Concerned about microplastics? Research shows one of the biggest sources is car tyres

A lot of the emphasis on reducing microplastics has focussed on things like plastic bags, clothing, and food packaging.

But there’s a growing body of research that shows one of the biggest culprits by far is car tyres.

It’s increasingly clear that we simply cannot solve the issue of microplastics in the environment while still using tyres — even with electric-powered cars.

"Tyre wear stands out as a major source of microplastic pollution. Globally, each person is responsible for around 1kg of microplastic pollution from tyre wear released into the environment on average each year – with even higher rates observed in developed nations.

"It is estimated that between 8% and 40% of these particles find their way into surface waters such as the sea, rivers and lakes through runoff from road surfaces, wastewater discharge or even through airborne transport.

“However, tyre wear microplastics have been largely overlooked as a microplastic pollutant. Their dark colour makes them difficult to detect, so these particles can’t be identified using the traditional spectroscopy methods used to identify other more colourful plastic polymers.”

https://theconversation.com/check-your-tyres-you-might-be-adding-unnecessary-microplastics-to-the-environment-205612#:~:text=Tyre%20wear%20stands%20out%20as,rates%20observed%20in%20developed%20nations.

"Microplastic pollution has polluted the entire planet, from Arctic snow and Alpine soils to the deepest oceans. The particles can harbour toxic chemicals and harmful microbes and are known to harm some marine creatures. People are also known to consume them via food and water, and to breathe them, But the impact on human health is not yet known.

““Roads are a very significant source of microplastics to remote areas, including the oceans,” said Andreas Stohl, from the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, who led the research. He said an average tyre loses 4kg during its lifetime. “It’s such a huge amount of plastic compared to, say, clothes,” whose fibres are commonly found in rivers, Stohl said. “You will not lose kilograms of plastic from your clothing.””

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/14/car-tyres-are-major-source-of-ocean-microplastics-study

“Microplastics are of increasing concern in the environment [1, 2]. Tire wear is estimated to be one of the largest sources of microplastics entering the aquatic environment [3,4,5,6,7]. The mechanical abrasion of car tires by the road surface forms tire wear particles (TWP) [8] and/or tire and road wear particles (TRWP), consisting of a complex mixture of rubber, with both embedded asphalt and minerals from the pavement [9].”

https://microplastics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43591-021-00008-w

#car #cars #urbanism #UrbanPlanning #FuckCars @fuck_cars #environment #microplastics #pollution #plastics

  • AJ Sadauskas@aus.socialOP
    1·
    9 months ago

    @ColeSloth “So you’re saying you have like 30 with populations at or over 100k? Ok. Wow. The US has over 330 like that.”

    So you should have many more pairs of cities that should support rail.

    And once you have a pair of cities that support rail, you can have stations in each of the towns between them.

    Even if they’re only a couple of hundred people.

    “A rail system doesn’t sustain when people are trying to get from one place to so many different destinations and you can’t claim it can, when it’s literally never been created on a scale of anything similar to the US.”

    The US already has an extensive rail network. As in, right now. Here’s a map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=96ec03e4fc8546bd8a864e39a2c3fc41

    That’s all the places where it’s viable for a commercial operator to have railways based on freight.

    So a decent starting point would be just to run passenger services along those existing freight corridors, as Brightline did in Florida.

    And frankly, if the US had spent a fraction as much on rail as it has on propping up the auto and oil sectors, it’d be viable.

    (By the way, before the World Wars, the US had even more railways with a smaller population. Many US towns are where they are because of the railways.)

    “For everyone to get to their destinations…”

    You have a hub where many lines converge, or lines that cross one another.

    If trains are timetabled to arrive and leave at the same time, or arrive frequently, you transfer.

    So think of multiple lines between pairs of big cities, serving many smaller towns in between.

    Even if you’re the only person travelling between one tiny town on one line to another tiny town on another line. And you’re the only person making that particular journey in a given month.

    If there’s a station or hub you can transfer at, you can make that journey by rail.

    “…without it taking many extra hours of travel time…”

    Trains are significantly faster than cars, and don’t get stuck in traffic.

