If car tyres wear out then why aren't there piles of rubber at the side of the road?

Answer 1

Because the rubber that wears off the tyre is in such small amounts at a time, that it becomes as small as dust and can't be seen. It blows around in the wind and becomes part of pollution

Answer 2

There ARE piles of rubber alongside the road! They just aren't very big! (And it is spelled "tires" by the way.) Think of the tire as a ribbon wound around and around that is 50,000 miles long. On the tire, the thickness is maybe half an inch. As the tire rolls over the ground, it leaves rubber particles behind (unwinding the ribbon), which to you and me, is exactly the stuff we call dust. The ribbon is only a few molecules thick. It blows away and ends up ar part of the dirt and debris alongside the roadways. Try an experiment. Take a piece of shelf paper and tack it to the ground alongside a major highway, sticky side up, and leave it sit for a month. At the end of the month, you will find the sticky side has caught a huge amount of black colored stuff, dust, most of which is rubber from tires.

Answer 3

Weather effects such as rain and wind disperse the worn rubber before it can accumulate. The amount of wind created simply by the passage of vehicles is sufficient to spread it around.

Consider a truck carrying an uncovered pile of sand. The sand that is blown out of the truck does not stay where it lands on the road since the air turbulence of the truck motion creates swirling winds behind it.

For vehicle tires, most of them are rated at 40,000 - 60,000 miles before they wear out. A worn-out tire has only lost about 1/2" of rubber around the outside to pile up on the road. The rest is discarded as a junk tire for recycling. At 15,000 miles/year it typically takes 3-5 years for the tire to wear out. All of those miles are never concentrated in a particular stretch of road. The wear is also very slight unless the vehicle is braking, accelerating or turning. Most driving hardly wears the tires at all.

Aircraft tires actually DO leave substantial amounts of rubber on the runway. It's quite visible at both ends of the runway. The tires themselves are quite soft by comparison to vehicle tires. When the tires are in use on the runway they are either accelerating (standing still to full rotation for a 200 mph plane at touchdown) or braking (100 mph to taxi velocity). Then they must turn to approach or depart from the gate. Most of the time the plane is fully loaded with cargo or people and fuel. The same runways are fairly short (2-3 miles) compared to most roads. At an airport, they are the ONLY surfaces used by the planes, so accumulation does occur during the many landings and departures each day.

Answer 4

The rubber wears off gradually and small particles are dispersed into the atmosphere with some left on the road surface but not enough to form visible piles.

Answer 5

The rubber wears off in tiny debris. maximum of those are washed off with the help of rain or blown away with the help of the wind. some stick in case you seem heavily at a concrete street, you will see that that there are 2 tracks that are darker than some thing else of the line. this received't take position on a darker substance like asphalt. each from time to time, you'll see lengthy strips of rubber, the position finished treads were thrown off. Truckers call those "Gators". once you've a puncture in a metallic belted tire with a lot of tread lefyt, you need to continually have it repaired with a patch from the interior, as a plug from the exterior will enable water to rust gthe metallic belt, whiuch will finally rust and swell up, causing the trad to peel off. that is amazingly risky, fantastically with a severe middle of gravity motor vehicle like an SUV or a pickup.

Answer 6

The rubber is removed on a tiny scale with each rotation of the wheel, you cannot see it, because the pieces which wear off are too small for the naked eye to observe.

As with all small particulate matter, the weather moves it until it finds some resting spot and merges with all the detritus of life, eventually becoming new layers of the earths surface.

It also ends up in your lungs!

Answer 7

It wears off the tyres as a rubbery dust which then gets washed into the drainage systems whenever it rains. That's why the roads are so slippery when they first get damp after a warm dry spell of weather. It's almost like driving on black ice.

Answer 8

They do but the rubber is spread out over the distance you are driving constantly wearing away.

Answer 9

there will not be chunks of rubber because when u say the tyres have worn out it means tha the tyre grips is over or the tyre has over heated and has become useless

Answer 10

They form part of the dust in the road. This is cleaned partly by the maintenance people and partly by the wind and the rain.