My question that no one has ever given me a satisfactory answer for is this. If a tire leaves a very very thin film of rubber with each revolution of the tire, where does all the rubber dust go?
The shoulder lanes of freeways and highways etc. should have 6 foot drifts of the stuff. Yet there is none. So,again, where does it all go?
The tire particles they’re talking about are super-tiny, like flour particles, far too small to settle out and pile up as you describe. They disperse almost immediately into the air and are blown far and wide, hence the warning about inhalation. That said, the same can probably be said for the asphalt or concrete on the road, the paint in the road striping, and all the brake dust being generated constantly. Roads are not very clean places.
Good question.
I don’t know.
Maybe the particles are bio-degradable and eaten by microbes.
Tire-wear yields particles too small to even be called dust. You ever feel inside a bag of concrete? These are dry particles but it feels like you have your hand in a liquid. This is what we’re dealing with here. The smaller-than-dust tire residue gets blown around by winds or washed off and away or to settle in with the ditch soil.
If it were possible to have an auto race track or a freeway with no wind blowing about (it’s not), tire-wear residue would eventually coat everything.