Anyone who’s worked in a warehouse with forklifts could tell you this. I remember taking care of a PC in one when I was like 19-20 and asking about the dust and being told it was tires.
My immediate thought was “oh Jesus Christ what must our cars be doing”
Then the first big public studies on microplastics dropped.
Thinking back on how black my skin would become with tire dust, I’m amazed that masks aren’t required by OSHA on freight docks. I used to be so dirty at the end of a shift. I’m sure it didn’t have good impacts on my lungs…
To be fair forklifts do a lot more low-speed or static turning which causes significant tyre wear, but compared to the sheer volume of car traffic…
Not to mention the abuse that fork lift drivers put on them due to speed expectations. Few drivers use their brakes, and just blast the transmission from forward to reverse or vise versa.
So, there is plastic in our rubber tires? Interesting. Can we call it plas-rubber then and sound all futuristic at least?!
I don’t think we’ve used tree rubber in our car rubbers in a long time
Correct, it’s all been synthetic for a long, long time. And for what that’s worth, even if there were enough sources of natural latex in the world to support the global tire industry, we’d still have problems. In both cases, polymers are stabilized with sulfur in a process called vulcanization. I’m mostly sure that’s why tires don’t decompose under natural conditions.
People are working on it though: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11041115/
We need trains so bad
While I agree with you, particularly in urban areas where it’s easy for transit to make sense, I do still think we need solutions for people not living near cities too. Makes me wonder if there’s any tire technology out there to be developed that would either shed a lot less plastic, or maybe not even contain plastics.
Inb4 “lighter cars” or “just walk”, yeah I know, and I already drive a wagon rather than an SUV, to min/max size versus practicality, and I usually try to walk to town unless I need to carry something heavy or the weather is particularly shit, but there’s a ton of times where I need to go on a long drive, sometimes through multiple urban areas (that now get polluted with my microplastics), and public transit offers me no solution, or the solution is to at least double or triple the time taken by my already long drive. I’m eventually moving from diesel to electric to cut down on my exhaust pollution, but I’d also like there to be something that people like myself can do about the microplastics. Not because I think me alone doing something would change something, but because once something exists, it can be mandated by the EU or local governments.
not living near cities
Fewer cars, more green-space in the countryside, so not a huge worry. Cities should really focus on public transit; it fixes so many problems, no more drinking and driving, freeway congestion, traffic accidents, cost of owning car.
fuck cars
Fuck cars.
. . . Fuck cars? 👁️ 👄 👁️
Dragons love it!
Another community missing on lemmy…
Tja…
There was a guy in Florida who was filmed getting amorous with a woman’s car …
sigh
zip
right in the exhaust pipe 😩
Instant subscribe
There was this chapter in an XKCD book talking about where does tire particles goes. From memory, it said “there are many answers to that question and none of them are good”.
I love cars. I also wish my city had realistic public transport options that worked for my commute.
Trains are the real solution.
Bro-dozer pickups weighing 9000+ pounds are the biggest problem.
This isn’t a hard problem to solve technicaly… it’s just a social problem.
Vehicles are now over weight and over powered. Laws could fix this. No one needs a 4000lb car with 600hp.
Weirdly, electric cars are also worse for tire abrasion since they tend to be heavier. Trains and electric bikes (in cities) seems like a good way to go
Heavier, and they generate a lot of instant torque. Small EVs don’t have this issue.
Legislative really. It all goes back to the Chicken Tax.
It has a lot to do with the supersizing of vehicles for sure.
Which tracks with the super sizing of asses.
It’s long been known most of the microplastics come from tires and clothing.
The stuff from tires is in the air and the environment as road run off and the stuff from clothing is in the water from washing it.
This is where legislation is required, to start limiting tire dangerous particles emissions. 🤷♂️
EU7 will take particle emissions from tires and brakes into account.
What account though, do you have more info?
I wonder what those limits will be, how much big tire and big breaking will lobby. I’d like to also see sticker on tires (like the ones we have for energy) or at least clear data on datasheets.
Mission accomplished.
Or we can just use publicly accessible information to find out who’s making these products and correct there.
I’d assume that all tires are more or less culprit - but yes, if better and worst tires are exposed, it’d be good.
*urban microplastics (because most nano- and microplastics released into the environment come from commercial fishing by far)
Fuck I wish so many cities aren’t designed to be car centric. Imagine QoL improvements
Yes, but the all new 2028 Ford Mustang Mach-E comes with a HEPA cabin filter and racing tires guaranteed to last half the time they would on a Corolla. You can take advantage now of Ford’s More Than You Can Afford Event, and get yourself into a Mustang with Always-Low* payments across a 122 month term!
