Concerned about microplastics? Research shows one of the biggest sources is car tyres
A lot of the emphasis on reducing microplastics has focussed on things like plastic bags, clothing, and food packaging.
But there’s a growing body of research that shows one of the biggest culprits by far is car tyres.
It’s increasingly clear that we simply cannot solve the issue of microplastics in the environment while still using tyres — even with electric-powered cars.
"Tyre wear stands out as a major source of microplastic pollution. Globally, each person is responsible for around 1kg of microplastic pollution from tyre wear released into the environment on average each year – with even higher rates observed in developed nations.
"It is estimated that between 8% and 40% of these particles find their way into surface waters such as the sea, rivers and lakes through runoff from road surfaces, wastewater discharge or even through airborne transport.
“However, tyre wear microplastics have been largely overlooked as a microplastic pollutant. Their dark colour makes them difficult to detect, so these particles can’t be identified using the traditional spectroscopy methods used to identify other more colourful plastic polymers.”
"Microplastic pollution has polluted the entire planet, from Arctic snow and Alpine soils to the deepest oceans. The particles can harbour toxic chemicals and harmful microbes and are known to harm some marine creatures. People are also known to consume them via food and water, and to breathe them, But the impact on human health is not yet known.
““Roads are a very significant source of microplastics to remote areas, including the oceans,” said Andreas Stohl, from the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, who led the research. He said an average tyre loses 4kg during its lifetime. “It’s such a huge amount of plastic compared to, say, clothes,” whose fibres are commonly found in rivers, Stohl said. “You will not lose kilograms of plastic from your clothing.””
“Microplastics are of increasing concern in the environment [1, 2]. Tire wear is estimated to be one of the largest sources of microplastics entering the aquatic environment [3,4,5,6,7]. The mechanical abrasion of car tires by the road surface forms tire wear particles (TWP) [8] and/or tire and road wear particles (TRWP), consisting of a complex mixture of rubber, with both embedded asphalt and minerals from the pavement [9].”
https://microplastics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43591-021-00008-w
#car #cars #urbanism #UrbanPlanning #FuckCars @fuck_cars #environment #microplastics #pollution #plastics
I used to live in a farming area with some roads that were basically semi truck conveyors. You could see the dirt next to those roads was caked in oil and rubber dust
Meanwhile car culture: BIGGER CARS, MORE WEIGHT, WIDER TIRES, MORE RUBBER, MORE ACCELERATION
Tbf regenerative braking is likely helping reduce the rate at which microparticles are shed by tires when slowing a vehicle, but the absolutely insane torque on modern cars, as well as the weight of carrying around the battery capacity to pull off that one road trip you’ll do once a year is likely offsetting the tiny benefits of that one improvement.
Why be efficient when you can ensure your own safety in an accident at the expense of the people you plow through?
yeah the massive EV’s they insist on building are so heavy they generate more of this tire dust than normal vehicles.
Rivian has particular issues in this regard, I really hope we bazinga our way into some better materials soon.
In the most extreme case, one owner reported having to replace their front tires after only 6,000 miles. Others speak of replacements by 12,000 miles not being uncommon, as tire wear has become a sore subject that’s a regular source of divisive discourse.
and in the meantime how about some tiny ev’s!?!?
I really hope Aptera takes off, vehicle design in the exact opposite direction and in a way that REALLY makes sense.
Even small pure evs will wear out faster than a small ice or hybrid, but it would still be a huge help if they sold smaller ones.
Of course the issue is that smaller range EV’s aren’t all that wanted except as a second vehicle for short trips. If you have a short range EV it won’t work as a complete replacement, so you then need two vehicles.
@ColeSloth @CubbyTustard I checked my movement history for the last few months. The furthest I went in a car in a day was 80k. If we look back over the entire year 160k is the furthest.
A small EV with 100k range would be a fine second car. A full sized sedan EV as the primary car with 200k range would be sufficient.
Any trip that is further than that should prefer to use rail for the bulk of the travel, hiring a car at the far end if needed (most holidays I’ve taken haven’t needed a car)
You’re European. How your country is sized and built is vastly different than what is capable right now in the US. Heck, I drive 90 miles (so like 145 KM ) each way to work a couple times a week. Stuff is spread out differently when your country is just the size of a US state.
@ColeSloth @LovesTha My friend, this has been debunked many times. Please stop propagating auto industry propaganda. The US is not “too big” for public transportation. We choose to prioritise automobiles & car-centric infrastructure. It’s a choice.
The US is most definitely too big and too spread out for complete or even close to complete public transportation. It’s only viable going from large city to large city and within a city. The US would need a complete redesign for public transport to work for a lot of people. Not to mention the lack of time people have and that it can ad an hour to a trip that’s 20 minutes by car.
@ColeSloth i’m sorry, but you have no idea what you are talking about. You’re literally parroting incorrect automobile and highway lobby talking points. The US interstate system is the worst thing to ever happen in terms of economy, equality, and ecology on top of the nonsensical logic going on here. I encourage you to seek out urbanist and transit planning YouTube and Twitch channels & educate yourself on the facts.
