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Tire toxicity faces fresh scrutiny after salmon die-offs
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- trvs 2y ago[dead]
- HPsquared 2y agoThere's a connection there: recycled tyre rubber is used a LOT in playgrounds (soft floor surface, etc.) https://www.cpsc.gov/Safety-Education/Safety-Education-Centers/Crumb-Rubber-Safety-Information-Center https://www.cpsc.gov/Safety-Education/Safety-Education-Cente...
- mistrial9 2y agosome links from Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=jennifer+mcintyre+salmon&btnG=&oq=jennifer+mcintyre https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=jenn... " a Ph.D. student, Haoqi Nina Zhao, suggested a new way to separate out chemicals that led to a prime suspect. But they couldn’t test it, because they didn’t know what it was. “It’s almost like you have a fingerprint,” Dr. Tian said. “But you really don’t know who this is, because in your database, this fingerprint doesn’t exist.” Dr. Tian’s “aha!” moment came one morning. Guessing that the mystery chemical had transformed from a substance originally added to the tire, he looked for a compound whose carbon and nitrogen molecules matched, ignoring the oxygen and hydrogen, since the latter are more likely to be altered when a chemical transforms. In an Environmental Protection Agency report on tire rubber, he found a match: an antioxidant called 6PPD. The researchers ordered the smallest amount they could, about a pound of purple pellets. When they oxidized the substance, the resulting chemical looked just like the one they had worked so hard to isolate from the tire water. It was time to test this version, 6PPD-quinone, on the salmon. “I find it incredibly sad to watch fish die,” Dr. Kolodziej said. “You’re just watching these fish struggle. And yet you’re happy you understand why.” The killer was the 6PPD-quinone from the tires in the roadway runoff. “The analysis that they did is really amazing,” said Nancy Denslow, a professor and director of aquatic toxicology at the University of Florida who was not affiliated with the study. She also praised the large number of authors. “It’s wonderful to see big groups of people coming together to solve problems,” she said. “Group science is fantastic.” -- How Scientists Tracked Down a Mass Killer (of Salmon) https://www.asf.ca/how-scientists-tracked-down-a-mass-killer-of-salmon/ https://www.asf.ca/how-scientists-tracked-down-a-mass-killer...
- Chris2048 2y agoI don't understand how testing toxicity of chemicals, and their oxides, is not a standard part of allowing them in manufacture?..
- Tiktaalik 2y ago[flagged]
- zonkerdonker 2y agoThere are hundreds of distinct chemical compounds in tires. This one in particular is very harmful to salmon. It's it harmful to bison? What about cicadas? It's a problem of scale, greed, perverse incentives, and capitalism. I'm sure there's some amount of testing involved, and I'm also sure that Dow Chemical has made many lobbyists very wealthy in order to keep that testing as cheap and as minimal as possible.
- LarryDarrell 2y agoPerhaps tires can be made less toxic, but over all, we need to prioritize driving less. WFH means I put barely 3000 miles per year on my car. It's absurd we are not aggressively promoting WFH or hybrid WFH at the national level. It's the easiest win for the environment and it's right there for the taking.
- tristor 2y agoSame here, been WFH since 2015, however I did do a lot of driving for other reasons previously. Since 2022 however I drive less than 7000 miles a year, and that includes a family road trip each year for the holidays that is ~2500 miles round-trip. One thing that bothers me is that insurance is getting extremely expensive where I live, even though I hardly drive and my car is garaged year-round due to the greatly increasing amounts of vehicle theft. I've considered a few times just not having a car and renting a car regularly, but services like ZipCar have pretty much died out and I don't live in a city center where they still sometimes exist. I drive on average just once per week, if I could that for a fully-laden cost of less than $500/mo it would be cheaper to rent than buy, but it doesn't seem like there's anyone that's captured this market.
- njarboe 2y agoDo you have full coverage on your car? You should consider dropping that. Vehicle theft should not be increasing liability costs that much.
- tristor 2y agoI am required to carry full coverage because my car is financed. Even when I've paid a car off, I still carry full coverage, because liability-only policies tend to not help in my past experiences mostly due to the absolute epidemic of uninsured/unregistered cars on American roadways.
- LeifCarrotson 2y agoI can call my insurance agent and take a vehicle (seldom-used winter beater truck in the summer, or seldom-used summer car in the winter) on or off the road at a whim, prorating my premium appropriately. That sucks for usability, but I wonder if there exists a market for 'smart insurance' where I can log into a webpage or use an app to put it on or off a car. But the real answer, I think, is getting a quote for your actual mileage. You're driving 7000 miles a year and being lumped into a risk group with people who are driving two or three times as much: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm Unfortunately, I've found that mileage doesn't have a big impact on my premiums.
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- bdamm 2y agoTragedy of the commons?
- thefaux 2y agohttps://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/garrett-hardin https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/indi...
- moomoo3000 2y agoCould increased street sweeping help?
- bamboozled 2y agoI’d almost guarantee the bristles on a street sweeper are also leaching insane amounts of toxic crap into the environment. I bet they’re plastic…
- carom 2y agoThey are metal, you find them in the road sometimes.
- nosrepa 2y agoYou can make an alright set of lock picks out of them.
