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That’s why I don’t use tires. Raw dog the road.
There are some people who do that. Just driving on the steel rims of their cars. But they usually take it a step further, driving on roads that are also made of steel.
Trains…?
No, Trams
Citation needed
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969724011422
There’s been a wave of similar articles coming out over the last few years. People are finally noticing that this is yet another way cars are killing us.
Well, no, we don’t know that & that’s prob false, it’s just all plastics.
Tire microplastics just get circulated faster bcs they get grinned to a fine powder as part of their initial use (& that float gets flushed away with water). And the stat is stated for water or air.
Which is a problem, I’m just saying that we are producing a much larger scale of this problem that we can currently detect (and detecting microplastics is still in it’s infancy even in lab conditions).
But sooner or later all petroleum based (non-biodegradable) plastics get to be microplastics, we just won’t be around to see it.
Microplastics are the sedimentary boundary that will mark the current extinction event in rocks.
You can weigh new tires and compare them to weights of replaced tires. That would give you the low end estimate environmental tire microplastics deposited based on tire sales. I can’t imagine its not a massive number.
Yes, it is. But compared to all plastics production it’s not a third. Much like clothes aren’t a third either.
But they both release microplastics directly into the air & water, so they enter the circulation quicker. The printer that is gonna end on a landfill will be in the balls of creatures millennia from now.
That printer is not “micro”, it won’t shed detectably, and it will be confined to one part of a landfill
Toner is basically bulk microplastic.
Supposedly you can recycle them, but normally they will be confined to a a small section of landfill. While “on a landfill” is not a good answer, it’s much better than “in the environment “
You could even argue that leachate is “good” in that it pulls all these contaminants out of the landfill to a concentrated place where they could in theory be removed (and placed in a landfill 🤪)
You can’t recycle them (very poorly at best, with extra harmful byproducts).
And landfills are not built like nuclear waste storage facilities.
Everything around us is ‘the environment’.
Landfills at least in the us absolutely are designed to encapsulate waste, to minimize leachate and to control runoff. The whole point is to bury it in a way that it will tend to stay buried.
There is evidence of paper not decomposing because it doesn’t get enough oxygen or water for microbes to do their thing
Confined-ish. Rain will still wash it further eventually.
All fossil fuel (+many other) plastics = microplastics eventually.
But my og reply here was just making that point - that within our lifetime most of the microplastics we will breathe & ingest comes from clothing, tires, and food-adjacent plastic products.
Source? Heard this before and not surprised, but I’d like something concrete that I can point to.
It seems to be even higher, several studies suggest it’s closer to 50%:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c05002
Three different studies predicted emitted tire wear proportions (TWP and TRWP) of total emitted MP [microplastic] loads in the environment (both aquatic and terrestrial) for around 45%. (6,7,52) These calculations were mainly based on global, annual production data and matched the TWP proportions of around 40% in this study. However, since C-PVC was excluded here, a comparison of the percentages is not trivial.
Thanks!
And the severity increases with per axle weight
I thought car tyres were made of rubber.
Stupid lemmys driving cars into playgrounds.
Don’t tell me how to take a shortcut to work.
That’s one of those facts you never think about… makes you realize pollution isn’t just exhaust, it’s everything around it too.
The OSHA permissible exposure limit (PEL) for benzene is 1 part per million (ppm) as an 8-hour time-weighted average (TWA), with a short-term exposure limit (STEL) of 5 ppm for any 15-minute period.
The benzene content limit in gasoline in the United States is set at 0.62% by volume, with a maximum average standard of 1.3% that took effect in 2012.
By mass or volume?
