Bit by bit microplastics from tyres are polluting our waterways | Hacker News Reader

Bit by bit microplastics from tyres are polluting our waterways

news.griffith.edu.au

143 pointsgeox94 comments

And yet many countries are investing hard in making "plastic roads". Plastic waste is put into the road, turning it into a horizontal garbage dump where cars and trucks run over it and grind out the microplastics into the air, water, food, soil, plants, animals and people.

Why do they do this? Because plastic in landfill is apparently the worst thing that can happen to plastic waste. Instead of containing the toxicity to the local area of the landfill, it is spread everywhere via the roads.

Places in India make it a legal requirement.

I feel sorry for India - all those schools and houses with toxic roads running right in front of them.

The biggest argument I have heard against plastic roads is "well roads are bad for the environment anyway, so no reason not to fill them with plastic".

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/jun/30...

Vested interests hard at work to legitimize plastic roads:

https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/all-news/2023/aug/recycled-plas...

And those pesky environmentalists getting in the way of progress:

https://www.theage.com.au/national/the-science-stacks-up-for...

Sort of funny, because I remember in school we were taught "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" but maybe that simply doesn't work as a concept for most modern materials.

I was taught the same slogan in school as well. The 3 R’s we called it! I think where we went wrong is we started ignoring the first two and went all in on the third.

I remember at one point we saw a demo of an alternative 2 litre pop (soda) bottle that used slightly thicker plastic which made it durable enough to be collected, washed, and refilled. It never came to market here, unfortunately. I guess no one was willing to put in the infrastructure.

The first two are bad for business unfortunately. They're a tough sell in practice even though they are more important.

Go to somewhere like Germany. You pay a "Pfand" when you buy the plastic bottle and it's noticeably sturdier than in countries without this system. There are machines everywhere (especially in supermarkets) that you can put the bottles into. The machine collects them for cleaning and refilling and you get your Pfand back.

The infrastructure isn't crazy and it's working nicely in plenty of countries.

That's a great system. We call it a "deposit" and but we only use it for beer here. For a long time, beer was only sold at specific beer stores so it was natural for people to return their empty bottles and cans to the store for the deposit.

But there's also the so-called "Einweg-Pfand" for single-use bottles. The reverse venting machines will also take those back but immediately cut them down into small pieces.

Supermarket chains lure you into believing that all of the plastic from those bottles will be reused to create new ones.

> I guess no one was willing to put in the infrastructure.

This is kind of surprising. I remember when I was a kid (not that many decades ago), things like milk, soda, yogurt etc. would come in glass or ceramic bottles under a subscription service. [For context this wasn't in the US]

Every time the delivery day came, you would set out (sometimes a crate of) empty bottles that were then exchanged for the same amount of filled bottles. They'd then wash and sterilize the old bottles centrally and refill and recap for a future delivery.

Thing is, I don't recall buying drinks this way being more expensive per-bottle than what it costs today. Perhaps slightly more inconvenient since you had to remember to set out the old bottles, but it's not like people don't do that anyways today with their recycling...

I live in Germany and I just buy milk, soda, water and yogurt in glass bottles from my local supermarket. All are from companies less than 50 kilometers away and will be washed and reused several times.

So there are places in the world, where this is still possible, although there no longer is a delivery service. But it's more expensive than plastic bottles and even more expensive than single-use plastic, so the majority uses plastic alternatives. Most milk here comes in some kind of cardboard containers that are mixed with a lot of plastic.

>some kind of cardboard containers >that are mixed with a lot of plastic.

Tetrapak?

I've heard that tetrapak are like the worst type of material to recycle.

IIRC they're a combo of paper, aluminum foil, and a plastic inner coating. Individually, the paper and aluminum are relatively easily recyclable, but I recall seeing somewhere that because it's all bound into a single material, the labor/energy cost to separate the layers of tetrapak for recycling end up not worth it and it just ends up in landfills...

Yeah. Also Tetrapak (the company) is lying about the recycling ratio in order to avoid collecting "Pfand" for beverages. If the recycling ratio for a bottle/can/container is less than 70 percent in order to increase the number of container that make it back to the reseller. That's why there's no Pfand for milk in Tetrapaks, but you need to pay Pfand for milk in glass bottles.