~* Always-Low payments subject to increase; does not include seven nigh mandatory monthly subscriptions~
It’s so crazy that the 144 month term is only barely an exaggeration.
It’s not
You can finance a Maserati today for 180 months.
Woodside Payment: $2,395 for 180 month term
The tilde is so out of place but is it?
I love how the 12² isn’t explained, so it’s really just 144 months of payments.
Toss in the all-weather floor mats and you got a deal.
We need to get cars out of cities. A blanket ban. Only emergency vehicles, and maybe small trucks for deliveries, and cars for people with disabilities. That’s it.
Imagine how beautiful, safe, silent our cities would be.
Step 1: rebuild all the infrastructure
Sort out public transport, make it very attractive, even free. Charge for cars, parking, etc, with suspension for needs like disability, hospital appointments, that kind of thing.
The political capital required for such an agenda is immense.
I don’t think you realize the level of Stockholm syndrome created by cars. When you spend more than 50k on a car, of course you don’t want the government to ban it or make it harder for you to justify your purchase.
It’s been done so it’s possible and of course change is hard.
I’d allow:
- emergency vehicules
- trucks of any size for deliveries (depending on the road of course)
- vehicules for professional needs (eg. a manual worker who works in many places ans needs to carry his equipment)
- cars for people with disabilities (while still offering special transport, and making the general public transport as accessible as possible)
so, what alternative do we have to plastic tires? do we just go back to using extract from the rubber tree?
Reducing the use of cars would help.
If only there was a way
Fewer cars
that’s not going to happen. if we’re going to think up solutions, let’s think up ones that are likely or reasonable.
*in cities
less car usage in cities can definitely happen
A societal change against commuting for work would help too. I have a half hour commute now which is kind of as good as it gets around here unless u work on the same town but I used to drive. A hour one way for work every day. I know people that drove more than that on a daily basis!
It’s already happening, at least in Europe, cities have special limited traffic zone where only residents can enter and some cities are starting to gradually ban EURO 3, 4, 5, and even 6.
That is the most reasonable and achievable solution. Nothing else would really change things, as tires need to be made of durable materials that shed durable microparticles as they wear. Even trains do this, but because they carry people more efficiently, the impact is lessened. It’s never wise to bet on magic materials when the magic materials of the past are at the root of the problem.
We need a decades long change in both the economy and the way we live to fix most environmental problems. The solutions always exist, but we rarely implement them because power decides the future, not a quest for human well-being. Unless some country gets more powerful or some people become richer, it doesn’t happen. In this case, a solution will only be reached when cars are so disfavored by the country and market that the transition happens naturally.
Mass transit is a likely and reasonable solution, but they want you in cars, slaves to the oil magnates. We used to have e fully electric transit grids before the 50’s until cars began to be widely adopted. Car companies killed them off.
We also had more trollies in mid-sized cities until the tire lobby persuaded city governments to invest in buses.
They didn’t persuade them, they bought the companies and then killed them off. My town had a pretty extensive trolley system, the remnants of which still exist as bike and walking trails further from downtown. The infrastructure for it is still visible and it’s a painful reminder of what could have been. Instead we get a routine traffic problem in a town of only 160k.
That’s just the easiest solution.
Using other materials are less convenient.
Our current car use per capita is unsustainable.
Either we reduce it, or we reduce human reproduction and survival rates.
Yeah fuck you buddy its already happening whether you like it or not. Car dependency is dying and public transport and walkable cities are our future.
You don’t like it go move to your local dying ponzi scheme suburban stroad.
Cars that fly above the road
I don’t trust normal drivers, you really trust people to fly their cars safely?
I’m not talking about full blown flying. Just hover above the road a few feet.
Trains
Steel tyres. They’d also look better!
Metal would wear out too fast on asphalt/concrete though. What if we used metal tyres on metal roads? Less friction, less abrasion! It’d be expensive though to replace the whole road. Maybe just a pair of strips the same width as the tyre spacing. Cars could even connect to each other to reduce aerodynamic drag… Nah, would never work
Yeah, there was a video a little while back that said that one of the only real sets of tyres that are pure rubber these days are plane tyres because of the huge strain put on them as soon as touchdown is made.
In other news, US automakers are rolling out new vehicles that burn rubber at twice the current rate while offering a blistering 15mpg.
Electric vehicle are major culprits, no? They literally weigh tons more than ICE, a lot more friction between rubber and road and therefore more tire wear?
