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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> the solution is natural rubber, which costs slight more than synthetic rubber but lasts longer. So its better for consumers, cheaper all around, and 1,000x better for the environment

Is it? I'm Googling but can't find any evidence for that.

Natural rubber tires still produce tons of dust, I can't find any reference to it being less harmful in our lungs, and even natural tire rubber seems to biodegrade on the order of thousands of years.

Natural tire rubber is still extremely processed. It's nothing like the raw latex that comes out of the plant.

So how is it 1000x better for the environment? Or even 2x better, honestly?

I'd love to believe it, but I'm surprised I can't find any references easily. Everything I can find refers to it being more sustainable to manufacture. Nothing about its effects on pollution.

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One is a closed system, the other is dumping NEW carbon into the air. The simple accounting is:

Plant a seed that grows to a dry weight of 1 lb. That is basically 1 lb of carbon.

Turn that into 0.5 lb of rubber. Grind that rubber back down to carbon and we are back to where we started minus the waste.

Is the problem "net carbon", or is it "hey there is 100nm carbon particles entering my brain from my lungs" ? I feel like it's the latter ? And I'm not sure how natural rubber is gonna stop that ?

I thought you were trying to address dust?

> I'm Googling but can't find any evidence for that.

I'm sorry, but the parent poster said they have been studying in this domain for 4+ years (including PhD research), and you present doubt because your Google searches are unconvincing?

What would it take to convince you?

You do realize that what you find on the first 10 pages of Google (or other) search engines could be junk or intentionally targeted misinformation, right?

It's doubtful if you know even a basic bit of chemistry. Vulcanized rubber is a crosslinked thermoset polymer that is very difficult to break down, regardless of whether it is natural or synthetic in origin. It's going to produce roughly the same amount of microplastic per amount of tire. Lets say natural rubber lasts 2x as long, that's half as much microplastic, not 1/1000th. I get that GP is being hyperbolic, but natural rubber is incrementally better (at best) than synthetic, not revolutionarily better.

A careful reading will reveal that the parent poster merely said they spent 4 years doing PhD research, and during that time, also indirectly looked at things somewhat related to tire research.

I don't know how much time you've spent in academia, but when I wrote my thesis, there were a couple "indirect" things like that that I could sound knowledgeable on but really knew no more about than someone could learn in an hour of internet reading if they really tried.

A source is what it would take to convince me, not an internet commenter claiming to have googled something during their school years.

This is the internet. Doubt everything, always.

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