Yes, Tetrapak.

That's why I'm curious...

I feel like people figured out how to do this in the past in a cost effective way (even including delivery!) but then we somehow moved away to something (arguably) worse.

My hypothesis here would be perhaps the increasing abundance of choice makes it inefficient, since the main drawback I recall was that there was just like 1-2 local providers that handled each type of thing rather than like the 4 brands of milk we get at supermarkets today [in the US]. Though, I can't see why modern supply chains couldn't be refitted to handle this? E.g. your package delivery person / mailman also recovers the reusable containers etc.

Plastic roads aren't recycling, and it's not green - it's toxic waste disposal.

The reason they are getting traction is because at first glance it sounds like a great idea.

Only when you think about the detail that you start to realise that unintended consequences.

The question to really focus on is "why are environmentalists so obsessed with keeping plastic out of landfill?". Environmentalists will go to almost any length to keep plastic out of landfill. But WHY? The safest place for plastic waste is in landfill, not out in the environment distributed everywhere as microplastics.

In Australia there's a ridiculous utter obsession with "recycling plastic", as though it is some sort of solution to the plastic problem. Recycling plastic is not a solution because the flow of plastic is so utterly gargantuan that no amount of recycling can get on top of it. And that is when governments that are under pressure to do something about it turn to plastic roads. "What are we going to do with this firehose of waste plastic? Well we CANNOT put it in landfill because landfill is the worst thing in the world, so we must put it in roads."

The trick was that "recycle" was always a lie when it came to plastic. Paper can be recycled, but it's not super efficient. Metal can be recycled profitably. Glass can be recycled or even just reused. But plastic? It's stupid-expensive to recycle and degrades too much to be endlessly reusable.

Imho all single-use plastic (and similar non-recyclable non-biodegradable products like non-recyclable coated paper products) should be taxed by mass. Get rid of the stupid "plastic straw ban" and "plastic bag ban" piecemeal garbage that punishes consumers while ignoring commercial users and hit everybody equally.

It's impossible to buy food and beverages packaged in anything but single-use plastics. You'd think someone would have built a commercial alternative.

this is my first time hearing about plastic roads and it sounds like satire.

Well asphalt is made in part from oil, so it's just another form of that.

what’s your point? all kinds of shit is derived from oil

I think the point is plastic roads and asphalt roads are just sibling forms of oil

countless modern substances and materials are siblings if you look at it this way. you sleep on polyester mattress, why not sleep on asphalt? etc

The point is that it's not far-fetched that they're making roads out of plastic. It's a viable material for cars to drive on, which is the purpose of building of roads.

Or a new verse to Fake Plastic Trees.

Plastic infilled roads seem like false concern where they've been paved with tar (a coal/petroleum product) for decades. And yes, the tar comes off in tiny pieces over time too.

https://ecoshieldasphalt.com/news/environmental-impact-of-co...

Maybe if we'd already shifted to all concrete roads, or every road we're talking about was paved with something else. Or if road diets were happening all over the world.

Most roads use bitumen (a heavy oil fraction) which AFIK less harmful in a long term than BPA containing plastic. Oil contain some harmful for health compounds (in small amounts) but they AFIK degrade in then environment much faster than BPA.

...and given that climate change rapidly increases the frequency of extreme weather events - Greece for example is suffering from record-shattering rainfalls of 754 mm/m² at the moment [1] - it is crucial that stormwater retention systems get upgraded.

It's not just microplastics that pose a serious risk to waterways, they're the least concern IMHO in storm surge events, it's all the other crap: oils and fuels from vehicles and storage tanks, all kinds of toxic chemicals from industry sites wrecked by disasters, nutrients and soil from fields... and barely any country has prepared for that.

The oils are the worst problem of the bunch, especially if floodwater passes over agricultural land - remediation is very cost-intensive.

[1] https://greekcitytimes.com/2023/09/06/rain-record-in-greece-...

Whilst I think most agree with your post. This research was just focused on microplastics from tyres.

It is okay to study things in its components and that doesn't reduce its entirety. Yes all of those other things are important, but let's not try to boil the ocean.

Indeed, but the conclusion of the study was to upgrade stormwater filtration systems, and at that point it makes sense to look at the whole contaminant situation.

