this is doing my head in
you know the old question, "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" which is hard to debate and also NOT to be debated here...
and you know the old question "why do you never see baby pigeons?" which is another great one, cos you never do.....
well Zak's being troubled by this.
Where is all the rubber from our tyres?
Seriously......each car has 4 tyres, and on average the car's gonna need at least 2 tyres by 20,000 miles.....(and lets NOT get involved in debate on how long tyres last)
Last year 2.4 million new cars were registered in the UK
Year before was just under that....2.1 mill....year before about 1.9 million
average tyre is 18.5 cm wide....the average tyre is on a 14 inch rim.....its rolling circumferance is 185 cm round (I measured a few)
Each new tyre tread is about 7 mm deep (so 0.7cm).....about half the tyre tread is gaps, the other half is rubber...you're supposed to get rid of them at about 2 mm....thats 5 mm used (0.5cm)
185cmx18.5x0.5 and then halved for the gaps in the tread =855 cubic cm of rubber.
2 per car.....2x855=1711 cubic centimetres per car
Lets say it takes 3 years to use the tyres....
2,300,000 (2003) + 2,100,000 + lets say...1,900,000 cars (thats three years worth) = 6.3 million cars
These are BIG numbers guys....
we are talking about the fact that we should be struggling through ankly deep rubber on the roads...
where the HELL has it all gone? Some must BURN off.....literally...and some must go down the drains, and clogg up the sewage systems...
but if there are 10 MILLION cars and ever three years each one needs 2 tyres cos its dropped 1.7 litres (volume) of rubber down.....
thats 17 MILLION LITRES OF TYRE RUBBER.....
WHERE IS IT ALL?