- basil-rash 2y agoThey’re metal. Plastic would not stand up to the task.
- bamboozled 2y agoActually some good news then :)
- 13of40 2y agoThey're actually steel, and if you keep an eye out you can find them all over the place.
- ravenstine 2y agoIf performed correctly, maybe. I'm not convinced that street sweeping in most cities much but a low-level scam so the city can cash in on parking violations. In LA, I've seen street sweepers my whole life going around and mostly kicking around dry material and moving so fast that they barely pick up anything, often followed by a parking enforcer some kind of golf cart type vehicle. Street sweeping makes more sense when the debris is big and wet enough to be swept up, which may not be the case for most tire debris. If it's tire particulate, street sweeping might make things worse by making it more airborne.
- liminal 2y agoI'd like to see a weight tax on vehicles. Lighter vehicles have less tire wear, so less pollution. They also require less energy to move, so less emissions. Plus lighter vehicles would improve pedestrian safety.
- capitainenemo 2y agoInteresting idea. Apparently road damage goes up with the 4th power of the weight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law) Really trucks are probably not paying their fair share in that regard. I wonder how it would be implemented in practice given how variable vehicle weights are depending on how they are being used. Weigh stations like they use for trucks? It might also be a solution for gas taxes being insufficient to maintain roads as vehicles transition to electric. And in concert with the much higher weight of electric vehicles due to batteries still sucking at power density (maybe it would increase interest in things like aluminium-air)
- chongli 2y agoYes and so what makes the most sense is to make the tax increase with the 4th power of vehicle weight multiplied by the miles they travel. This way there are no perverse incentives. Everyone pays their fair share according to how much damage they cause.
- eldaisfish 2y agoTying a tax to distance travelled requires accurate reporting of distance travelled. How is that not a perverse incentive?
- chongli 2y agoWe shouldn't care if you want to buy a 10,000 lb electric truck if you leave it parked in your driveway all year round. If we're not taxing based on distance then the perverse incentive is to drive big trucks until they fall to pieces.
- cbsmith 2y agoI'm kind of stunned that we're just now getting a handle on problems with tire particulates. It's been roughly a century.
- r00fus 2y agoConvenient for the auto industry that it's been overlooked for so long...
- cbsmith 2y agoVery.
- singularity2001 2y agoHow long did it take to become consensus that smoking is in fact not healthy?
- cbsmith 2y agoIt'd didn't take nearly that long for us to start to identify that there was a problem there. Making the case that it required a regulatory response definitely took really long, which I expect will happen again this time.
- lonelyasacloud 2y agoI'm not. Default assumption in the West is if it's not medicine and it doesn't kill immediately it's good to go. Some time later, usually quite a lot, a tiny group of independent scientists end up being interested enough to scientifically prove that bloody obvious scaling problem is a problem. But by that time usually much money and politics is tied up in it. To that mix, then add in legislatures that even when they are independent have processes and bandwidth largely optimised for the pace of change from the age of sail and we end up with an endless stream of doh moments. One glimmer of hope here is at least it looks like getting it sorted might take slightly less time than lead pipes.
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- b800h 2y agoI'm similarly concerned about the horrible tiny rubber pellets used in latest-generation astroturf pitches. IIRC they used to be made from used tyres but now aren't - does that just mean they're processed? Where does the rubber come from and where does it go afterwards?
- trgn 2y agoMy neighbor on one side maintains their virginal lawn with copious amounts of roundup, the neighbor on the other has a facsimile in astroturf. We will wallow, willingly, in trash, breathing fumes, particle dust, just because of an imitative, aesthetic fad. It's absolutely incredible to me.
- glorpsicle 2y agoIf you don't mind my asking, how do you maintain your property? It may be illustrative to see what some of the alternatives to the scenarios you described with your neighbors might be.
- trgn 2y agoI mow and weed wack. Looks tidy, but lawn is mix of weeds and grass.
- goda90 2y ago"Weed" is in the eye of the beholder. If it's not a harmful invasive plant then really the only reason to not want it is aesthetics or because it impacts what you want to do with a space.
- rrrix1 2y agoWeeds are just unwanted grasses, flowers and hedges. Sounds like you like all of your lawn plants, so you don't actually have any "weeds." That's how I do it too. It's the right thing for our planet.
- autoexec 2y agoI'd mostly agree, although it's worth mentioning that there are certain invasive species and harmful plants that are best to get rid of however you can. It might be worth taking a look at what's growing even for people who aren't interested in pulling weeds.
- everforward 2y ago
- gregwebs 2y agoPutting EV subsidies instead into electrifying and enhancing train transit seems like a better approach to combat this. A lot of mass transit trains are still diesel powered and pollute heavily (although on a per person basis might be much better than driving cars). I am wondering if a bus is better or worse for tire pollution per capita?
- dzhiurgis 2y agowell bus will pollute something like 10,000x more over EV. If you tax them accordingly you might as well take taxi.
- commandlinefan 2y ago... and allowing as many people who can realistically work from home do so would go a long way toward alleviating this. But managers don't believe you're working unless they see your face in person, so keep on commuting...
- asdasdsddd 2y agoI've been trying to fish for coho salmon for a while in the bay area, but I just never found one :(