Microplastics are just one of many ways in which cars do a disproportionate amount of damage to our environment, especially where shortsighted public policies have ensured that car traffic intersects heavily with (and overrides the interests of) urban dwellers[1].

[1]: https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/ny_asthma/pdf/2018-2019...

It is very hard to overstate just how advantageous a bigger investment in mass transit would be for health, climate change, and the economy.

Agreed, but in the US I think we simultaneously need to invest in public safety and mental health facilities or no one is going to use the new mass transit facilities.

I don't think that is borne out by evidence. You build a better bus and people take it. Recent examples that are local to me include BRT lines in San Francisco and Oakland. These are very popular.

The reason transit systems fail is because governments sabotage them by prioritizing free-at-point-of-use car infrastructure like freeways, unmetered parking, etc. My favorite example being the extension of BART into Antioch, where the project budget was divided into half for BART and half for a toll-free 8-lane superfreeway, resulting in a system where nobody takes BART.

I live in a city with a halfway decent (very good by US standards) transit system (Cambridge [Boston]).

My car is comically faster to get almost anywhere I have to go, unless I’m trying to get to the Dunkin’s or newsstand at a T station.

The random route ability of cars (and bikes) will dominate fixed route radial spokes from the city center as is overwhelmingly common from mass transit systems.

> My car is comically faster to get almost anywhere I have to go, unless I’m trying to get to the Dunkin’s or newsstand at a T station.

And if you ignore the time and monetary cost of finding parking.

That's a largely self-regulating problem: I mostly go to places with ample parking, which merchants (and my company) are willing to provide in exchange for the traffic it brings.

I think this speaks more to your (car-induced) travel patterns than to the inefficiency of the network itself (which might itself be inefficient, as you say). As a non-driver who needs to ride in cars occasionally, my experience is the exact opposite: mass transit almost always gets me there faster, except in cases where it’s been intentionally “nerfed” (including, inexplicably, NYC’s airports).

Indeed, there is a positive feedback loop that I choose to grocery shop at a grocer with parking (and the grocer chooses to provide parking in order to get customers) and I choose to drive to my office rather than commute by public transit due to the horrible time inefficiency of the MBTA "solution" to getting me there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197

I almost never want to go to the city center (in part because it's still a pain in the ass and time-consuming to get there, due to needing to use a bus and a subway or possibly a bus and two subway lines). I can find ready substitutes for most things in the mid-density half-urban area near where I live or in one of the nearby suburbs which are terribly connected by public transit [buses only and mostly radial bus lines].

If there was excellent public transit, I agree there'd be more services highly coupled to the transit hubs. As it is, much of the shopping areas have vast parking lots/garages instead, because that's how the merchants can stay in business: by catering to people who can actually get there efficiently.

Cambridge has very high non-car trip mode share by U.S. standards. Really, its working correctly as you describe it. One of the benefits of getting indifferent travelers out of their cars is that people who truly need or prefer to use a car can do so with less competition.

You think only Americans have mental health problems? Those are everywhere. The difference is that Americans reject their public transit for the bottom rung of society and then are surprised when it's populated with society's rejects.

And honestly, the big thing needed to make transit viable is denser city planning. You can't do decent transit in a sprawl suburb, it's just not logistically possible.

Well, to be quite honest, neither is our current car based approach. Suburban developments have long been a massive drain on our tax system due to the incredible amount of infrastructure required to service a comparatively sparse population.

Density really is the key.

Genuine question: how big of a problem is this, really?

Just because it seems like nobody was talking about it until a few months ago, now that there's growing realization that while EV's reduce ICE pollution, the battery packs make them heavier and so tire pollution will be increasing.

But in the context of everything else that gets dumped into waterways and the air and the soil, how big of a deal is this? Like is this something that we really need to find a solution for soon, and is there even a solution? (Hard to imagine tires that don't wear out.) Or is this only really the 1,000th top priority, of all of the categories of things we pollute with?

I just have no idea, and none of the articles I've been reading have managed to put it into any kind of context.

I operate under the suspicion that there's a lot of fossil fuel astroturfing going on with things like this.

They know full well anything which slows adoption is going to ultimately lead to sustained ICE usage, not some third option.

Some of us would just rather invest in busses, bikes and trains if we're going to replace everything on the road right now.