    “…and tons of them would be going places where they may only have a handful of passengers on board…”

    If it’s on a line between two larger cities, even small towns are viable for rail. If it isn’t, you run a frequent feeder bus service to the nearest town with a train station.

    “a train running with just a dozen passengers is a hell of a lot worse for the environment than a dozen cars. A lot worse.”

    You do realise electric-powered trains exist, right? And electricity can come from renewables? And renewable energy can be stored?

    “That can’t happen in the US unless travel destinations limit themselves way down, which cuts a lot of people off from using them.”

    The problem is that the US has government-owned roads and not rail.

    The problem is the US spent $597 bn (adjusted for inflation) building the interstate highway system, instead of investing in rail.

    Half a trillion subsidy for the interstates alone.

    The problem is that the US government mandated planning codes that make it illegal to build the types of developments that support rail.

    • AJ Sadauskas@aus.socialOP
      1·
      9 months ago

      @ColeSloth There is not inherent reason why America should have worse rail and worse public transport than Australia.

      It’s the direct result of the policy choices your politicians, Republicans and Democrats, have been making over the past 70-odd years.

      And it’s left you with a rail system that’s shamefully, embarrassingly bad.

      It’s not even third world standard. Frankly, there are many emerging economies that have better rail and public transport than the US.

      I’m not sure you’re aware of this, but people outside the US used to think of it as the best country in the world. Many no longer do.

      The embarrassingly poor quality of American public transport and rail system is one of the reasons why.

      You own country had a more extensive rail network until the 1920s, with better passenger rail services.

      Many of your towns are where they are because of the railways.

      Your politicians have spent decades letting it rot, in order to prop up big oil and big auto. Often with your tax dollars, or cross subsidies from private businesses and individuals.

      In many US suburbs, it’s illegal to build anything other than a detached single-family home.

      It’s not naturally like that. That’s government policy.

      You know the massive parking lots in front of many suburban shopping strips? That’s mandated by planning laws, rather than the free market.

      And I haven’t even touched on the trillions of taxpayer dollars and countless solders’ lives your government has wasted on oil wars in places like Iraq.

      The end result is that you have atrocious rail, atrocious public transport, and endless traffic jams.

    • ColeSloth
      1·
      9 months ago

      The US doesn’t have just “pairs of cities”. You branch off from city to city to city to city you’ll turn a 140 mile straight drive that’s just over 2 hours into a 400 mile train ride with three transfers and 10 hours long.

      • AJ Sadauskas@aus.socialOP
        1·
        9 months ago

        @ColeSloth Here’s how that problem was solved in a country called *checks notes* America in the early 1900s: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2Fbon-U7GpfU-Qps1R7xOyG1EfRjRVSyX7FsVdhN_kpng.png%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df05295494056e3b1e6821c853aeb4aed61909ce8

        Here’s a map of just the Illinois Central Railroad:https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSm-rwgQ1PSRo4GIplmxRZscx_nF-betb5SMRbEo7juj5nxUP0lpUp-NXs&s=10

        And Missouri: https://www.loc.gov/item/98688505/

        This is what America used to have, albeit with a much smaller population.

        Lots of hubs, lots of lines crossing each other. Lots of small towns served in between.

        See, what the people in America knew was that trains are faster than automobiles, and they still are.

        So you’ve effectively turned one-hour straight train journeys (with one or two transfers at most) into two hours stuck in traffic.

        Because unlike cars, the more people use trains, the more frequently services run, so it gets faster the more people use it. Whereas the more people drive, the more traffic there is, and the slower it gets.

        • ColeSloth
          1·
          9 months ago

          I don’t live near one of the big cities with traffic jams. There’s generally only a couple cities per state (average) at most that commonly have traffic jams like that.

          And yes, in the early 1900’s. When a car was “fast” if it did 30 mph, had shit suspension, was good for about 60,000 total miles, had no freeways everywhere, and had like 3 million cars in existence. People didn’t take the train because it was faster, so much as because people didn’t own cars, and the ones that were available were only cars in the sense of they had 4 wheels and an engine attached. The trips taken back then by train were much slower than what a car can do today.

          • AJ Sadauskas@aus.socialOP
            1·
            9 months ago

            @ColeSloth “The trips taken back then by train were much slower than what a car can do today.”

