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Evidence mounts on toxic pollution from tires
- jschveibinz 3y ago[flagged]
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoCan’t tell if you are saying that growing up breathing rubber smoke is just fine, or that reporting that widely used chemicals are toxic is fear-mongering. Or both.
- telchar 3y agoWhat an asinine no-information comment. If you think you have have something of substance to say on the topic, say that.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- swader999 3y agoSo maybe not the best material for playgrounds.
- dTal 3y agoThe risks seem to come from tire dust, which obviously is only generated when a tire rolls along the ground. So it's probably not all that bad for playgrounds.
- candiddevmike 3y agoYou don't think tire shreds rubbing together when kids run, jump, or land on them create dust? Tire shred playgrounds always remind me of the Sigur Ros Untitled 1 / Vaka music video.
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoNot to nearly the same extent as when they're carrying a 3,000 pound vehicle down miles and miles of rough asphalt, no.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Almondsetat 3y agoI don't think children cause the wear and tear of 18 wheelers, no
- swader999 3y agoI've seen kids eat the stuff.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Airsinner 3y agoYou've seen neglectful parenting then, which would exist irrespective of what material playgrounds are built from.
- kyleee 3y agoIt’s actually quite a high bar for a parent to completely prevent unintended items from being put in a child’s mouth. I suspect you either don’t have children or you are an extremely militant helicopter parent if you can tell us with a straight face you’ve met that bar.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoWhile it may be a full time job, keeping toxic materials out of your child's mouth is one of the primary responsibilities of a parent. This is not a high bar.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoOh, get a grip. If parenting was really critical for their development, then it would be on my infant's YouTube playlist.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoI think there's a Bluey episode about not eating the recycled tires on the playground...
- redtexture 3y agoRubber crumbles are a base layer under astroturf. Thus a very large number of hig h school fields have astroturf and rubber crumbles. On pro-football broadcasts, you can occasionally see clouds of rubber dust during a tackle.
- hedora 3y agoKids that play soccer goalie on astroturf fields (ground up tire base) have an absurdly high cancer rate. But, causation is hard to prove in court, so cancer for kids it is!
- nvy 3y ago>absurdly high cancer rate Source please.
- beachy 3y agoWe just brought home some old tires to plant pineapples in. Maybe time for a rethink.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoThe tires themselves are pretty inert, it's the constant road friction tearing off tiny little pieces of it and spewing it intot he air that's the problem. I wouldn't worry about using tires as building material.
- _vertigo 3y agoThat seems to be contradicted by the article
- liquidpele 3y agommmm, wouldn’t say they’re inert… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef
- GuB-42 3y agoThe article doesn't say the tires are not inert. It says that the stuff they use to hold the tires in place didn't hold. So instead of a nice reef, you had thousands of lose tires smashing marine life that tried to settle there.
- tzs 3y agoThat looks like it failed because the bands that were supposed to keep the bundles of tires together corroded. The tires then were free to move around in the currents, which destroyed any life that had been growing on them and prevented any new life from attaching. It also let them collide with natural reefs and damage them.
- liquidpele 3y agoHmm, I remember reading about it leaching chemicals too, but guess that’s not in the wiki so maybe wasn’t sourced /shrug
- chmaynard 3y ago[flagged]
- thesh4d0w 3y agoBeing a dick isn't a good way to get positive engagement.
- sidfthec 3y agoStrange tone to the article. Very adversarial and doomy. Sounds like 6PPD is essentially required for modern tires. People are researching alternatives but haven't scaled any yet. Other emissions from modern tires are also bad. People are researching alternatives but haven't scaled any yet. Regulatory agencies are pushing to speed this up. What's the issue? It sounds like things are working as intended.
- irq 3y agoThe issue is this shouldn’t have happened in the first place. We as a society should have learned from, at least, the debacle that was leaded gasoline and its impact on populations over generations.
