Rubber off worn tyres?????

Can any one tell me where the rubber that wears off tyres ends up? There should be a fair bit of it laying around??
Jim

Same place as all the dead skin that comes off human beings I guess :confused:

Into the soil mix on the roadside one would expect :confused:

It dissapates into the air at the summernats!

Gets washed into our drains and then into the sea - just another reason why our fisheries are all stuffed (see, it's not all the fault of the netters).

Storm water really needs to be cleaned up on the way out, it's a huge pollutant ... but you didn't hear that from me. Here in Adelaide, we've had a lot of success with wetlands being used to filter the water. Should be more of it, but that'd be the govt spending money on something that actually does something rather than just sounding sexy (which is all commercial television cares about).

Richard
dammit, my greenie tendancies are showing again :cool:

Crikey wasn't I showing my "stix" heritage off, didn't even consider curb & gutter(city & town) type roads :o

Rubber is biodegradable. It comes from latex from the sap of a tree & will eventually break down.

Jim,
the rubber that wears off tyres, as well as any oils and fuel that drips onto the road is trapped in the pores of the bitumen. Then, when you get the first bit of rain it all floats up and forms a slick coating on the bitumen. This is why there's always a swag of accidents the first time it rains after there's been a long dry spell. No doubt both you and Cliff have noticed that there's usually a few cars off the side of the range and off the roundabouts on the Cook highway after the first rains.

Mick

it all goes into another dimension, same place socks and workshop pencils go

I heard Dr. Karl talk about this exact subject last year on triple J, they (scientists) aren't sure where all the rubber goes, although it's believed that because the rubber particles are so small that they break down pretty quickly from the sunlight, similar to how plastic breaks down from UV rays I guess.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by womble

I heard Dr. Karl talk about this exact subject last year on triple J

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Dr. Karl was talking about this topic a few years ago, the conclusion was it's just blown away and broken down.

In it's diluted form, it's used to dye navel lint that lovely blue colour.

Of course the "navel" of which I refer is not the "Naval" which to which I would have referred if I was to try to weave a gratuitous pirate reference into a thread on tyre wear.

Real Pirates don't touch rubber.

Arrrrrr,
P
:D :D :D

I've worked in a couple of warehouses that had unsealed concrete floors- very hard on fork tyres. If there's no breeze to blow it away, I can assure you it ends up on everything. You, um, scurvy dogs, you.

Regards,
Rusty.

I've heard that said waste rubber is collected by a trained team of small Chinese labourers, brought into the country through some free-trade agreement. These rubber raiders operate throughout the country under the cover of darkness (so as not to alarm the honest tax-payer/voter), armed with cap-lamp and dustpan, placing the valuable but pirated resource into special pouches. It is then collected by a network of vans which transfer the booty to a central but undisclosed shipping terminal, and onwards to China. The rubber dust is then reprocessed and made into cheap, nasty v-belts, tubes and tyres, which of course us Aussies (as part of the free-trade agreement) buy back attached to machinery and vehicles etc. Much like our scrap metal trade really.

So now you know something Dr. Carl doesn't:D

They put it in KFC chicken nuggets.