The reality is yes of course EVs are better than ICE cars - eventually. It takes some 20-90,000 miles driven for them to break even in terms of CO2 emissions thanks to all the lithium and copper that goes into them. The tire wear is yet another new and interesting challenge.

They're being marketed as a panacea, but they're not. They're probably 1/2 to 1/4 as bad as a gas powered car for most people in most cases. For some people it's worse than a gas car - the ones who get big heavy cars like an electric hummer, or for people who don't put too many miles on their cars.

The best car is the one you don't need because you have public transit around. That way you can use the roads for neat stuff like restaurants, and walking.

> 1/2 to 1/4 as bad as a gas powered car

That right there is huge cause for celebration.

> For some people it's worse than a gas car.

Those people should wait, and let someone else use the EV. But for a good comparison, I think we should stick to lifecycle for the car and not individual owners. Few cars go from cradle to grave with only a single owner.

It's better, it's not best - we know what 'best' is and what it looks like, we're just choosing not to invest in it.

The main issue I have is it's being marketed as something it isn't to placate entrenched interests.

> Those people should wait, and let someone else use the EV.

Why? Why shouldn't both people take a train? Same kind of argument really.

Are you suggesting 'best' is public transit? We know already that it doesn't come anywhere close to solving the myriad use cases for private transportation. I'd love a very healthy public transit system, but cars are always going to have their place. Public transit has a halfway decent use case for a good number of people, for sure.

Each car costs $50-100K right now, times however many cars we're going to replace over the coming few years. Thats 290M * let's call it $75K = $21T. What kind of transit system do you think that would buy us? How much better for the environment do you think that would be?

A transit system like Hong Kong MTR would get us down to 1 in 3 people owning a car. Down from 179% right now. If the rest were gas, so what? Could still swap them out for electric over time.

You can buy any of a number of EVs for quite a bit less than 50K. And they'd be replacing an equivalent ICEV that's going to be replaced anyway, for a use case that will not 100% be replaceable by public transit.

Comparing the US to Hong Kong is severely biased. Though it does explain why many people on HN are so delusional about what problems public transit can and cannot solve. Even in Europe, which everyone says has much better public transit than the US, the vast majority of people own cars. They're useful, and denying that just destroys the pro-transit argument before it can even be made.

The US light duty vehicle (GVW under 7 tons) sales are in the 14-17M/yr range.

The average price is just over $46K.

Multiply and you get around $700B/yr. $21T is 30 years worth, which doesn't match my usage of "coming few years". (That also assumes that all new vehicles could be replaced with transit, which is obviously false for most delivery and service/construction type vehicles, many of which fit into the light-duty segment figures above.)

I was just using the cost to replace all gas cars in the US to frame the magnitude of the conversation.

Honestly what’s cool to me is being able to travel anywhere in America any time I want for a few dollars without owning a depreciating asset I have to pay $1-2000 per month in payments for, a few hundred in insurance, a few hundred in parking and a few hundred in maintenance, a few hundred in gas - plus tickets and tolls. I need all that just to get around the city I live in. Then there’s the 1% lifetime risk of dying in a car accident and the easily order of magnitude higher risk I’ll get injured. For the privilege of being stuck in traffic jams all the time.

That’s indentured servitude, not freedom, and that’s true whether my car is powered by gasoline, electricity or whale oil.

They’re luxury products and we should treat them like luxury products - not minimum requirements to participate in society whose needs are socialized. If you want a car you should pay for the road you drive on. We can use what we’re not spending on roads to pay for trains.

Provided you always plan ahead for where you're going by multiple hours. And don't carry anything more then hand luggage. And don't semi-regularly need to move heavy loads. Or need to get children from place to place. And that there's public transport service there at all.

People always have some "look how lightweight my life is, why would anyone need a car" and I can pretty reliably guess that they (1) don't own a house and/or (2) don't have kids, and/or (3) don't work in a job which requires them to get to more then 1 site and/or (4) live near the center of a major urban center.

Finally: "pay for the road you drive on" - that's literally what gas taxes are for, EVs already attract additional taxes to account for this, and I'm real curious how you think the things you buy in stores get there...

> Provided you always plan ahead for where you're going by multiple hours.

