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Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by moffkalast on Sunday April 09, 2023 @07:33AM (#35501745)
Ah yes let's avoid the real issue of car tyres producing 2000x the particle pollution per distance travelled compared to already insanely filtered exhaust and distract ourselves with tiny improvements that make no difference.

ICE emissions will be irrelevant in 10 years when they're all but banned anyway, and rubber tyres will still be the only way to drive on the road. In fact it'll be way worse with the average EV being heavier and emitting more due to more tyre wear.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by Neil44 on Sunday April 09, 2023 @07:41AM (#35501791)
It’s hard to really quantify how big of an issue this is in my head, I mean a set of tyres will do 20,000+ miles and only loose a small percentage of their mass while doing so. How much damage is really being done? How much scope for improvement is there?
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by marginalia_nu on Sunday April 09, 2023 @07:54AM (#35501872)
Depends on the sort of tires.

For examples, studded snow tires can tear up the road surface quite significantly, tend to kick up a lot of sharp fine dust. It's such a big problem they're often banned parts of the year in some regions where they're typically used.

Here's some science: https://www.ivl.se/download/18.1ee76657178f8586dfc89b/161951...

It seems to largely suggest that GP is correct (see the figure in 5.3.8 for example), with the caveat that this is mainly a problem in colder regions of the world.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by chongli on Sunday April 09, 2023 @08:19AM (#35502036)
The road itself gets torn to pieces as well. Furthermore, tire and road wear scales with the 4th power of the vehicle mass. Heavy trucks and buses cause far more damage than cars. But all that damage leaves dust all over the road which cars will scatter all over the place.

Lastly, as pointed out above, EVs weigh a lot more, so the damage they cause will go up a lot, thanks to that 4th power scaling.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by ChuckNorris89 on Sunday April 09, 2023 @07:47AM (#35501833)
>ICE emissions will be irrelevant in 10 years when they're all but banned anyway

Dream on. Germany and EU had to pull back from the ICE ban of 2035. Banning ICE by then is unrealistic considering the way things work right now. The frog needs to be boiled slowly.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by sandworm101 on Sunday April 09, 2023 @08:21AM (#35502053)
There are many steps that can be taken. At the moment, car designs make absolutely no effort to minimize tire particulates. I could see some basic airflow changes, along with rough filters, that could vastly reduce rubber particulates.

And the real issue isnt even the rubber but all the random chemical additives in that rubber. Some basic study and perhaps modification could also reduce impacts.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by yyyk on Sunday April 09, 2023 @12:25PM (#35504169)
"basic airflow changes" "basic study". You seem to assume it's easy, but give no particulars.
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by alex_duf on Sunday April 09, 2023 @09:48AM (#35502695)
I'm hearing both arguments from pretty reasonable people and I can't seem to make up my mind on this issue.

Some are saying: yes it's a massive issue, and some are saying nah it's not, I can't seem to find a consistent view on this issue.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by 6510 on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:52AM (#35503878)
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by totalZero on Sunday April 09, 2023 @10:30AM (#35503040)
I'm willing to bet that the additional mass of EVs has a marginal effect compared to the environmental impact of ICE fuel shipment and delivery.
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by ip26 on Sunday April 09, 2023 @10:57AM (#35503332)
Are the two issues directly comparable? Tire particles settle near the road, going into the soil or washing into waterways for us to drink. Exhaust particles stay suspended in the air for a long time & blow far and wide for us to breathe. Both matter, both impact health, but we can't fix bad air quality by fixing tires.
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by jeffbee on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:55AM (#35503909)
Why do you believe this? It doesn't make any physical sense. Tire and resuspended road dust are in the 1-10µm range and they can fly as high and as far and for as long as a same-sized particle from exhaust.
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by ip26 on Sunday April 09, 2023 @12:23PM (#35504146)
1-10µm is a size, not a mass or chemical property. Maybe tire PM2.5 stays aloft the same amount of time as smoke PM2.5, but I don't see why that is a given.