- sidfthec 3y agoI'm not sure what you mean. What would the alternative world look like in this case? Less safe / a lack of tires until we confirm every chemical used isn't dangerous? I don't think that's a good trade off. We still don't have good alternatives in 2023, let alone in the last 100 years.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoAnd DDT, and mercury thermometers, and Teflon, and the list goes on... It's a fundamental fact: introducing anything new to an environment disrupts the status quo. In a living environment, that means health problems for living things. You either stop creating synthetic materials or you have unforeseen consequences. You can mandate more research and more rigorous standards, but that has diminishing returns. Some things will slip past.
- dkarl 3y agoDoomy? The tone seems balanced and pragmatic to me. Nothing in the article implies an existential threat or takes a doomer perspective. The subject is depressing, but if that bothers you, you should probably skip environmental news altogether. > What's the issue? It sounds like things are working as intended. Studying and reporting about pollution is part of how things work as intended. Maybe you sincerely expected something different when you clicked the link, but it comes off like you're seeking out this material and then complaining that it exists.
- zhrvoj 3y agoWelcome to the truth. Tires wear and all of that stays on the road, or next to the roads, seas, oceans. Years...tires... And then, we have to sort each plastic HDPE bag to save the Earth. Feel guilt if we don't. Ok that. I hope that they are sorting waste in Ukraine. Otherwise, my efforts are in vane.
- nirvdrum 3y agoThe indignity! Don't do it if you don't want to, but let's not pretend sorting a plastic bag is a major imposition. Just because something is a worse polluter doesn't mean we can't improve anything else.
- ejb999 3y agosort them if you want, but more than 90% of the stuff that is sorted and 'recycled' doesn't actually get recycled - its gets buried or burned just like regular trash. Much better to not generate it in the first place, i.e. make a conscious effort to reduce what you buy and consume where possible. "This will likely come as no surprise to longtime readers, but according to National Geographic, an astonishing 91 percent of plastic doesn’t actually get recycled. This means that only around 9 percent is being recycled. As if that weren’t enough, nearly all of that plastic that does get recycled is actually downcycled, which means it gets less and less useful every time, eventually becoming so flimsy that it can no longer be recycled properly. As it is, that 91 percent just sits in landfills, piling up and breaking down slowly into arguably more dangerous microplastics. National Geographic reports that by 2050, approximately 12 billion metric tons of plastic will be sitting in landfills across the globe. For scale, that amount of plastic weighs approximately 35,000 times more than the whole Empire State Building."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DoingIsLearning 3y ago"Seventy-eight percent of ocean microplastics are synthetic tire rubber, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trust." How true is this? Seems like we have been focusing on the wrong sources if this is true?
- sp332 3y agoA recent study shows that ocean microplatics were overestimated. https://phys.org/news/2023-08-plastic-litter-oceans-overestimated-persist.html https://phys.org/news/2023-08-plastic-litter-oceans-overesti... Most of the platic is in larger pieces. So it seems probable that focus was misplaced, yeah.
- myshpa 3y agoDepends. Those macroplastics haven't degraded yet. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64889284 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64889284 Oceans littered with 171 trillion plastic pieces The concentration of plastics in the oceans has increased from 16 trillion pieces in 2005, data suggests. It could nearly triple by 2040 if no action is taken, scientists warn. https://www.seaspiracy.org/facts https://www.seaspiracy.org/facts 150 milion tons of plastic in the sea, 1 garbage truck every minute, 46% of plastic in the pacific garbage patch is fishing nets
- ars 3y ago78% by number not by amount (mass). The tire particles are incredibly small, so there are lots of them.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoYour lungs and bloodstream are also very small and numbers matter too
- foxes 3y ago[flagged]
- notacoward 3y agoThere will be mostly two kinds of response to this article. (1) Cars and trucks are evil, get rid of them. (2) Too bad, nothing we can do, get over it. Neither is helpful. We're going to need lots of tires for a long time. Trains don't (and can't) go everywhere. Bikes can't carry everything, and any imaginable bike that could would have the exact same problem. Trucks of all kinds, and buses, are indispensable and need tires. The question is how to make the tires better. Fortunately-people are working on this. Bridgestone: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/04/eco-friendly-tires-bridgestone-goes-green-in-new-tire-test/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/04/eco-friendly-tires-brid... Goodyear: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/goodyear-unveils-90-sustainable-material-demonstration-tire-approved-for-road-use-301713430.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/goodyear-unveils-90... (specifically using soybean oil in place of 6PPD) What we need to do is not argue tires vs. no tires, but keep the pressure on these makers and others to continue developing less-harmful tires. And the best way to do that is with our wallets. If there's demand for less toxic and more sustainable tires, they're more likely to be made. We also need to reduce the average weight of passenger vehicles, and reduce the need for vehicular travel to accomplish daily needs. That includes everything from urban design to WFH, but those efforts are largely orthogonal to the issue at hand.
