Most people think of plastic bags, straws and disposable cups when they hear about plastic pollution. Meanwhile, every car — even the electric one — is driving over the asphalt as an invisible plastic factory. According to estimates by institutes such as RIVM and TNO, wearing car tyres are by now the largest source of microplastics in our environment, accounting for many thousands of tonnes per year in the Netherlands alone. These particles end up in the air being breathed, in the ditches and rivers along roads, and eventually in the sea and food chains.

Yet government campaigns primarily direct the public to the petrol station to check tyre pressure. "Give your tyres air", they say, with the emphasis on fuel saving and road safety. Useful, but it is as if with cigarettes the main talking point were smoking outside so the curtains smell less. The core of the problem remains untouched: the product itself. The tyre as it is currently common — a disposable product with a lifespan of roughly 40,000-50,000 kilometres — belongs to a previous century.

Anyone who lines up the figures will find it hard to maintain that this is a fringe phenomenon. An estimated 19,000 tonnes of microplastics per year are released by tyre wear; almost two thirds of that reaches soil and water. The particles are so small that they are invisible, but they are measurable everywhere: in verge sludge, in water drainage along motorways, and in the surroundings of cities. Unlike litter, no simple clean-up is possible with grippers and rubbish bags. Once worn down and blown away, it is practically no longer retrievable.

It is not neutral plastic

On top of that, these wear particles are not neutral plastic. They carry a cocktail of additives with them: substances that keep the rubber flexible, slow ageing and protect the tyre against UV and ozone. It is precisely those substances that allow tyres to withstand the extreme forces and temperature fluctuations of the road surface. But as soon as they end up as fine dust in air and water, they become potentially toxic mixtures for humans and nature. Researchers warn that such mixtures can disrupt the development of fish and that long-term exposure in humans can contribute to health problems.

In neighbourhoods close to busy motorways, public health services have long observed that children on average score worse on lung function and sometimes on cognitive tests than peers in quieter areas. The role of traffic-related particulate matter — from exhaust fumes, brakes and tyres — is evident, even if the exact distribution per source is complex. So something is happening here that would no longer be socially accepted with tobacco: a product known to continuously emit harmful particles remains out of reach as long as the user "sticks to the rules".

The gaps in REACH

The European Union meanwhile has REACH, one of the strictest chemicals regulations in the world. Under that umbrella, dangerous substances are being restricted or banned step by step, and recently additional rules have come in to push deliberately added microplastics — such as scrub grains and glitters — out of the market. That is good news for showers and make-up, but with tyres this approach only works indirectly. Here it is not about plastic particles deliberately added to a product in a factory, but about particles that arise through use: through braking, accelerating and driving through bends.

In practice, REACH currently forces producers mainly to replace certain additives with less dangerous alternatives. That costs time and money, and the first generations of new mixtures rarely achieve the same performance as the old ones straight away. The temptation is great to focus on compliance: just safe enough to meet the rules, without substantially extending lifespan or drastically reducing wear per kilometre. As long as there is no norm for microplastic emissions per kilometre, and no minimum lifespan is enforced, a tyre can be chemically cleaner on paper, but last less long in practice and bring more mass into the environment.

Producer responsibility is also narrowly defined. For car tyres there already exists a system in which producers and importers must contribute to the collection and recycling of discarded tyres. The old tyre as a visible waste product is thereby covered. But the tonnes of wear microplastics released over the entire lifespan fall outside these calculation models. The costs of that — in water treatment, nature recovery and health — land with society, not with the manufacturer or seller. The incentive to make a tyre that lasts longer and wears less is therefore minimal.

The tobacco industry as a mirror

Anyone recognising this pattern quickly thinks of the strategies of the tobacco industry. There too, marginal measures were emphasised for decades: filters, ventilation and smoking rooms. The individual smoker got the message: smoke consciously, smoke less, smoke outside. With tyres a comparable reflex is now visible: campaigns about tyre pressure, infrastructure measures along motorways, and perhaps an extra label here and there. But the tyre itself remains at its core the same disposable product, with the same wear logic as decades ago.

The irony is that technological solutions are already much further along than the rules. In research programmes, patents and prototypes, tyres appear that last considerably longer than the 40,000 kilometres for which most consumer tyres are roughly designed. Manufacturers are experimenting with airless structures, with 3D-printed treads, and with combinations of biomass-based rubber components and advanced polymers. There are concepts that see the tread as a wear layer and the load-bearing structure as a platform that lasts much longer — precisely the reversal that is needed to sharply reduce microplastic emissions per kilometre.

Yet these tyres do not appear en masse on the market. Not because it would be physically impossible, but because the current economic and legal rules do not reward it. A tyre that lasts twenty years and produces much less wear disrupts an industry set up for regular replacement and for a certain cost level per kilometre. Without norms for emissions and lifespan, such a tyre remains a niche option instead of the standard. And without systematic measurement methods and labels for microplastics per kilometre, consumers remain blind to the differences.

Europe is overtaking itself

Europe thereby runs the risk of putting itself behind. While classical tyre factories in Western Europe close and production shifts to countries with lower costs, the European market is becoming ever more a sales area for conventional tyres from elsewhere. The strictest rules apply here at the edges, but the core innovation — the leap towards regenerative, low-emission tyres — could just as easily land in other regions, where large car manufacturers and fleet owners are earlier prepared to step into new models. Then Europe becomes the customer of tomorrow's tyre, not its maker.

Tomorrow's tyre is no longer a disposable product, but a platform. It lasts longer than the car it is mounted on. Its tread is not a fixed, single layer, but a renewable function: something that is reprinted, replaced or regenerated, without wasting the carcass. Tomorrow's tyre is designed to release as few microplastics as possible, and to make the particles that do arise chemically as innocuous as possible.

The question is not whether such a tyre will come. That question has long been answered in laboratories, in patents and in quiet pilot projects. The real question is how long it is still accepted that yesterday's tyre is the norm on the road. How many generations of children along motorways still grow up with plastic dust in their living environment. How many tonnes of microplastics still disappear into ditches and seas before it is recognised that this is not an unavoidable side effect, but a political choice.

What is needed now

If that choice is to tip, a few simple steps are conceivable:

• Set a maximum microplastic emission per kilometre for new tyres, just as CO₂ norms exist for cars.
• Extend producer responsibility to wear emissions, so that a tyre emitting half as many particles actually becomes cheaper in levies than a tyre that pollutes more.
• Make it compulsory on a tyre label to show not only rolling resistance and wet grip, but also an indication of lifespan and microplastic emissions per 1,000 kilometres.
• Reserve space in regulation for tyres that are fundamentally different — regenerative, printed, platform-based — instead of forcing them into the same mould as yesterday's product.

Anyone driving over the motorway today sees none of this. No warning, no filter, no cleaning crew. Only asphalt, white stripes and a silent rain of invisible particles. It is time to admit that the tyre is no longer a self-evident, neutral component, but a policy choice. The cigarette that does not yet dare to be called that.