I took Hong Kong MTR recently and during peak times they had 40 trains per hour (2 trains every 3 minutes), and off-peak it was like 8 trains per hour.

You really didn't have to plan ahead. It was lovely.

> And don't carry anything more then hand luggage.

Order it delivered.

> And don't semi-regularly need to move heavy loads.

Rent a car when you need it.

> Or need to get children from place to place

Go with them on transit.

> And that there's public transport service there at all.

Which is my point.

> Finally: "pay for the road you drive on" - that's literally what gas taxes are for, EVs already attract additional taxes to account for this, and I'm real curious how you think the things you buy in stores get there...

The entire cost of roads is not born by fuel taxes. Fuel taxes total about $50B but roads generally cost about $200B. Free parking, parking minimums in building, etc, etc, are all taxes non-drivers have to pay to support drivers habits.

> I have to pay $1-2000 per month in payments for, a few hundred in insurance, a few hundred in parking and a few hundred in maintenance, a few hundred in gas - plus tickets and tolls. I need all that just to get around the city I live in.

We have a family of four, two adult drivers and two cars. I haven't had a car payment in years, but let's allocate $250/mo towards replacing cars every 10-12 years or so with another used car. We pay $102/mo in insurance, about $80/mo in gas and $20/mo in electricity, about $60/mo in registration and taxes, and if I budget $200/mo in repairs (one Honda, one EV), I'll have money left over.

One of us needs all of $2-3k/mo for one and the other needs ~$750/mo for two. There's a wide range of what one can spend on motoring versus what one must.

> One of us needs all of $2-3k/mo for one and the other needs ~$750/mo for two. There's a wide range of what one can spend on motoring versus what one must.

I spend $70 per month to go everywhere, whenever I want, with zero tail risk.

Forcing this huge cost on everyone is a regressive burden on the poor.

$750/month for a family's lifetime is easily $450,000. Wouldn't you prefer to retire early, or have an extra half million dollars to leave your kids?

I misunderstood what you meant when you said "I need all that just to get around the city I live in" then.

I couldn’t find numbers on tire wear, but road wear increases with the fourth power of vehicle mass [1]. I think it’s a fairly safe guess to assume tires wear similarly to roads at best.

Unfortunately, vehicles have been getting dramatically heavier [2] before even taking EVs into account. It doesn’t take too many people driving around in 9000 pound Hummer EVs to make a big difference. Using the fourth power law, a single 9000-pounder is going cause the equivalent of 81 3000-pound compact cars worth of road wear.

We may have to introduce some kind of vehicle weight tax!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AASHO_Road_Test

[2] https://www.axios.com/2023/04/28/evs-weight-safety-problems

Fortunately, 9000 pound hummers are essentially exotics, and not something that will sell in large numbers.

I think a better context would be comparing the most popular EVs on our roads (e.g. Model 3, Y) with the most popular ICEV equivalents (RAV4? Camry?). And for extra data, box trucks and tractor-trailers.

Probably we should just tax trucks and skip the expense of trying to tax individual consumers.

Prepare to be depressed [1]. Just at a quick glance, it seems vehicle weight has a very high correlation with popularity.

[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g39628015/best-selling-car...

I always thought it would be interesting to try a "momentum limit" rather than a speed limit. I wonder how fast that would get people to move to lighter vehicles.

That would only work if each vehicle weight class had its own lane to work with. Otherwise you can’t mix vehicles of widely different speeds on the same road.

Right, by the same token, why should any relatively small carbon intensive country decarbonise x/y/z sector when China, India, Nigeria et cetera are still out there?

Tyres have costs that they successfully externalise. As a society we either accept them or we regulate them.

It’s incredible that whenever the externalised costs of motor vehicles come up someone will come in and say “ah but there’s no direct carbon emissions”. (This is a reference to another child comment, not yours specifically).

The context is that we exist in and depend on a biosphere that we don’t fully understand but we do know we are living through what amounts to a huge mass extinction where we are destroying assets that have taken about 66 million years to arise without having determined their true value. We seem to be in the middle of a demographic transition where we will gradually need less space and fewer resources as a society (all the while seemingly needing more care provided to us).

And it’s a conversation that’s been going on my whole 30 something years on this planet.