- robertlagrant 3y agoBut I'm 23 with no family in Amsterdam with a remote role and I get around on a bike just fine?
- notacoward 3y agoHow did that bike get to you? How did the food get to your grocery store before you rode there? (Hint: it's not trains and boats. Go watch the traffic on a highway some time and you'll be disabused of that notion.) How did all of the transport involved in your furniture's manufacture and final delivery occur? Even if we completely got rid of passenger cars, there would still be plenty of tires on the road and there would still be a need to make them more environmentally friendly. Your response is a non sequitur. I already said we need to reduce the need for vehicular travel to accomplish daily needs. What more do you want, that doesn't fall into the useless "get rid of them" bucket? And yes, I realize your comment might have been satire, but - as another commenter amply demonstrates - some people here say that kind of thing with no irony whatsoever. P.S. for the aforementioned un-ironic picador: As I already said, we should address this problem in many ways. "Reduce trips" is one part of the equation, but doesn't eliminate the need to make the trips that remain more ecologically benign. Suggesting that this is "don't address the last 1%" is a total strawman, more insulting to people's intelligence than anything I've said and more injurious to the curious conversation that the guidelines recommend.
- ejb999 3y agoand unfortunately, EV's are worse than ICE cars of similar size, because of the extra weight - so they can go thru tires 30% faster. "Increased tire wear can also contribute to air quality issues. In Oslo, Norway, where electric vehicles make two-thirds of registered vehicles but a higher proportion of traffic, the "air has unhealthy levels of microscopic particles generated partly by the abrasion of tires and asphalt," The New York Times reports." from here: https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-unexpected-problem-with-evs-they-tire-quickly https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-unexpected-problem-with-evs-t...
- lowbloodsugar 3y agoHere we go. Funny how we are just learning this now! And EVs are the problem. Not the giant SUVs and trucks!
- lowbloodsugar 3y agoFunny how now that electric vehicles are winning, it turns out that, no, it’s tires that are bad and gosh look EVs have more tire wear because they are heavier. Regular people with regular sized EVs must be taxed more than gas cars!! (But of course not trucks and SUVs)
- hedora 3y agoThe article contains a caveat that tailpipe emissions only recently were reduced below tire emissions, and even then only in some places. Also, EV’s produce much less brake dust, and the article doesn’t compare that decrease to the 20% increase in tire dust. Anyway, this mathematical bound holds in the absolute worst case for EV’s. If tailpipe emissions used to be 51% of the problem and brakes were zero, then switching entirely to EVs would leave us with 60% as much particulate emission as we had before. It’s likely much lower than 60% of course.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hackermatic 3y agoI support EVs over gas cars, and small gas cars over SUVs, but any of those will always be worse for the environment (in terms of resource and land use, emissions, and traffic noise) than more mass transit and a built environment that is convenient to get around without cars.
- roflchoppa 3y agoIs there a place where I can lab test my soil? Just over our fence is a main road, we grow a bunch of veggies on our side of the fence. I wonder what’s being accumulated into our veggies.
- Symbiote 3y agoSearch for "soil testing". There should be local companies doing it, as it's a standard procedure when planning new buildings. (You can't build a new school or playground on polluted ground, for example.)
- evilduck 3y agoBut you can build a school and then dump 50 tons of shredded tires on the playground as a woodchip alternative.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoRight but you won't be growing a garden in it any time soon. So while not great it may be better than just burning.
