this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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Here's another "fun" fact, with every 3 miles you drive you will polite about 1 straw of microplastics from the cars tires.
Here's a fun fact because I work in a lab that studies micro and nanoplastics:
Of all the plastics we have studied, tire particles are THE FUCKING ABSOLUTE WORST. They leach all sorts of nasty shit.
Source?
You know how you have to buy tires every few years because they "go bald"? As in, they've lost that material that was once tread? That material isn't just disappearing, it flies off the tires in the form of tiny particles that are in the air and water. It's actually really toxic too, way more than other plastics. Fun fact EV tires are even more toxic.
Source: I work in a toxicology lab studying microplastics.
Yes I know that, but I'm asking for your source for your claim of those exact numbers.
It's an article from a Dutch professor, unfortunately paywalled
https://fd.nl/futures/1299880/autobanden-de-grote-vergeten-vervuiler
On his linked he summarized some points
https://nl.linkedin.com/posts/carlo-van-de-weijer-961998_autobanden-de-grote-vergeten-vervuiler-activity-6532899021768400896-oinC?trk=public_profile_like_view
Google translated
Column FD
In the Netherlands, a total of around twenty million kilos of tire grit in various degrees remains in the environment every year.
**A car threw the equivalent of a plastic straw's worth of microplastics out the window every five to ten kilometers. **
You cannot remove microplastics from the water with a well-intentioned ocean filter.
Time to start working on more sustainable or, better, biodegradable tires.
While notable: That wasn't a source on the particular fact cited.
I responded somewhere above in the conservation.
It was something I heard this professor say in a podcast and there was also a newspaper article about it.
This English items doesn't say the straw bit, but it does say 4KG of microplastics during its lifetime
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/14/car-tyres-are-major-source-of-ocean-microplastics-study
After some Googling, a car tire will last about 50K miles. After 50K miles it has lost 4KG of microplastics. A car has 4 tires so 16KG.
16000 grammes per 50K miles, is almost 1 gram per 3 miles.
First Google result Straws on average weigh so little—about one sixty-seventh of an ounce or . 42 grams