767
Car tyres shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment – urgent action is needed
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
767 points (96.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
9794 readers
284 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
what's the percentage comparison to microplastics that are released by the floating plastic island in the middle of the Atlantic?
I can't imagine much microplatics are getting chipped off of them. The tires have thousands of pounds of pressure being put on small surface areas when you round corners, where as a plastic bottleneck can dolphin into the water if hit by a large wave and not nearly as much friction placed on it.
How I imagine it
so plastic floating in a salty ocean, being hit with wave after wave of hundreds if not thousands of tons of pressure 24 hours a day 7 days a week for literal decades all while slamming into other plastic bottles will release less plastic than tires?
IDK. I think a wider study should be done.
50-75 trillion pieces of plastic exist in the ocean today and makes up 80% of all marine pollution.
plastic itself isn't easily recycled either. tires on vehicles can be reliably recycled into other products like asphalt, roof shingles, new tires, etc.
I think if the concern is about microplastics, there are bigger pollutants at hand that need attention before car tires.
What I'm getting is I'm going to need a lot more digital bottle nosed dolpin bottles to emulate this.
One question that'd be interesting to know the answer to is where it ends up at. I could imagine microplastics from the garbage island mostly staying around the island, whereas ones from tires will end up all over the environment.
25% of all microplastics isn't worthwhile to fix? Even if it was 10%, thats worthwhile. Would a 10% raise make an impact on your life? I know it would on mine. We can have people focusing on multiple problems and i think its wrong to dismiss people trying to fight tire plastics just because you think theres a bigger boogeyman, we can save the environment from multiple angles at a time. Even if we recyle 100% of the tires we make, that does nothing to stop the wear down plastics which is where most of these microplastics are coming from in roadway runoff
You say that the plastic island has been slamming for decades, while cars have been using tires for decades too. Some countries have started banning single use plastics so they've already started focusing on that problem as well.