771
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
771 points (96.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
9808 readers
13 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
Bear in mind that the denominator is plastic pollution. Most plastic waste does not directly pollute the environment. If it is not recycled then it goes to landfills or incineration. Not ideal, but at least the damage is contained. (The bulk of ocean plastic comes from the rivers of poor countries without proper waste management.)
The issue with tyre microplastics is that it's all but impossible to channel the waste. It's the same with synthetic fabric: just washing it creates pollution that's really hard to control.
This might be true for places nearer to shore, but studies have found the great Pacific patch to be mostly discarded fishing gear by weight.
Yes I've seen this factoid too, but I struggle to see how it could be true. We're comparing theoretically non-disposable kit from individual boats with the output of a large number of massive rivers in countries with populations of hundreds of millions (in particular Indonesia and Philippines) and a terrible habit of dumping trash in waterways. The amount reaching the ocean must by definition be huge.
Of course, the main problem with discarded fishing nets is not that they are plastic but that they destroy the ecosystem by design. Maybe the two harms have been conflated.
I also struggle with it, but the research I've seen is that it's the majority by weight. Microplastics wouldn't get picked up, so they'd be really hard to be weighed.
Then again, these big pieces will be shedding microplastics all the time so maybe they're contributing to it as well.
Either way, we've got two problems: Plastic runoff from rivers and fishing gear disposal. And both, I think, could be solved by simply providing cash for people who can verifiably dispose of plastics. Check out some nets and floats and line, check in a certain amount and you get money back. Because people are greedy and stupid we need to incentivize cleaning things up.
Agreed. Great idea.
So then isn't it 1/4 of a meaningless number? It seems like the specific impacts mentioned in the article (zinc,6PPD) are more relevant.
Tyre dust vacuum car, just add HEPA filter:
Filtering clothes washer wastewater is even easier.
Yes the washer wastewater should be easy in theory. But to filter the really small particles you'd need an expensive HEPA-equivalent filter that has to be regularly changed. Needless to say, none of this is happening in practice.
Filtering tyre dust is always going to be a haphazard proposition. This interesting contraption notwithstanding.