14 ms·

To place this in context, it's 50,000 tons/year of fishing waste, versus 200,000 tons/year of microplastics from car tires: https://www.theguardian.com/environ

To place this in context, it's 50,000 tons/year of fishing waste, versus 200,000 tons/year of microplastics from car tires: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/14/car-tyres-are-major-source-of-ocean-microplastics-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/14/car-tyre... Further, microplastics enter the ecosystem far easier than the bulky big plastic from fishing gear, so the tire microplastics should be far more concerning to people. It's really weird how cars get a pass for so much. Try to live a life without a car, and people think you are weird, and pass laws preventing you from building a community that is accessible without a car (at least in the US). And that's before we get to the violent deaths caused by car crashes, or the wheezing deaths caused by COPD, or the quality years of life reduced by asthma from cars...

kohanz 4y ago
I'm not sure if it was your intent, but that comparison makes the fishing output seem even more outsized to me, given the size of the auto industry.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- josho 4y ago
  From a damage perspective the two couldn't be more different as well. Lost fishing gear is large bulky items that trap & kill sealife, damage habitat, etc. Whereas we aren't entirely sure what downsides micro-plastics have, I'm sure over time we'll discover issues. But, where we stand today we know that we have a clear and present danger from the fishing gear.
  - bilekas 4y ago
    > I'm sure over time we'll discover issues. But, where we stand today we know that we have a clear and present danger from the fishing gear. Whereas today, we already see the present danger of micro plastics.. Just because fishing takes part on 80% of the globe as opposed to the <20% we drive on, I think the numbers are worse. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2022.827289/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2022.8272... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/microplastics-are-in-our-bodies-how-much-do-they-harm-us#:~:text=In%20laboratory%20tests%2C%20microplastics%20have,microplastics%20and%20impacts%20on%20health https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/micro.... Maybe lets not disregard the downsides just yet. EDIT: Both are bad.. Plastic isn't helping anyone. Marine or mammal .
  - ruined 4y ago
    tire particulate is known to be toxic, up to levels that are lethal to wildlife in roadside streams https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd6951 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd6951 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0045653522004271 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
  - ericd 4y ago
    From a cleanup perspective, I'd much rather have it consolidated into relatively few large chunks...
notch656a 4y ago
Do you need recommendations on places in the US you can work in tech without a car and still enjoy the community? Because I can speak from many years of experience, it's not a difficult life to setup for yourself.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- zonotope 4y ago
  I'd love to hear these recommendations. I know you thrive without a car in New York and Boston, but I would love to hear about other places like that in the US.
  - kevinventullo 4y ago
    Chicago is doable though the winters are brutal.
    - gensym 4y ago
      Car-free is the way to go within the city of Chicago and now that I live in Southern California, the car-free lifestyle is what I miss most (other than people). It's hard to get out of town without a car. The commuter rail schedules are focused on people who live in the suburbs and commute to the city, so they aren't really an option. There's good public transit to the airports, however, so if you live car-free in Chicago, New York feels closer than Wisconsin in some ways.
    - rhino369 4y ago
      Chicago winter mornings on the open air el station platforms puts hair on your chest.
  - arebop 4y ago
    San Francisco
    - deleted 4y ago
christophilus 4y ago
Pretty sure most plastic eventually becomes microplastic. So, the fishing waste is doubly bad because it chokes and traps aquatic life while on its way to doing whatever it is that microplastics do.
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
This seems like needless injection of your pet issue into an only tangentially related subject. Cars are used for a huge fraction of the transportation in the world. It would be surprising if the oceans weren't full of tire dust and so on. (inb4 anyone construes this as an endorsement of the status quo wrt micro-plastics) The fact that the commercial fishing industry manages to dump 1/4 of the tonnage of plastic into the ocean despite only a fraction of the human man hours dedicated to its operation and a fraction of the rolling/floating stock is pretty impressive. You'd think they were just throwing nets overboard.
causality0 4y ago
It's really weird how cars get a pass for so much. It's really weird how trucks get a pass from people who don't give cars a pass. If tire wear is proportional to road wear, the majority of tire-originating microplastics is from semi trucks, not commuter sedans.
- julianlam 4y ago
  That's a whataboutism. Many countries cannot survive without long haul trucking. Many individuals can survive without a car given the right municipal commitment.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Isn’t that flawed logic? If you’re proposing that one of these issues can be fixed with more infrastructure, then couldn’t either? Rail is nice.
    - julianlam 4y ago
      Sure! Rail is nice, when the volume permits it. How would we supply the supermarket, though? A rail line would be unfeasible.
      - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
        If we wanted to redesign all our infrastructure to minimize auto and truck miles, we’d probably try to replace long-haul trucking routes with routes that pick up from local rail depots. Everyone would live near a train station (or in larger urban areas, light rail that connects to the train stations). There would be a mostly-separate freight network with depots near every population center. Trucks could be used to get goods from the depot to the store. Some long-haul routes would be needed to serve remote rural communities, and some high-priority stuff like mail delivery.
        aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
grapeskin 4y ago