And from the article:

> “We also assessed the effectiveness of a stormwater treatment device to capture and remove these contaminants from stormwater and evaluated the role of a constructed stormwater wetland for capturing microplastics in the sediment, removing it from stormwater runoff.

> “The device is a bag made of 0.2 millimetre mesh which can be retrofitted to stormwater drains. Although originally designed to capture gross pollutants, sediment, litter and oil and grease, it significantly reduced microplastics from raw runoff, with up to 88% less microplastics in treated water which had passed through the device.”

They even have a partial solution to this problem that can be retrofitted to existing infrastructure.

It absolutely _feels_ like there's an anti-EV campaign to pump out FUD concerning tires. First it was long-tailpipe stuff, but that didn't really gain much traction (har har), so we're on to the next one. Not saying it's not a problem, but saving some car weight by making them all burn gas doesn't seem like the solution.

>Not saying it's not a problem, but saving some car weight by making them all burn gas doesn't seem like the solution.

The solution is good enough that many manufacturers make hybrid cars that do this.

Tyre particulate pollution has been a big deal in environmental circles for some time, but it seems to be only recently that it's had a lot of media attention. Is this good news that it's finally gaining some attention or bad news that it's being used to astroturf? I'm really not sure.

This article is about setting up devices to remove that plastic, I'm not sure to see your EV angle to this.

It's a big deal for fish

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd6951

A ubiquitous tire rubber–derived chemical induces acute mortality in coho salmon (2020)

> In U.S. Pacific Northwest coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch), stormwater exposure annually causes unexplained acute mortality when adult salmon migrate to urban creeks to reproduce. By investigating this phenomenon, we identified a highly toxic quinone transformation product of N-(1,3-dimethylbutyl)-N′-phenyl-p-phenylenediamine (6PPD), a globally ubiquitous tire rubber antioxidant. Retrospective analysis of representative roadway runoff and stormwater-affected creeks of the U.S. West Coast indicated widespread occurrence of 6PPD-quinone (<0.3 to 19 micrograms per liter) at toxic concentrations (median lethal concentration of 0.8 ± 0.16 micrograms per liter). These results reveal unanticipated risks of 6PPD antioxidants to an aquatic species and imply toxicological relevance for dissipated tire rubber residues.

> Urban stormwater runoff typically requires treatment for the removal of suspended solids and nutrients [...] However, regulations are lagging behind when it comes to microplastics and tyre wear particles.

The question is less about how big of a deal it is, and kpre about whether suspended plastic bits should be allowed to stay when other particles are required to be removed.

this is, really, a big problem. tire particulate is particularly nasty.

Internalization, reduced growth, and behavioral effects following exposure to micro and nano tire particles in two estuarine indicator species

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2022.133934

>The presence of adverse effects in M. beryllina and A. bahia indicate that even at current environmental levels of tire-related pollution, which are expected to continue to increase, aquatic ecosystems may be experiencing negative impacts.

Toxicity of micro and nano tire particles and leachate for model freshwater organisms

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhazmat.2022.128319

>TP leachate was the main driver of toxicity for D. magna and larval zebrafish. Exposure to nano TPs enhanced toxicity in comparison to leachate alone.

A ubiquitous tire rubber–derived chemical induces acute mortality in coho salmon

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd6951

>Regular acute mortality events are tied, in particular, to stormwater runoff, but the identity of the causative toxicant(s) has not been known. Starting from leachate from new and aged tire tread wear particles, Tian et al. followed toxic fractions through chromatography steps, eventually isolating a single molecule that could induce acute toxicity at threshold concentrations of ∼1 microgram per liter.

Tire-wear-particle leachate toxicity to Americamysis bahia: analysis of sublethal and molecular effects

https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwuet/1132/

>There were 80 dysregulated contigs across all tested weathered leachate concentrations and 139 dysregulated contigs across all tested un-weathered concentrations. [...] Many contig sequences mapped to gene descriptions that regulated physical body structure, inflammatory response, and mediated protein-protein interactions, signifying that TWP leachate exposure disrupts many internal molecular processes in A. bahia.

Tribes Petition Environmental Protection Agency to Ban Toxic Chemical from Tires

https://earthjustice.org/press/2023/tribes-petition-environm...

