Brake Pad Partnership

Project Overview

Each time you step on your car's brakes, small amounts of debris, including metal such as copper, are released onto streets and into waterways. Dissolved copper is toxic to phytoplankton, the base of the aquatic food chain. Drivers in the United States press on their brakes billions of times a day, which could have a potentially harmful impact on the environment.

Pollution Prevention

To understand the impact of brake pad debris on our waterways, Sustainable Conservation needs to study many factors, such as how much copper is released from wear debris, and how it travels through the air and streets. Once it flows into our waterways, does copper debris threaten the environment? Sustainable Conservation launched the Brake Pad Partnership to help find answers to these complex questions. Wear debris characterization, air deposition modeling, and watershed modeling studies have been completed, and it has been determined that brake pads contribute substantially to copper in runoff to the San Francisco Bay.

A New Partnership is Formed

The Brake Pad Partnership brings together for the first time government regulators, brake pad manufacturers, stormwater management agencies, and environmentalists. This highly collaborative team is evaluating the potential effects of brake wear debris on water quality, using copper in South San Francisco Bay as an example. Rather than fighting one another through dueling science and lawsuits, the partners are concentrating on finding workable solutions.

After rigorous testing, if brake pad wear debris is found to impair water quality, industry manufactures agreed to voluntarily introduce new products within five years. However, voluntary introduction of new products by brake pad manufacturers does not guarantee their use, and the Partnership has embarked on an investigation of other control measures.