Chemical fingerprint for environmental detection of tire rubber emissions
Over 2.3 billion tires are produced globally per year, with an ever-increasing complexity of chemical additives to optimize safety and performance. Greater understanding of the chemicals and polymer degradation products allows the environmental impact of tires to be better understood. This presentation shows an untargeted pyrolysis GC-MS method to analyze tire rubber for environmentally important chemicals to develop a comprehensive tire chemical source profile – 340 tires from light, medium and heavy-duty tires from Europe. The tire antioxidant 6PPD is the only chemical detected in every tire, and the presentation will show how a single chemical tracer for tire wear is insufficient.