Cars don’t get a free pass. But literally any time someone says X is a big source of pollution, someone always screams that Y is worse so let’s stop focusing on X. Then when people talk about Y, forget it, here’s Z and it’s the real problem. They’re all bad. It’s not like there’s one single person on earth who only has time to focus on one single problem. There’s billions.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  Ok, let's plug in X Y and Z. Suppose X is pollution due to letters-in-a-bottle thrown in the sea, Y is pollution due to humans peeing in it, and Z is pollution due to oil spills. Which problem should we focus on?
  - ri0t 4y ago
    Aah, i think i see a pattern here, now. Is the answer maybe: All three? Yes, yes, i'd like to solve: A, B and C!
  - themitigating 4y ago
    All? It's not a single person picking an enviornmental issue to work on, it's all of us. What kind of deflection are trying to pass off?
  - grapeskin 4y ago
    Did you respond to the wrong post?
- koheripbal 4y ago
  It's a classic whataboutism distraction attack on the conversation. whataboutisms aren't bad because they're wrong - they are bad because they are a distraction. Either the commenter is trying to turn the conversation to a different topic they prefer to advocate for, satisfy their ego that they know more, or they are simply attempting to disrupt discourse. In reality, the focus should be placed on solutions that have the greatest net positive impact. The size of the problems can guide, but some problems are more fundamentally difficult to solve (which makes them useful whataboutisms). Of course, if we also added the criteria of "We should only debate things on a forum that the members of the forum actually have the ability to effect change on", then 90% of political posts would disappear.
formvoltron 4y ago
Yikes. You are right and I had not thought about tires as an obvious source of microplastics. What's the solution though?
- ericd 4y ago
  Probably lighter vehicles? Wear is superlinear with weight. Unfortunately, EVs aren't great on this axis.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    A Tesla Model 3 is about 4200lbs. Most pickup trucks and midsized SUVs weigh more than this.
    - ericd 4y ago
      Eh that’s higher than the low end of an F-150, which isn’t something to be really proud of for a small car. The Model X is >5000 pounds. I think EVs are worth it overall, but something to keep in mind.
    - morsch 4y ago
      A Renault Twingo weighs about 2150 lbs. This is a sensible car which seats two comfortably and four in a pinch. It also gets 40-50 mpg. No, you can't transport your quad with it, and it's not very useful when moving house. It's also not the right car if you're currently raising three kids; most aren't. The average occupancy rate for cars is 1.5. Car taxation should scale quadratic with weight.
      - ericd 4y ago
        I think the issue with the nonlinear road wear taxation is that any fair system would have trucking paying basically 100% of the tax, and that would result in much higher goods transportation costs (I think it’s actually proportional to the 4th power of axle weight). Which I’m personally fine with, I think it’s bad policy to subsidize trucking over trains, but it’d be a big adjustment.
p1necone 4y ago
I'm sure you mean well by posting this, but comments like this aren't really helpful. Every time anything environmental gets posted here there's always someone saying "but other issue is more severe". If we take this attitude then nothing will ever be fixed. This isn't really a zero sum game - some people with the knowledge/motivation/clout can try to fix plastic waste from fishing equipment while some other people with the knowledge/motivation/clout can simultaneously try to fix plastic waste from road tyres. The fact that OP posted this specific article about fishing plastic pollution doesn't mean that they or anyone else aren't concerned by other sources of pollution, or that they're not trying to fix them too. Do you expect people to exclusively talk about the single issue that's most harmful at the exclusion of everything else? Doesn't that just result in much less getting done? This kind of whataboutism is counterproductive.
- themitigating 4y ago
  I don't think he means well. He probably doesn't care about the environment because of selfish reasons but knows you can't use that as an argument, hence the whataboutism
natch 4y ago
I read somewhere that someone looked into the mystery of where all the missing tire tread ends up, and it turns out there are microorganisms on land that digest the rubber dust from car tires. If this wasn’t the case, roads in dry areas where there is little to no water to wash it away would be absolutely piled inches high with the stuff.
mc32 4y ago
Ah! If the rest of us Americans would only adopt and adapt to an Amish lifestyle with no rubber tires, or tyres, synthetic or natural -we'd all live a more fulfilling, meaningful and verdant life. The one Grete wishes we'd all live.
- suoduandao2 4y ago
  Demographic trends indicate that future generations will do that anyway ;-)
bergenty 4y ago
No it’s not that weird, I love cars and car culture. I want to live outside of dense urban areas, have a lot of land and feel generally uncomfortable traveling in public transport. I’m not alone. People will generally look the other way when it comes to things they love.
themitigating 4y ago
Just because they are highlighting this issue doesn't mean they are giving car tires a pass.
hedora 4y ago
Microplastics are bad, but they're not a strangulation / entanglement / choking risk, which is how the fishing gear kills most wildlife.
Fezzik 4y ago
This is just a silly red herring - the two issues are not mutually exclusive and addressing the one does not detract from addressing the other. Can someone help me understand why people think that thinking this way is productive, or intelligent, or… anything positive? I truly do not understand it at all. On so many articles the top/highly rated comments are just variations of ‘oh, but this other thing is even worse!’ Why is that?
pibechorro 4y ago
This is also an issue with EVs, they are much heavier and thus create ALOT more tire wear.
sorenbs 4y ago
The big concern around fishing gear is that it is specifically designed to catch marine life, so when it is lost or deliberately discarded in the ocean, it continues to kill for years for no reason at all. The movie Seaspiracy makes this point in a very graphic way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q5CXN7soQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q5CXN7soQg This fact-check runs through all the points of the video in 15 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7QRLZp63Eo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7QRLZp63Eo
- koheripbal 4y ago
  It's hard to take that trailer for Seaspiracy seriously. > "We've all heard about blood diamonds. This is blood shrimp." ... "The solution is to leave the sea alone." It's like a high school teenager wrote this.
whiteboardr 4y ago
How about … shipping vessels? Ships in general.
justinwp 4y ago
And automobiles provide far greater benefits to society than fishing; impacting a far greater number of people.

