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Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

Cue 50 posts about how "we're all in this together" talking about irrelevancies like recycling their supermarket plastic bags and using metal water containers. No.

The consumer end source of the problem comes from tires and the use of synthetic fabrics. As far as I know there is no effort at all to do anything about tires (using regular vulcanized rubber presumably would help). Synthetic fabrics, you actually can do something about. Stop buying them; your spandex pants are destroying the environment.

The other sources are pellets and coatings used industrially.

https://storyofstuff.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IUCN-rep...

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At least in America the motorist is unassailable. The most you can ask of an American motorist is that one of their three cars is a Prius. Never mind the tire dust, the brake dust, the sprawl, forty thousand dead pedestrians, ecological collapse, lead poisoning, leaking gas station tanks, and climate change. Give them paper straws and carry on.

> lead poisoning

Uh... leaded gasoline has been phased out since the '70s, despite being demonstrably better for car engines (no anti-knock agent as good as tetraethyl lead has yet been invented), precisely because the American motorist is not unassailable!

Uh American motorists have still not been made to account for a fifty-year-long crime wave that their leaded ways precipitated.

What about airless tires? I havent looked deeply into them but they sound like they would not be as profitable since you will be less likely to change tires due to a nail certainly reducing sales. But I am not sure what kind of cars these tires compliment and what kind of driving they are not for.

https://www.bridgestonetire.com/tread-and-trend/tire-talk/ai...

The problem of tires is wear. Everything that's not on your tire anymore is microplastics now.

Understandable, I hadn't looked into them as much or the subject matter. I'm curious if airless tires with similar design but different material could be made.

Their claim of low rolling resistance is surprising to me, since all the non-pneumatic designs similar to that I've seen before had abysmal rolling resistance. It seems their prototype is still in development, so maybe that claim represents their ambitions, not their achievement thusfar. Although, looking at the render of the product they've provided, it looks pretty dang narrow compared to the "ecopia" brand tires they're compared against. It could be they've reduced rolling resistance by simply making it narrower than an otherwise equivalent pneumatic tire.

For tires, it looks like pyrolysis is the least-worst option, of which there are a few small players such as eneform.com

Disclaimer: family affiliation

Some high level data why pyrolysis is preferable over other options: https://paul.copplest.one/knowledge/pyrolysis.html#what-is-p...

I have been thinking about getting a washing bag like the guppyfriend. Anyone knows if they actually work?

What about sneakers?

Poor people's clothes are synthetics. Natural fibers cost. People have become used to buy-and-trash one season clothes. This is a problem.

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