Your decadent lifestyle shouldn’t have ever been normalized. Your neighborhood likely should have never been built. And the hundreds of miles of road network that you use weekly doesn’t need to exist.
@ColeSloth Complete myth. EVs are far more durable than any ICE vehicle, having a couple thousand fewer parts and requiring far less maintenance. @CubbyTustard
@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars “you will not loose a kilo of plastics from your clothing” but I have a lot more clothes than tyres. I wonder kilo for kilo how it compares.
The forces being applied to tyres are orders of magnitude higher than the forces being applied to your clothes. Tyre plastic compounds are also designed to wear a certain amount, or in other words they must be relatively soft and therefore subject to wear, in order to provide friction sufficient to keep hundreds of kilograms safely connected to the road surface at high speed.
“Microplastics are of increasing concern in the environment [1, 2]. Tire wear is estimated to be one of the largest sources of microplastics entering the aquatic environment [3,4,5,6,7]. The mechanical abrasion of car tires by the road surface forms tire wear particles (TWP) [8] and/or tire and road wear particles (TRWP), consisting of a complex mixture of rubber, with both embedded asphalt and minerals from the pavement [9].”
https://microplastics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43591-021-00008-w
You quoted the introduction, not even their conclusions. That’s not how scientific papers work.
Your post amounts to mostly baseless fear mongering while ignoring the real data you actually link to:
(TWP = tire wear microplastic particles)
Results indicate that TWP occur in relatively high concentrations compared to microplastics in general and that the corresponding risk of TWP is above threshold levels. Because TWP exists both as anthropogenic particulates and as a source of a suite of chemicals, providing a risk assessment is challenging. This study provides a first risk assessment posed by particle effects (TWPMP) as well as risks posed by chemical effects (organic micropollutants). Additional research is required to further address the risks of TWP, e.g. toxicity testing for environmentally realistic TWP material and aligning exposure and effect data.
I interpret that as there are clear signs of it being an issue but further research is required to actually find out how big the issue actually is.
I tried to read the paper for more details but I’m not very well versed in risk assessment of substances, so I barely understood it.
I don’t see what’s wrong with quoting the introduction. Generaly, literature reviews are more reliable than a single study, and the introduction is a mini literature review.
I guess if op was writing a scientific paper, they ought to cite the original research to give credit to the right people. And maybe it would be better to cite a proper review article in a Lemmy post, but I think what op did was fine.
I don’t see what’s wrong with quoting the introduction.
Because the motivation is mostly a formality, not the actual contents of the paper.
literature reviews are more reliable than a single study, and the introduction is a mini literature review.
I’d generally agree but not if the paper they’re citing adds new information that (at least partially) invalidates/updates the literature.
If I wrote a paper that said in its introduction “It is generally believed that x is the cause for y. So and so have found weak evidence in [42] and someone else similarly weak evidence in [69]. Someone else still theorised the effect could be greater than assumed in [1337].” and then found out in the paper that x does not cause y at all.
Don’t you think it’d be disingenuous to quote the introduction and leave out all of the conclusions when talking about the effects of x?To me, that’d be an obvious lie by omission.
In this case, it’s not quite as bad as the paper does not conclude the literal opposite of what was quoted but its conclusion is quite a bit more differentiated than the “TWP bad” of its motivation.
@Atemu @lemming934 What was more of interest was that literature review and overview of the state of research, rather than the specifics of the research itself.
Currently, a lot of the public disclosure around microplastics focusses on things like plastic bottles and bags. There’s little public discussion around the impacts of driving and tyres.
Whereas, in the academic discourse, there is an acknowledgement that one of the top sources of microplastic pollution is from tyres and asphalt, particularly in waterways.
i remember about a decade ago when GM announced they had developed tires made out of mushrooms. but of course nothing came from it and i cant find anything online. anyone else remember?
Once there was also a car with 0.9 l/100 km fuel efficiency. It costed around $150k though. It’s usually all about money
Meanwhile, brain-dead bosses: “It’s time to return to the office and look busy from 9-5.”
Ev’s wear out tires faster. Check mate, environmentalists!
No environmentalists likes cars, nor do they think EVs are a good thing.
@PowerCrazy @ColeSloth this is the one post you post lmao
EXTREME
@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars This is the elephant in the room that most environmentally conscious organization do not want to think about.
“But our results are still worrying, particularly as the time in which the animals were exposed to the particles was short. The observed decrease in bivalve feeding and burrowing at low concentrations suggests exposure to tyre wear microplastics in the wild will significantly impact this species.”
The members of those orgs all use cars.
@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars Walking minimizes environmental tire wear concerns.
@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars i’m guessing this would include bike tires. If somehow everyone switched to bikes, i wonder if the issue would still be as significant.
Removed by mod
@oo1 @abroad_octopus A typical bike weighs somewhere around 6.8 – 10kg or so. Even when carrying an adult human and some cargo, you’re only looking at maybe 80 – 100 kg
By comparison, a Ford 150 pickup truck weighs 1837 kg and 2375 kg. The 1.2 (on average) humans on-board are a rounding error.
