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So every car is pretty much dumping ~3 liters of plastic out on the roads every year? (4 tires = 6 liters every 2-3 years.)

Let's say there are on the order of 100,000,000 cars in regular use in America. That's 300,000,000 liters of of plastic waste generated each year?

That's hundreds of thousands of tons of waste thrown into the environment every year! I had no idea that car tires shed that much.

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How do you judge that number to be a lot? Are you comparing it to something else you're already familiar with?

I'm familiar with a liter. If I saw a liter of solid plastic sitting by the side of the road I'd be quite disappointed.

That's like finding 20 empty two liter bottles just lying there. (Based on a bottle using 50 grams of plastic.)

So yeah, seems like a lot to throw out every year from every car.

Put another way, if every driver threw an empty two liter bottle on the side of the road every two weeks, you'd have an equivalent amount of plastic being shed into the environment.

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