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Your car’s tires are swirling donuts of pollution
washingtonpost.com
In fact, wear and tear on tires and brakes have been shown to produce increasingly more particle pollution, by mass, than car exhaust systems did in several real-world and test scenarios. Some of the particles are large enough to see with our eyes. Others are fine particles (known as PM 2.5, with diameters up to 2.5 microns) and ultrafine particles (known as PM 0.1, with diameters of 100 nanometers), which can enter through our bloodstream and harm our organs.
I always wondered about this when I was a kid as soon as I learned that tires wear down. Where does the material go? If we can’t see it, is it small and do we breathe it in?
Turns out: yup.