The press on the subject also annoyingly sidesteps a direct comparison. For example, you can read that tires product 2000x the particle emissions as tailpipes, and lots of ultrafines. Notice that statement does not tell you anything about the relative difference in ultrafine production.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by jeffbee on Sunday April 09, 2023 @12:38PM (#35504282)
The media coverage on this is terrible but that is because the media is staffed full of people who did not study hard sciences. There's nothing wrong with the research on this topic and there is tons of it.
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by amluto on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:05AM (#35503407)
Modern environmental regulation seems to be comical in the degree to which it focuses on the wrong things. Here’s actual data (no comment on quality):

https://www.baaqmd.gov/~/media/files/planning-and-research/p...

So vehicle exhaust is 5% of fine particulate matter in the Bay Area, whereas road dust, tire, and brake emissions are 20%. (Where’s the breakdown between brake dust and tire dust? EVs and even hybrids can substantially reduce brake dust. Heck, an eddy current brake could too, if anyone cared to build one. Might be bad for unsprung weight.)

And commercial cooking is 8%, it I suspect this massively understates the problem, since commercial cooking can easily concentrate its emissions right where large numbers of people are walking around.

But here’s the hilarious commercial cooking regulation:

https://www.baaqmd.gov/~/media/dotgov/files/rules/reg-6-rule...

Read the second paragraph: it applies only to charbroilers and only in restaurants that buy 500 or 1000 lbs of beef per week. That fancy Greek restaurant that smokes up three square blocks of a fancy downtown, but it’s all lamb and fish? No emission controls. That little neighborhood place making tasty bento boxes with pork, and probably less than 500lbs anyway? No emission controls. That portable smoked turkey place at lots of county fairs? (Those are IMO horrible to be around.). No regulation.

And let’s not even mention the single biggest source: residential wood combustion at 12%. It’s politically hard to address, but residential wood combustion serves almost no economic purpose and could come very close to stopping without harming people or the economy. Almost everyone already has a perfectly fine non-wood-fired heater, and a narrow exception would be fine.

And yet BAAQMD is willing to ban the sales of gas fired water heaters in a few years, never mind all the existing buildings with tankless heaters in a place where a heat pump retrofit is impractical. And also never mind that we already have gas fired water heaters with quite low NOx emissions and essentially zero particulate emissions.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by generalizations on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:37AM (#35503736)
> residential wood combustion serves almost no economic purpose

It’s a lot cheaper than the alternatives. And a lot more resilient in areas with unreliable power.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by flakeoil on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:57AM (#35503930)
> It’s a lot cheaper than the alternatives.

Really? The efficiency is very low heating a house with wood unless you use it to warm water which is distributing the heat to radiators (and for heating warm water to the showers). Almost no-one who burns wood has this, people just have a chimney in the living room.

And how do you feed the wood into the burner? Waste 10 minutes every hour, 24/7?

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by hansvm on Sunday April 09, 2023 @12:42PM (#35504306)
All it costs is your time, and not much of that since it replaces some of the time you'd otherwise spend exercising. 30hr/yr to break down a recently downed tree into firewood, 5min/day to clear out ashes and bring in new wood for the stove, and 1 min every 6hr to shove some new wood in the stove. You have gas as a more expensive fallback to keep things from freezing if you get lazy or are gone for awhile, and especially if a good job in the area pays $10/hr it's a no-brainer for most of the population to use wood heat. The stove pays for itself in less than a winter in gas savings.
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by grecy on Sunday April 09, 2023 @12:06PM (#35504002)
I live in the North where -40 is common. I would say the vast majority of people have a wood stove, and they work exceedingly well.

You might not be aware but ones that burn the wood twice (even three times) are now common and in fact are law in many places. So they're MUCH more efficient, and drastically reduce the particulates coming out the stove pipe. Another benefit is they only need to be fed once every 24-48 hours (depending on what heat you set the thermostat, what size stove you have, how well insulated your house is and what temperature it is outside.)

Wood stoves are a necessity.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by amluto on Sunday April 09, 2023 @03:02PM (#35505444)
I don’t have actual data, but I strongly suspect that emissions from actual well-designed wood stoves are negligible. The problem is wood-burning fireplaces, which are a whole different animal. If you want to heat your house with a high quality wood-fired heater, be my guest.

Nothing good will come of trying to heat your house with a wood-burning fireplace. They’re pretty, they’re fun, they crackle nicely, they combust wood very poorly, and they send almost all the heat right out the chimney. And, if they work correctly, lots of air comes out the chimney for the ride (keeping the combustion products out of the house), so a lot of makeup air comes in from outside, cooling your house.