>When 6PPD reacts with ground-level ozone, it breaks down into 6PPD-q — the second most toxic chemical to aquatic species ever evaluated by the EPA. Exposure to 6PPD-q can kill coho salmon within hours, and the chemical is responsible for “urban runoff mortality syndrome,” which kills up to 100% of coho returning to spawn in urban streams. The Tribes contend that 6PPD in tires poses unreasonable risks to the environment, requiring the EPA to regulate the chemical under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

One more reason to build more rail infrastructure and use trains for more things.

What home filtration do folks use?

My biggest fear in over filtering is then the decision of what to add back feels too overwhelming, whereas leaving it completely out of my control means it's not my fault :)

Reverse osmosis + your choice of "remineralization filter" is probably the safest course of action.

I spent the day on an island with very few cars, a bus service, a ferry and lots of bicycles.

Getting back to the mainland and having cars everywhere was a bit of a shock. Life on the island was better, best cycling ever and I could ride side by side with my friend, chatting.

There was also an abundance of fresh fruit - blackberries - so I didn't have my lunch, I just ate all that I could eat from the fresh food available at the roadside, all of it organic, none of it washed, all of it freshly picked fresh.

With the quietness due to the absence of cars I could say hello to people cycling the other way. Beeping or waving through a window in a tin box is just naff, and not as civilised.

The road surface was also pretty much perfect, not ruined by motor vehicles. There was a complete absence of the grey filth that is on the roadside of the roads on the mainland.

The sooner we get rid of cars, the better. They are economic traps for people. Obviously we have all got to eat, but, on the island with just a ferry, bus and lots of bicycles, they seemed to be correctly nourished - no fat people in cars to be found.

Do you mind saying which island this was? I'd really like to live somewhere like this.

Technology has pulled as away from what's really important and then we look for escapism.

Millport, Scotland. £3.60 for a return trip on the ferry. Ten mile ride around the island. Cheapest day out ever.

I thought tyres were rubber, not plastic. There's always more to it I guess

Synthetic rubbers are a type of plastic. Most of the advancements in tire technology are from materials science improvements in these plastics.

To my surprise there's Nylon in alot of tyres.

If memory serves nylon has long, long been the material that provides strength-in-tension in car tires. The rubber holds the air molecules in, but woven nylon layers keep the pressure from ballooning out the rubber.

If you see someone with worn sidewalls (chronic curb scrapers for instance) the white you see is probably nylon.

I would not be surprised if nylon is blended into the rubber now, but it used to be a simpler composite.

Edit: turns out the fillers are just carbon black and silica

https://www.ustires.org/whats-tire-0 says 43% of a passenger vehicle tire is rubber (natural or synthetic), only 4% is fabric. Whole lot of ingredients to protect against UV and oxygen damage. Wow.

By far not - rubber isn't even the majority of stuff that's used in vehicle tires [1].

[1] https://p2infohouse.org/ref/11/10504/html/intro/tire.htm

> .. the study showed that in stormwater runoff during rain approximately 19 out of every 20 microplastics collected were tyre wear particles with anywhere from 2 to 59 particles per litre of water.

I’m curious, is there any real alternative tyre material technically possible to avert this? Or is this plain impossible given that tyres by definition need to be rubber-type-based whereby with friction it is inevitable that wear particles will be released.

What goes around...

I will never get over this spelling of "tires"

We're all tired of it.

I think "knackered" is the term you are looking for.

It's an Australian university, are you surprised it uses Australian spelling?

software-controlled measurement: use the eco-driving mode, pay less co2-carbon tax. But its not as easy, bc data protection..

How would that reduce tire wear?

It would make driving suck so more people would take trains.

Solution: invent practical flying cars. Musk, git on it!

A more practical solution would just be encouraging funding in high speed trains and, critically, not constantly lobbying against it.

While also encouraging smaller vehicles like bikes and microcars in urban areas: https://electrek.co/2023/03/22/wink-motors-test-drive-electr... . Tire wear is proportional to both speed and vehicle weight.

Obviously the solution is maglev trains

The image people have of flying cars will never happen.

Any attempt at making a hybrid airplane/car will be shitty at being one or both of them. A hybrid helicopter/car is going to be too loud to use anywhere near a residential area, as would anything that relies on using turbines to push air downwards to pull the car up.

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