kohanz 4y ago

I'm not sure if it was your intent, but that comparison makes the fishing output seem even more outsized to me, given the size of the auto industry.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
josho 4y ago
From a damage perspective the two couldn't be more different as well. Lost fishing gear is large bulky items that trap & kill sealife, damage habitat, etc. Whereas we aren't entirely sure what downsides micro-plastics have, I'm sure over time we'll discover issues. But, where we stand today we know that we have a clear and present danger from the fishing gear.
- bilekas 4y ago
  > I'm sure over time we'll discover issues. But, where we stand today we know that we have a clear and present danger from the fishing gear. Whereas today, we already see the present danger of micro plastics.. Just because fishing takes part on 80% of the globe as opposed to the <20% we drive on, I think the numbers are worse. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2022.827289/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2022.8272... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/microplastics-are-in-our-bodies-how-much-do-they-harm-us#:~:text=In%20laboratory%20tests%2C%20microplastics%20have,microplastics%20and%20impacts%20on%20health https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/micro.... Maybe lets not disregard the downsides just yet. EDIT: Both are bad.. Plastic isn't helping anyone. Marine or mammal .
- ruined 4y ago
  tire particulate is known to be toxic, up to levels that are lethal to wildlife in roadside streams https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd6951 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd6951 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0045653522004271 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...
- ericd 4y ago
  From a cleanup perspective, I'd much rather have it consolidated into relatively few large chunks...

