7 ms·

Just wait for the follow up study in 70 years on the microplastics and the brake and tire dust. It is amazing how much we’ve disturbed the world and our own pop

by asdff 2y ago

Just wait for the follow up study in 70 years on the microplastics and the brake and tire dust. It is amazing how much we’ve disturbed the world and our own population through industrialization. And most of it wasn’t even beneficial to us! Weigh the industrial efforts to build public infrastructure or anything collectively beneficial like medicine against the useless consumer crap product economy that is doomed for a landfill before long and its not even close. Thats the junk that’s backing up the ports and freight railways: not parts for trains or precursors for medicines. And it continues because there’s just too much money to be made for anyone to stop for a second and consider the direction we are heading based on what our actions actually do for this planet. There’s no real leadership on this planet capable of creating actual significant change, only people put in power to preside over the profitable status quo.

xeromal 2y ago
I believe tire dust is about 40% plastics so add that the microplastics bin + the other stuff off of it.
- benterix 2y ago
  Brake dust is comparable to tyre dust BTW: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749123008321 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026974912...
  - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    Drum brakes can capture this dust for safe disposal, but are seen as old fashioned and for poor people.
    - more_corn 2y ago
      This is not true. Drum brakes are not sealed.
      - sokoloff 2y ago
        They are not sealed perfectly, but every drum that I’ve removed had a pile of shoe dust that was a very significant fraction of the original mass of the shoe friction material worn. I’d estimate that 50% or more of the material ends up at the workshop instead of along the roadside.
    - toast0 2y ago
      The interwebs say that disc brakes are better able to dissipate heat, provide more consistent braking performance, and generally reduce stopping distance. Drum brakes are old fashioned, most US vehicles switched to at least disc brakes in the front in the late 1970s and early 80s. Drums in the rear make the parking brake simple, and rear brake performance is less important as more braking force comes from the front. I don't know about being "for poor people", except that poor people may be more likely to have older vehicles, but I don't know that that extends to using vehicles that old, most vehicles with drums are 40+ years old at this point, and keeping something that old alive starts to get spendy because parts are trickier to find, and it costs time or money or both to adapt parts from other vehicles (like upgrading to disc brakes from a newer car)
      - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
        Some modern EVs already use drum brakes on the rear. Since they have regenerative breaking you don't get brake fade on long downhills. New EU regulations are coming in to limit brake dust and so people are looking at them again. And other ideas, like mercedes has a prototype that puts the brake inside the motor.
      - sokoloff 2y ago
        Note that some cars have parking/emergency brakes as drum brakes in the center of a rotor that provides disc brakes for the service (“normal”) brakes, so you can still get disc braking performance with the parking brake cable mechanism. Drum brakes are also slightly more efficient, with the shoes exhibiting less drag when not applied, which is important on small battery EVs. (They are worse for high-energy or repeated braking, but better in cruise.)
  - more_corn 2y ago
    Regenerative braking converts 90% of braking from pad on rotor to running an electrical generator.
    - observationist 2y ago
      If it costs more to replace degraded magnets or motors every million miles compared to brake pads, it will raise the cost of transportation. It's also not feasible to use in ICE vehicles - once you've filled your battery, the only place for that energy to go is heat. It's not just a tradeoff between ICE and electric, or drum vs pad brakes, or rubber additive A vs B. It's a complex ecosystem upon which people's lives and livelihoods are dependent, with unpredictable and chaotic relationships. The naive view is to simply replace the apparently "bad" material in tire dust, but if that raises the cost of transportation, food prices go up, quality of life goes down, nutrition suffers, and possible downstream effects end up causing more harm than good. This isn't to say we shouldn't bother, just that a superficial approach targeted at a single issue could end up doing a lot of unintended damage, and there's no bounded scale of harm. Trying to reduce cancer rates by .0001% might end up reducing average lifespan by a decade, or some other consequence that's orders of magnitude more impactful than the thing being "fixed". We live in a complex and dynamic system; the supply chain sits at the base of it all. We benefit from the economies of scale serving the supply chain, so we have access to cheap vehicles, efficient and cheap long haul trucks give us access to food and products. Tinker with that too aggressively and people can die. The best route toward action on things like this are cultural - educate individuals and make alternatives available. People can adjust at their own convenience, and the trend of markets will resolve on a balance between health and safety risks and convenience. You could simply ban private cars, and presumably 35k fewer deaths would occur each year in the US, and we could work on monolithic solutions to things like brake dust and tire dust. We've decided that our collective quality of life and the benefits conferred us by allowing private transportation far outweigh the harms. We need to find where the balance is between the potential harms of these dusts and how much we're willing to give up in mitigating those harms. Anyway - it's not a trivial exercise, it's a microcosm of the global economy, with surprising complexity and dependencies at every level.
      - 2y ago
- taeric 2y ago
  Last time this came up, the story was about plastics in the ocean, and following the links on the story was specifically challenging how much tires contribute. Such that I'd love to see any more sources on this. To be clear, it is a plausible sounding claim. I'm just growing nervous accepting plausible things.
jeffbee 2y ago