So you’re looking at the difference between around 100kg on two fairly thin tyres, versus over 2 tonnes over four thick tyres.
What that means is when you hit the brakes on a pick-up truck, you have twice as many tyres are doing an order of magnitude more work to stop a far heavier vehicle.
Now on to road damage. (Road wear and asphalt degradation is the other half of this equation.)
The general rule of thumb is each time you double the weight of vehicle, the amount of road wear increases 16 times. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law)
A 10kg bike with a 70kg rider is going to do a miniscule fraction of the damage to a paved road that a 1837 kg pick-up truck or SUV does.
(A 160kg vehicle does 16x the road wear of an 80kg one, a 320kg one does 16x the wear as a 160kg one and 256 times an 80kg one, a 640 kg is 4,096 times an 80kg one, a 1,280 kg vehicle is 65, 536 times an 80kg one, and a 2,560 kg vehicle is 1,048,576 times the road wear of an 80kg one.)
So a motorist, especially an SUV or pick-up truck driver, is likely to cause an order of magnitude less environmental damage on a bike than in a pick-up truck or SUV.
My tires are a fraction of the size, support a fraction of the weight, and go at a fraction of the speed of car tires. The volume of wear is WAY less.
Wrong. Each person is not responsible for 1kg,
Someone living in rural Tanzania is responsible for close to zero kg, and some people are probably responsible for dozens of kg.
I really hate when people say “each person” implying that everyone use about the same amount, rather than an actual tonnage. Feel free to add distribution across nations, life styles and other categorizations after that.
<crawls-back-under-the-rock_without-tires/>
@fuck_carsHow much do bicycle tires create?
Close to zero. I haven’t bicycled regularly since I was teenager, but back then I did about 2000-5000km per year, and a set of tires weighed ~1kg and lasted 3-5 years, and most of the weight was not scrubbed off, but part of the regular waste.
Not zero but a tiny fraction of what a car does. Bike tires are very small and bikes are very light.
How much am I responsible for? If I weigh the tires (all 4) when I buy them, then use them for X years, then weigh them when I get rid of them for the next ones- then that is how much I responsible for. And I can divide it by the years I had it for a yearly number too.
And that is how much microplastic I would agree I am responsible for with the tires. There is also the carbon cost of making them, supplying them, and disposal. But we were talking about microplastics…
- tires from the trucks that brought your food to the shop.
- the tires from your Amazon delivery truck +…
There’s so many variables, it’s ridiculous to try to pin it on individuals.
…on average.
No, that’s still not fair.
That’s like saying; “On average, you kill 0.001 persons in your life time.”, or “On average, you smuggle 100 grams of hard narcotics in your life.”
But that’s literally how averages work.
The article obviously tries to highlight a systemic problem. Do we really need to put that much emphasis on avoiding any feeling of individual responsibility to the point where that’s no longer possible?
Nobody reading this puts the blame on someone in rural Tanzania. It’s a complete non-issue and definitely not what we should be focusing on coming from this very important article.
Can YOU please stop killing people? And I suggest that YOU stop being a drug mule.
(Please address that)Systemic problems are seldom systemic, but agendas driven by the ruling class. Taxation and regulation have created the monster that USA (and other places) is, for instance in the suburban crawl, unlivable cities, and long distance shipping/transport. The ruling class bought off by the oil industry to ensure the growth of oil consumption over the last 100+ years.
Averages aren’t a personal attack on you. They say nothing about the individual at all. Getting offended by that is simply a misunderstanding.
That’s like saying"man, humanity really should stop killing the planet" and you angrily replying: “what the fuck are you accusing me of?”
You’re not personally addressed by averages about car tires, drug mules etc. at all. It’s a waste of time to get irritated overt this.
Yes that is how averages work. The point is more that looking at averages can avoid or diminish responsibility, and in that case likely isn’t the right metric.
If 80% of the problem is caused by 20% of the people, then average really isn’t the best way to discuss the problem.
More than 20% use tires.
But I guess if the most important thing for ya all is to be of the hook personally, sure, fixating on the question of individual responsibility becomes the most important part and averages are just a distraction to that (because they say nothing about the individual). To me that wasn’t the relevant takeaway from the article. Our society must fundamentally change, or we will destroy ourselves. And for that it doesn’t matter at all how much microplastic you personally produce, but how much we all create - on average.
@ajsadauskas @architektradim @fuck_cars I’m getting tired of the “eco” lobby
Depressing.
It occurred to me last week, humanity has always feared nuclear weapons. People warned of the extinction of humanity should they see widespread use. But all this time we’ve been happily consuming and discarding something more subtle, but poisonous to life. And it’s literally everywhere.
Globally, each person is responsible for around 1kg of microplastic pollution from tyre wear released into the environment on average each year
Not me. I ride a bicycle. My tires don’t even weigh a kilogram.
I mean, bike tires have the same problem, but it’s orders of magnitude less problematic.
@ajsadauskas @fuck_cars tires wear down - where do you think all that material goes? Waterways, soil, your respiratory system, skin, clothing, crops, livestock feed etc.
