I have to replace my tires every 60 000-100 000 KM as the tires wear down and the rubber comes off as I drive. If this is happening with all cars, why arnt the roads coated in rubber? Is somebody cleaning the tire rubber off the road? Is it getting washed away from the rain and into drains/the ocean? How long does it take for rubber to degrade that has come off the tire?
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You need to basically melt rubber to get it to stick to the road- which is why you see it at race tracks, but relatively few tyre marks on the road. Normal wear and tear doesn’t do it at all, wheelspin and slides and locked wheels do it and most people do very little or none of that.
For the most part, your tyres just wear into very fine dust and then wash and blow away (with all the obvious environmental issues that brings with it, you breathe a lot of tyre in your life even if you don’t present Roadkill). Modern tyres are made out of a bunch of different ingredients and it breaks up a little as it wears so there’ll be carbon black (soot, basically), silica, etc as well as the base rubbers.
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