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I am not worried so much about synthetic rubber tires on bicycles. The scale of the pollution from bike tires is microscopic in relation to car and truck tires.

The side of our roads are covered in pieces of damaged tires. My apartment near a freeway was always covered by a thin layer of the micro debris emitted by car tires. It's insane.

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It's not the biggest lever we can pull, but it does feel better to know that if you were to replace your car with a bicycle, if we had no plastic tires we could almost feel like outside the fixed carbon emissions costs in the manufacturing of components, we'd be mostly pollution-free in our personal transportation (ignoring the implicit costs of the other products we use and their transportation).

The idea that I could take one additional bike ride and not have to know that it's going to create a marginal increase in plastic pollution is a beautiful one.

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