[epistasis]

Stop driving? Most microplastic in water come from tires.

I've been trying to make small moves away from car infrastructure in my town and the response is, well, less than positive.

We already tacitly accept that cars are one of the biggest causes of death. Reducing car infrastructure to reduce microplastics, where we don't even really know the harm, seems far far more challenging.

[Reason077]

> ”Most microplastic in water come from tires.”

And also synthetic clothes. According to the study they found more plastic fibres than plastic particles in many samples.

These get released when you launder your clothes, ending up in the drain water and ultimately the ocean.

Solution? Buy clothes with natural fibres (cotton, wool, etc) instead of plastics. And wash your clothes in a modern washing machine with a microfibre filter on its drain outlet.

[bordercases]

> And wash your clothes in a modern washing machine with a microfibre filter on its drain outlet.

That doesn't solve the whole problem because the microfibres eventually need disposal.

[Reason077]

Assuming you dump the sludge in the bin when you clean the filter then it’s much better than going into the ocean.

Depending on your location, they’ll either get destroyed by incineration or put in landfill where they’ll do less harm and hopefully break down after a few centuries.

Of course, if you clean the filter by flushing the sludge down the sink then you didn’t solve anything.

[bordercases]

The risk is runoff into the ocean or insertion into the water table through seepage within the dump into the soil. Furthermore incineration doesn't atomize these plastics; the smoke plumage may become a part of rain clouds which either recirculates the contaminants into the water cycle, and thus either in the local environment or into the ocean, again.

Obviously these are geography-relative concerns. But they aren't rare.

[ahazred8ta]

No. Most microplastic in water comes from washing machines. Synthetic fibers from clothes.

[epistasis]

No.

> Seventy-eight percent of ocean microplastics are synthetic tire rubber, according to one estimate.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemical...

> About 34% of the emitted coarse TWPs (tire wear particles) and 30% of the emitted coarse BWPs (brake wear particles) (100 kt yr−1 and 40 kt yr−1 respectively) were deposited in the World Ocean. These amounts are of similar magnitude as the total estimated direct and riverine transport of TWPs and fibres to the ocean (64 kt yr−1).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17201-9

[cma]

Each time you clean your dryer lint trap I think you inhale more microplastics than a lifetime of food.

[fnordpiglet]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43023-x

[city_guy_1]

source?

[cma]

"I think." Just from eyeballing the amount of dust in the air when the sun shines on it while scraping it off.

[gwbas1c]

> No.

Water pollution from brake and tire dust, (and oil drippings,) is well proven. If you build infrastructure to handle runoff from roads, you need to mitigate pollution in that runoff too.

> Most microplastic in water comes from washing machines. Synthetic fibers from clothes.

I know less about that but from what I've skimmed it appears to be true too.

[anonymous_pro_]

What town is that? It seems like the success of diversifying away from cars depends on the place and how it grew. LA, for example, grew at the time of peak automobile infrastructure investment and it's basically unrecoverable at this point. There are probably other reasons why places like LA are so locked in to cars now, but that's the one that seems obvious to me.

[epistasis]

It's a town with one of the highest percentages of bike commuters in the state, actually.

However there's also a regressive aspect that refuses to make any accommodations for anything except cars, and these people have veto power over non-car infrastructure. There is no built-in veto power for new car infrastructure, and in fact existing law requires car infrastructure as a base for any sort of building, for example parking minimums.

Most of the city was built 1960-1980, so based on car designs. But it's small enough that small amounts of change would eliminate car dependence.

[tppiotrowski]

I think of tires as being made of rubber. Where does the plastic come from?

[I_Am_Nous]

>Tire factories start with bulk raw materials such as synthetic rubber (60% -70% of total rubber in the tire industry[2][3]), carbon black, and chemicals and produce numerous specialized components that are assembled and cured.

Looks like most of the rubber used these days is synthetic[1], usually made of styrene and butadiene which could easily degrade into base monomers or at least shorter chains.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire_manufacturing

[emptybits]

Car and light truck tires are apparently only about 19% rubber.[1] More than half of a tire's composition is synthetic polymers, fillers, and textiles (e.g. polyester, rayon, nylon).

[1] https://www.ustires.org/whats-tire-0

Tires generate more particles of pollution than exhaust.[2] EVs are good. But eliminating car exhaust apparently isn't the big car pollution problem.

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...

[haltist]

A car tire is not purely rubber, it is combined with synthetic polymers derived from petroleum and petroleum derivatives (same as plastics).

[Solvency]

Not just tires. Your clothes being washed.

[olalonde]

> Stop driving?

Not a realistic solution. The vast majority of people will take the microplastics over not driving.

[epistasis]

You say "vast" but we have to outlaw non-car options and legislate that only car options are allowed for nearly all our land.

If we were to even legalize non-car options, we might discover what the market actually wants. And the necessity of those laws kind of shows that the non-car option must be legally suppressed to prevent its true market preference from being revealed.

To everyone who thinks that the "vast majority" of people prefer driving, I say: show the confidence of your convictions and make it legal to build other options.

[olalonde]

> legalize non-car options

What do you mean by that? Which non-car options are outlawed?

[epistasis]

Dense walkable neighborhoods like you'd find in most parts of Europe.

[glial]

Until the concentration is high enough it affects birth rates.

[fnordpiglet]

Birth rates isn’t what motivates people. It’s the act that creates births that people care about. To that end, until it causes impotence.

[QuarterReptile]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but birth rates are already pretty low, and, worse than failing to deal with the problem, some people think that is a good thing.

[jay_kyburz]

Falling birth rates _is_ a good thing and in my view its the only viable solution to global warming. Less people is less energy use and pollution.

[malka]

It might already do.

[ironmagma]

Stopping driving is only the beginning. Much more impactful would be to reduce the overall population's driving through legislation/taxation.

[psunavy03]

Ah, yes. Where adopting a fringe belief isn't enough, we need to force it on other people, too.

[ironmagma]

Whether it's fringe has no impact on whether it's true.