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Car tyres shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment – urgent action is needed
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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what's the percentage comparison to microplastics that are released by the floating plastic island in the middle of the Atlantic?
I can't imagine much microplatics are getting chipped off of them. The tires have thousands of pounds of pressure being put on small surface areas when you round corners, where as a plastic bottleneck can dolphin into the water if hit by a large wave and not nearly as much friction placed on it.
How I imagine it
so plastic floating in a salty ocean, being hit with wave after wave of hundreds if not thousands of tons of pressure 24 hours a day 7 days a week for literal decades all while slamming into other plastic bottles will release less plastic than tires?
IDK. I think a wider study should be done.
50-75 trillion pieces of plastic exist in the ocean today and makes up 80% of all marine pollution.
plastic itself isn't easily recycled either. tires on vehicles can be reliably recycled into other products like asphalt, roof shingles, new tires, etc.
I think if the concern is about microplastics, there are bigger pollutants at hand that need attention before car tires.
25% of all microplastics isn't worthwhile to fix? Even if it was 10%, thats worthwhile. Would a 10% raise make an impact on your life? I know it would on mine. We can have people focusing on multiple problems and i think its wrong to dismiss people trying to fight tire plastics just because you think theres a bigger boogeyman, we can save the environment from multiple angles at a time. Even if we recyle 100% of the tires we make, that does nothing to stop the wear down plastics which is where most of these microplastics are coming from in roadway runoff
You say that the plastic island has been slamming for decades, while cars have been using tires for decades too. Some countries have started banning single use plastics so they've already started focusing on that problem as well.
One question that'd be interesting to know the answer to is where it ends up at. I could imagine microplastics from the garbage island mostly staying around the island, whereas ones from tires will end up all over the environment.
What I'm getting is I'm going to need a lot more digital bottle nosed dolpin bottles to emulate this.