notch656a 4y ago

Do you need recommendations on places in the US you can work in tech without a car and still enjoy the community? Because I can speak from many years of experience, it's not a difficult life to setup for yourself.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zonotope 4y ago
I'd love to hear these recommendations. I know you thrive without a car in New York and Boston, but I would love to hear about other places like that in the US.
- kevinventullo 4y ago
  Chicago is doable though the winters are brutal.
  - gensym 4y ago
    Car-free is the way to go within the city of Chicago and now that I live in Southern California, the car-free lifestyle is what I miss most (other than people). It's hard to get out of town without a car. The commuter rail schedules are focused on people who live in the suburbs and commute to the city, so they aren't really an option. There's good public transit to the airports, however, so if you live car-free in Chicago, New York feels closer than Wisconsin in some ways.
  - rhino369 4y ago
    Chicago winter mornings on the open air el station platforms puts hair on your chest.
- arebop 4y ago
  San Francisco
  - deleted 4y ago

christophilus 4y ago

Pretty sure most plastic eventually becomes microplastic. So, the fishing waste is doubly bad because it chokes and traps aquatic life while on its way to doing whatever it is that microplastics do.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago

This seems like needless injection of your pet issue into an only tangentially related subject. Cars are used for a huge fraction of the transportation in the world. It would be surprising if the oceans weren't full of tire dust and so on. (inb4 anyone construes this as an endorsement of the status quo wrt micro-plastics) The fact that the commercial fishing industry manages to dump 1/4 of the tonnage of plastic into the ocean despite only a fraction of the human man hours dedicated to its operation and a fraction of the rolling/floating stock is pretty impressive. You'd think they were just throwing nets overboard.

causality0 4y ago

It's really weird how cars get a pass for so much. It's really weird how trucks get a pass from people who don't give cars a pass. If tire wear is proportional to road wear, the majority of tire-originating microplastics is from semi trucks, not commuter sedans.

julianlam 4y ago
That's a whataboutism. Many countries cannot survive without long haul trucking. Many individuals can survive without a car given the right municipal commitment.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Isn’t that flawed logic? If you’re proposing that one of these issues can be fixed with more infrastructure, then couldn’t either? Rail is nice.
  - julianlam 4y ago
    Sure! Rail is nice, when the volume permits it. How would we supply the supermarket, though? A rail line would be unfeasible.
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
      If we wanted to redesign all our infrastructure to minimize auto and truck miles, we’d probably try to replace long-haul trucking routes with routes that pick up from local rail depots. Everyone would live near a train station (or in larger urban areas, light rail that connects to the train stations). There would be a mostly-separate freight network with depots near every population center. Trucks could be used to get goods from the depot to the store. Some long-haul routes would be needed to serve remote rural communities, and some high-priority stuff like mail delivery.
      - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago

grapeskin 4y ago

Cars don’t get a free pass. But literally any time someone says X is a big source of pollution, someone always screams that Y is worse so let’s stop focusing on X. Then when people talk about Y, forget it, here’s Z and it’s the real problem. They’re all bad. It’s not like there’s one single person on earth who only has time to focus on one single problem. There’s billions.

Invictus0 4y ago
Ok, let's plug in X Y and Z. Suppose X is pollution due to letters-in-a-bottle thrown in the sea, Y is pollution due to humans peeing in it, and Z is pollution due to oil spills. Which problem should we focus on?
- ri0t 4y ago
  Aah, i think i see a pattern here, now. Is the answer maybe: All three? Yes, yes, i'd like to solve: A, B and C!
- themitigating 4y ago
  All? It's not a single person picking an enviornmental issue to work on, it's all of us. What kind of deflection are trying to pass off?
- grapeskin 4y ago
  Did you respond to the wrong post?
koheripbal 4y ago
It's a classic whataboutism distraction attack on the conversation. whataboutisms aren't bad because they're wrong - they are bad because they are a distraction. Either the commenter is trying to turn the conversation to a different topic they prefer to advocate for, satisfy their ego that they know more, or they are simply attempting to disrupt discourse. In reality, the focus should be placed on solutions that have the greatest net positive impact. The size of the problems can guide, but some problems are more fundamentally difficult to solve (which makes them useful whataboutisms). Of course, if we also added the criteria of "We should only debate things on a forum that the members of the forum actually have the ability to effect change on", then 90% of political posts would disappear.

formvoltron 4y ago

Yikes. You are right and I had not thought about tires as an obvious source of microplastics. What's the solution though?