It’s a little trickier than that. My Mustang MachE weighs about 4900lbs. The Ford Escape, a similar vehicle by the same manufacturer weighs 3300lbs, so my EV is about 1.5 times more car than the ICE equivalent. However, my car uses regenerative braking, and there is a huge reduction in brake dust from EVs, which some quick googling says can make up to 55% of non-emmission related airborne particulate matter in urban areas. Not to mention that the EV releases 0% (or maybe like 30% depending on the power infrastructure) of the “tail pipe” emissions of a comparable ICE car.
It’s all kinda moot since the majority of brake dust and tire particulates come from the 80,000lb semi trucks.
I’m not doing a deep dive on any of the particulate emissions listed. It’s a complex field, and I’d consider those numbers as “factoids at best” but it a least gives us a ballpark number.
Then you gotta ask yourself how you’d compare microplastics vs other types of pollution.
Tricky question, gets back to the whole, “I’m a part time internet shit poster and not a pollution expert” bit. I think that the impacts of microplastic pollution is serious and needs to be reduced where possible and regulated when it can’t be reduced. I also think that the concern about MPs is valid and serious, but a bit overblown. I’ll leave you with the last bit to think about as well: There will never be another person born on this planet without microplastics in their body.
There’s always a trade-off of harm humans are causing themselves and the planet. My hope is that one day we are plastic and we will be enriching ourselves instead.
If they’re using the stock low rolling resistance tires, there’s actually less friction.
Not to say that’s necessarily a good thing, since it’s easier to spin the tires with all the extra ev torque.
The computer stops you from spinning the wheels. I chirped the tires on my CRZ making a measly 150lb-ft way more than I’ve ever chirped my MachE GT at 600lb-ft…which is 0 times. I think most the tire wear is going to come from turning/cornering in this case.
Lol the 80kw motor in my Ford c-max chirps the tires every 3rd takeoff, and like 90% of the time when roads are moist. Could just be because my model is a compliance car, but the traction control suuuucks.
You don’t have to floor the pedal every time. Maybe they should only unlock max torque on kick down.
More to save the car industry than the planet, surely.
Urban air problems are many, so it’s better to not live in an Urb
For your health!
I live on the bleeding edge of a small town. This is reason #476 why I’ll never live in a city again.
Yep, it’s great to have room to breathe and do what you want, and still have a reasonable access to basic stuff nearby like groceries, general supplies. In the old days, living outside the city meant that it was hard to get anything that’s not common, boring, or basic. You’d have to drive to a Big City to get any kind of unusual stuff like skateboards or guitars. But we have online shopping now and you can get anything you want shipped to your doorstep, so I have no need for the city.
working to get food is also good for my health so i’ll keep living in the urb for the foreseeable future
“Jobs only exist in big cities” because no one else outside of cities is able to make a living… all areas other than cities must therefore be uninhabited
you know what happens when more people live together in one place and there are enough jobs for all the people living there? it becomes a city (it doesn’t need to be big, it only needs a lot of cars)
For real though I seriously wonder.
Outside of the bigger cities I’ve lived it’s like, people are working fast food or gas stations and other service labor or like, really niche stuff like oil industry (yuck), or some other industrial or farming occupations.
I know lots of people live in rural areas, dunno how many commute or how far, and I always was just like “Okay but what does everybody do?!”
I wouldn’t mind living somewhere less dense-urban, but geeze, I feel like it’d be even harder to find a fit than in the city, and it feels like it’d be a trap where you couldn’t make enough to move away.
I’d love to be wrong, assuming we’re not talking about the top 10% of programmers that have a lucrative telecommute contract via starlink or some crap lol.
Like stuff an average person is capable of without requiring a ridiculous amount of luck or extremely niche in-demand education.
Generally people commute to jobs within a reasonable distance, from where they live if they can’t find a nearby job that’s good enough.
For example if you lived in the area of Edinburg, Illinois (population about 1000) you would have the jobs listed here available within 35 miles: https://www.indeed.com/l-edinburg,-il-jobs.html
In a semi-rural area like that, it’s only going to take you about 30 minutes to drive 30 miles on highways. It’s not like driving through 30 miles of city. It’s common for rural folks to have a 30 minute to 1 hour daily commute to work.
Remote work is really what’s best though.
Wouldn’t tire abrasion be rubber?
Most vehicle tyres have moved a way from entirely rubber construction a while ago and will contain multiple additives such as polymers to improve performance, lifespan etc.
Some may even be made entirely of synthetic rubber but I don’t know if they are widely used or at all.
that’s my thought: would moving back to pure rubber solve the microplastic problem?
I suspect there isn’t enough natural rubber supply in the world for our needs.