            By 1891, the US had trains doing 110 mp/h (180 km/h). Here’s the NY Times article from the time about it: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1893/05/12/106864316.pdf

            Not sure about your area, but typical speed limits in a lot of the US are somewhere around 75–80 mp/h (121–129 km/h).

            So you had the infrastructure built out by the early 1900s. It not only can be done in the US—it has been.

            The decision by American governments at all levels to spend trillions of taxpayers dollars subsidising a slower mode of transport was a purely political one.

            (Seriously, just imagine how different the US would be right now if Eisenhower had spent $500bn (adjusted for inflation) on high speed rail, instead of building the interstates!)

            The decision to mandate planning codes designed around the car, at the expense of all other modes of transport, was a political one.

            The decision to spend $17.4 billion bailing out GM and Chrysler was political: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/19/bush-bails-out-us-automakers-dec-19-2008-1066932

            And cars are still slower than trains. (The fact you think driving is faster frankly says a lot about how far behind the rest of the world the US now is!)

            The minimum speed to be considered a high speed train is generally around 155 mp/h (250 km/h).

            China’s newest high-speed trains currently do 217 mp/h in passenger service (350 kp/h https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/china-high-speed-rail-cmd/index.html) and Japan’s new bullet trains will do 375 mp/h (603 kp/h https://www.jrailpass.com/blog/maglev-bullet-train).

            America once led the world with trains. It arguably had the best train network in the world.

            The decision to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars giving that up was pure politics.

            • EineKleine@mastodon.world
              1·
              9 months ago

              @ajsadauskas @ColeSloth That New York Times entry from 1891 is amazing. (Current U.S. highway posted limits are generally 65 mph (105 kph) with intermittent drops to 55 mph (90 kph) but to be fair traffic flows at about 75 mph (120 kph) regardless. If you can keep to your lane at 75-80 you’re at little risk of being pulled over unless you commit the sin of passing a marked police car.)

          • violetmadder@kolektiva.social
            1·
            9 months ago

            @ColeSloth @ajsadauskas

            A minute ago you were saying trains only work in BIG cities that aren’t spread too far apart, but now you’re saying Australia is different because it has… smaller cities just as far apart as ours?

            I don’t think you realize what sensible design could actually do, to streamline transportation in extremely smart, effecient ways. In the US we hardly ever see anything like that. We assume we’re the best and doing everything the best way it could be managed-- but the fossil fuel industry lobbied to have thousands of miles of perfectly good light rail RIPPED UP in the 60s so they could sell more gasoline to bus and car companies instead.

            • Scrummy@jawns.club
              1·
              9 months ago

              @violetmadder @ColeSloth @ajsadauskas
              American here, from the Northeast, so theoretically one of the best served areas by rail in the country. And even over my lifetime it has been unsatisfactory. I went to Uni up outside of Albany NY, when my family lived in South Jersey. To get home for holidays I had to take a bus from Albany to Philadelphia, changing in NYC because the Metro North trains didn’t go that far north.
              1/

              • Scrummy@jawns.club
                1·
                9 months ago

                @violetmadder @ColeSloth @ajsadauskas
                Later on I lived in Northwest NJ in a small borough of maybe 1400 people. But its history was a railroad junction, where trains would bring coal in from PA bound for New York. By the time I lived there, the railroad was disconnected from the NJ Transit network, and the nearest train station during commuting times was about 5 miles away. On weekends, the line only went to a station 20 miles away, with service maybe every hour.
                2/

                • Scrummy@jawns.club
                  1·
                  9 months ago

                  @violetmadder @ColeSloth @ajsadauskas
                  Point being, even in the Northeast, the “best” place for transit, it’s mostly been a story of abandonment for cars and interstates. We went from hopping on the Chattanooga Choo Choo to counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike.
                  3/end

                  • violetmadder@kolektiva.social
                    1·
                    9 months ago

                    @scrummy @ColeSloth @ajsadauskas

                    Exactly. And we can all see how badly even the infrastructure for FREIGHT trains is being neglected, what with all the derailments.

                    We could do so, so very much better than this if vampires weren’t sucking the lifeblood out of our infrastructure to feed their shareholders.