ericd 4y ago
Probably lighter vehicles? Wear is superlinear with weight. Unfortunately, EVs aren't great on this axis.
- themitigating 4y ago
  A Tesla Model 3 is about 4200lbs. Most pickup trucks and midsized SUVs weigh more than this.
  - ericd 4y ago
    Eh that’s higher than the low end of an F-150, which isn’t something to be really proud of for a small car. The Model X is >5000 pounds. I think EVs are worth it overall, but something to keep in mind.
  - morsch 4y ago
    A Renault Twingo weighs about 2150 lbs. This is a sensible car which seats two comfortably and four in a pinch. It also gets 40-50 mpg. No, you can't transport your quad with it, and it's not very useful when moving house. It's also not the right car if you're currently raising three kids; most aren't. The average occupancy rate for cars is 1.5. Car taxation should scale quadratic with weight.
    - ericd 4y ago
      I think the issue with the nonlinear road wear taxation is that any fair system would have trucking paying basically 100% of the tax, and that would result in much higher goods transportation costs (I think it’s actually proportional to the 4th power of axle weight). Which I’m personally fine with, I think it’s bad policy to subsidize trucking over trains, but it’d be a big adjustment.

p1necone 4y ago

I'm sure you mean well by posting this, but comments like this aren't really helpful. Every time anything environmental gets posted here there's always someone saying "but other issue is more severe". If we take this attitude then nothing will ever be fixed. This isn't really a zero sum game - some people with the knowledge/motivation/clout can try to fix plastic waste from fishing equipment while some other people with the knowledge/motivation/clout can simultaneously try to fix plastic waste from road tyres. The fact that OP posted this specific article about fishing plastic pollution doesn't mean that they or anyone else aren't concerned by other sources of pollution, or that they're not trying to fix them too. Do you expect people to exclusively talk about the single issue that's most harmful at the exclusion of everything else? Doesn't that just result in much less getting done? This kind of whataboutism is counterproductive.

themitigating 4y ago
I don't think he means well. He probably doesn't care about the environment because of selfish reasons but knows you can't use that as an argument, hence the whataboutism

natch 4y ago

I read somewhere that someone looked into the mystery of where all the missing tire tread ends up, and it turns out there are microorganisms on land that digest the rubber dust from car tires. If this wasn’t the case, roads in dry areas where there is little to no water to wash it away would be absolutely piled inches high with the stuff.

mc32 4y ago

Ah! If the rest of us Americans would only adopt and adapt to an Amish lifestyle with no rubber tires, or tyres, synthetic or natural -we'd all live a more fulfilling, meaningful and verdant life. The one Grete wishes we'd all live.

suoduandao2 4y ago
Demographic trends indicate that future generations will do that anyway ;-)

bergenty 4y ago

No it’s not that weird, I love cars and car culture. I want to live outside of dense urban areas, have a lot of land and feel generally uncomfortable traveling in public transport. I’m not alone. People will generally look the other way when it comes to things they love.

themitigating 4y ago

Just because they are highlighting this issue doesn't mean they are giving car tires a pass.

hedora 4y ago

Microplastics are bad, but they're not a strangulation / entanglement / choking risk, which is how the fishing gear kills most wildlife.

Fezzik 4y ago

This is just a silly red herring - the two issues are not mutually exclusive and addressing the one does not detract from addressing the other. Can someone help me understand why people think that thinking this way is productive, or intelligent, or… anything positive? I truly do not understand it at all. On so many articles the top/highly rated comments are just variations of ‘oh, but this other thing is even worse!’ Why is that?

pibechorro 4y ago

This is also an issue with EVs, they are much heavier and thus create ALOT more tire wear.

sorenbs 4y ago

The big concern around fishing gear is that it is specifically designed to catch marine life, so when it is lost or deliberately discarded in the ocean, it continues to kill for years for no reason at all. The movie Seaspiracy makes this point in a very graphic way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q5CXN7soQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q5CXN7soQg This fact-check runs through all the points of the video in 15 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7QRLZp63Eo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7QRLZp63Eo

koheripbal 4y ago
It's hard to take that trailer for Seaspiracy seriously. > "We've all heard about blood diamonds. This is blood shrimp." ... "The solution is to leave the sea alone." It's like a high school teenager wrote this.

whiteboardr 4y ago

How about … shipping vessels? Ships in general.

justinwp 4y ago

And automobiles provide far greater benefits to society than fishing; impacting a far greater number of people.