- semi-extrinsic 3y agoThe current state of understanding of microplastics is far too inadequate for there to be any useful lab testing available to consumers. For example TFA talks about 6PPD-q which is acutely toxic to fish, but "no one has studied the impact of 6PPD-q on human health." So we don't know if you should worry about that one. What we do know is that toxicity for aquatic animals is extremely different from toxicity in mammals. Soap, for example, is very toxic to fish. Another example that caught my eye: in one sentence there is a claim that 3.5 trillion tire microparticles are washed into the SF Bay per year. Then a couple of sentences later, there is a claim that a car emits 1 trillion microparticles per kilometer driven. So the cumulative distance driven across everyone in the Bay Area is around 2 miles per year?? When two different estimates disagree by nine orders of magnitude, you're either doing astronomy or you're doing something very wrong. Unfortunately the field of microplastics research is filled with work that is not just overly sensationalist, but that is very clearly wrong if you do a little napkin math. And almost without exception, the people involved are just plain bad at chemistry. I mean basic stuff like not understanding that a monomer has very different properties from the corresponding polymer. SMH. Edit: For soil specifically, there has been ample research showing that burying large amounts of tires in the ground is safe: "There is no evidence that tyre bales embedded in the ground represent a real or potential source of pollution, or pose a threat that water and soil quality in the vicinity will deteriorate." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7377248/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7377248/
- myshpa 3y agoThe WFH era should stay. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1001874 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1001874 Remote work can slash your carbon footprint — if done right. Remote workers can have a 54% lower carbon footprint compared with onsite workers
- hankman86 3y agoOr walk, cycle, use car pooling or public transport. Move closer to where you work, if that’s an option.
- za3faran 3y agoI'm constantly astounded at the way roads are laid out in many areas. Dumb traffic signals that turn red even when the road is empty, stop signs that can easily be replaced with yield signs, and much more. Low hanging fruit. But there are people who are just interested in talking, not fixing things.
- danielhep 3y agoMy city has been converting lights to be on timers rather than sensors to frequently give pedestrians a walk signal to improve walkability. This leads in to the concept of induced demand, which has been shown to be true over and over in urban planning. Essentially, making traffic better with smarter lights, more lanes, etc. doesn't work because it causes more people to drive their cars rather than choose alternative modes. It is much more effective from a climate standpoint to reduce driving by making it harder relative to transit, walking, and biking. Obviously the better way to do that is to make those other modes easier, rather than making driving harder, but putting resources into making driving easier certainly isn't a good idea either.
- danielhep 3y agoI'm surprised to see a lot of people in the comments falling into the same trap as people on my local Nextdoor do. Just because we can't eliminate all tires and cars and trucks doesn't mean it's not hugely beneficial to reduce the scale of their use. Reducing dependence on cars would have a huge impact on this particulate matter pollution even if your food still gets trucked to the grocery store or people still drive for some less frequent trips.
- lunias 3y agoVehicles have been getting heavier and heavier, but consumers doesn't seem to notice / care. Instead they go out and buy another SUV to park in their driveway next to the two SUVs they already own. Let's compare an SUV from 2000 to one from today: ------------------------------------------ 2000 Toyota 4Runner Weight: 3,440 to 3,975 lbs MPG: Up to 18 city / 23 highway ------------------------------------------ 2023 Toyota 4Runner Weight: 4,400 to 4,805 lbs MPG: Up to 16 city / 19 highway ------------------------------------------ After 23 years of R&D the same model of SUV gained ~1000lbs of weight and lost MPG. The 2023 model does make more horsepower and that added horsepower does offset the added weight in terms of power / weight ratio. Of course horsepower can't make up for handling, braking, fuel economy, tire / mechanical wear, etc. Electric cars push this disturbing trend even further: an SUV like the Rivian R1S weighs 7000 lbs... but don't worry you got 835 horsepower; I just hope you have some brake pads and tire tread left too. I hope we start seeing some vehicles that benefit from technology that allows them to be lighter than the vehicles from decades ago. I fear that this will not happen because light vehicles are seen as unsafe when the potential exists to be hit by a 7000 lb under-maintained SUV whose driver lost control and jumped a divider into oncoming traffic while attempting to brake after running an 11 second quarter mile while texting.