If you want to heat your house by burning something, you want to capture as much of the heat of combustion as practical (preferably the higher heating value, which condensing boilers and furnaces can do, but the lower heating value is a good start), and you want to minimize the degree to which operating the heater forces you to replace conditioned air in the house with unconditioned outside air. A fireplace fails at this.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by fooblaster on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:29AM (#35503645)
I think it might be fair to point out that particulate emissions from vehicle exhaust is likely low because of the regulation, not that they were regulating the wrong thing.

On an unrelated note, how did they come up with these numbers for percentage contribution? It seems quite difficult to attribute cause outside of a controlled laboratory setting.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by coredog64 on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:47AM (#35503830)
Agreed, but the point here is that there are diminishing returns. Absolutely keep an eye on it, but now lets move on to the next thing that we can move the needle on.
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by amluto on Sunday April 09, 2023 @03:05PM (#35505479)
Or pay attention to exhaust from the remaining highly polluting sources. For example, two-stroke gardening equipment (and bad four-stroke equipment), some trucks (where are the AI-powered freeway cameras detecting gross polluters), motorcycles, etc.
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by Why_O_My on Sunday April 09, 2023 @12:18PM (#35504098)
Here in the Netherlands I'm starting to smell and hear about lots of people warming their houses by burning wood since the natural gas prices have skyrocketed. Personally I'm not too fond of the idea of breathing in more fine particulate. But trying to ban wood fire heating would be political suicide.
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by moffkalast on Monday April 10, 2023 @07:46AM (#35511236)
In the city I live in it's borderline impossible to go outside during late hours in winter because you get literally gassed with smog from the various shit people burn for heating, it's absolutely unreal.
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by WirelessGigabit on Sunday April 09, 2023 @08:52PM (#35508004)
Nothing about leaf-blowers. The amount of pollution they produce is insane. Both directly by their exhaust, and secondary because they kick up a LOT of dust.
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by hokkos on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:09AM (#35503452)
2000x by mass maybe, but not airborne particules, so this number is irrelevant to the discussion of clean air
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by fooblaster on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:21AM (#35503571)
Can you post some literature on this, as it just doesn't pass the smell test for me? At the rate I drove my old car I would have burned 1200 gallons of fuel before changing the tires on the vehicle. I find the gap here pretty hard to overcome.

Alternately, is the issue about road wear particulate as a result of tire contact? That seems more plausible to me.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by 6510 on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:43AM (#35503789)
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by seattle_spring on Sunday April 09, 2023 @12:07PM (#35504019)
Just curious, why are you, jeffbee, and several other commenters being so hostile here to anyone who asks any questions?
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by 6510 on Sunday April 09, 2023 @12:31PM (#35504216)
No hostility intended.
Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by xiphias2 on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:42AM (#35503783)
This is the most stupid thing I have read, and it makes me angry, becuase it's just the anti-electric car movement. As a person heavily affected with asthma, I get very sick whenever ICE vehicles are going nearbly, or somebody smokes a cigarette, or starts burning their furniture. I never felt sick from car tyres of electric cars.

Maybe the people who are not affected shouldn't try to guess, when many of as as we are getting older feel the difference and it affects our life.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by jeffbee on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:53AM (#35503892)
Nice anecdata, bro.

"... researchers have generally found that exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is associated with the development of asthma and other respiratory and cardiovascular diseases."

"Under a modest assumption of electric vehicle uptake in which 4% of vehicles are electric by 2030, total non-exhaust emissions from passenger traffic are expected to rise by 53.5%. Assuming a doubling of electric vehicle uptake still leads to a 52.4% increase in non-exhaust emissions over this period."

Maybe google it or something.

Re:Car exhaust filters fail to clean up ‘ultrafine’ air poll... by ZeroGravitas on Sunday April 09, 2023 @03:28PM (#35505652)
EVs are not necessarily heavier than equivalent ICE cars. They are supposed to become lighter at roughly the same time they become cheaper up front, 2024-25.

But, I'm all for taxing cars for their externalities so I welcome these ridiculous anti-EV talking points. We might end up with clean EVs that are taxed by weight which is a double win.