollution, these represent only 11% of the particles by weight. Nonetheless, tyres still produce hundreds of times more airborne particles by weight than the exhausts.Sign up to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every weekday morning at 7am BSTThe average weight of all cars has been increasing. But there has been particular debate over whether battery electric vehicles (BEVs), which are heavier than conventional cars and can have greater wheel torque, may lead to more tyre particles being produced. Molden said it would depend on driving style, with gentle EV drivers producing fewer particles than fossil-fuelled cars driven badly, though on average he expected slightly higher tyre particles from BEVs.Dr James Tate, at the University of Leeds’ Institute for Transport Studies in the UK, said the tyre test results were credible. “But it is very important to note that BEVs are becoming lighter very fast,” he said. “By 2024-25 we expect BEVs and [fossil-fuelled] city cars will have comparable weights. Only high-end, large BEVs with high capacity batteries will weigh more.”Other recent research has suggested tyre particles are a major source of the microplastics polluting the oceans. A specific chemical used in tyres has been linked to salmon deaths in the US and California proposed a ban this month.“The US is more advanced in their thinking about [the impacts of tyre particles],” said Molden. “The European Union is behind the curve. Overall, it’s early days, but this could be a big issue.”TopicsPollutionRoad transportPlasticsAir pollutionMotoringnewsReuse this content