Here's the thing that makes tire dust and lead different: at least we get some measurable value from the tires. You can argue that our transportation system is wasteful, that we can use better means and modes, smaller vehicles and tires, but it remains true that we get non-zero benefit from the process any way you look at it. In the case of leaded gas we got literally no benefit. There was never a legitimate reason to put lead in motor fuels.
- JoshTko 2y ago
  I'm sure there can be many mitigation approaches that could reduce tire dust exposure by an order of magnitude if regulated. Vehicle weight limits in high density residential areas, plastic mix % in tires, toxic chemical limits in tires, etc.
- benterix 2y ago
  > smaller vehicles and tires That's the easy model where you basically know what you are doing is wrong but you like it so you decide to do less of it. The net result is still positive. An alternative approach is to try to actually innovate and/or invest in means of transport that don't require tyres nor friction for braking (e.g. eddy current brakes).
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Didn't (early) engines run significantly better with it? Less knocking, if nothing else? That was the stated rationale, anyway. It was an anti-knock compound. So, was that false? Did it not help knocking at all? Or was reducing knocking not a benefit at all?
  - maxerickson 2y ago
    You also have to consider alternatives. Ethanol was skipped because it was more expensive, and then we circled back around once we realized that we were contaminating ground water with MTBE.
- nayuki 2y ago
  > In the case of leaded gas we got literally no benefit. There was never a legitimate reason to put lead in motor fuels. That's not true. The benefit was anti-knocking without using more expensive high-octane fuel (or later, ethanol). It was still a terrible, terrible decision though, given the centuries of knowledge that lead is a poison.
hereme888 2y ago
How would you go about dealing with tire dust pollution in a sensible way that doesn't destroy the global economy? I'm all for it, I'm for policies that "force" people to change certain careers or lifestyles in a sensible way, and I'm sure there's a good solution however imperfect it may be.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  Tax it. Do a carbon tax too while we are at it.
  - hereme888 2y ago
    So we pay more for tires, the pollution keeps happening, and the extra money is used for virtue signaling with minimal change?
    - oefnak 2y ago
      No, investing in healthier tires becomes economically viable.
      - krisoft 2y ago
        What does “healthier tire” mean and how will the taxman know which tire is healthier and which one is not?
        terribleperson 2y ago
        You start out by measuring tires with some metric, like "pounds of of particulate released pe 50,000 miles when loaded at x", and tax tires with a worse rating higher. Them you're gonna have to keep an eye on additives to tires, because it's always possible someone will find something that makes tires wear slower but the particles more toxic. It's not impossible.
    - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
      There will be less pollution if polluting costs more
bobthepanda 2y ago
cars + tires did represent a major public health breakthrough at the time, because cities were struggling under the weight of daily animal fecal matter and animals dropping dead in the streets.
- tomjakubowski 2y ago
  Do you have a source for this? Per Wikipedia, starting in the late 19th century, electrified streetcars began replacing animal-drawn trams in US cities; by 1917, New York's trams were fully electrified. That would have been before widespread adoption of the automobile. By that time, was private transportation by horse really so prevalent in cities that it was a public health problem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcars_in_North_America#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcars_in_North_America#Hi...
  - vages 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1894 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1... While streetcars may have made it easier to transport people, you still need to deliver goods to stores. There’s also the problem of having to wait for tracks to be built.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
      https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCterstra%C3%9Fenbahn#/media/Datei:VW-Cargotram-Dresden.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCterstra%C3%9Fenbahn#/me... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCterstra%C3%9Fenbahn#/media/Datei:Cargo_Tram_outside_Zurich_Hauptbahnhof.JPG https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCterstra%C3%9Fenbahn#/me... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCterstra%C3%9Fenbahn#/media/Datei:G%C3%BCterbim_Zugfahrzeug_und_Anh%C3%A4nger.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCterstra%C3%9Fenbahn#/me...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
nomoreusernames 2y ago
[dead]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by asdff 2y ago

xeromal 2y ago

I believe tire dust is about 40% plastics so add that the microplastics bin + the other stuff off of it.

benterix 2y ago
Brake dust is comparable to tyre dust BTW: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749123008321 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026974912...
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  Drum brakes can capture this dust for safe disposal, but are seen as old fashioned and for poor people.
  - more_corn 2y ago
    This is not true. Drum brakes are not sealed.
    - sokoloff 2y ago
      They are not sealed perfectly, but every drum that I’ve removed had a pile of shoe dust that was a very significant fraction of the original mass of the shoe friction material worn. I’d estimate that 50% or more of the material ends up at the workshop instead of along the roadside.
  - toast0 2y ago
    The interwebs say that disc brakes are better able to dissipate heat, provide more consistent braking performance, and generally reduce stopping distance. Drum brakes are old fashioned, most US vehicles switched to at least disc brakes in the front in the late 1970s and early 80s. Drums in the rear make the parking brake simple, and rear brake performance is less important as more braking force comes from the front. I don't know about being "for poor people", except that poor people may be more likely to have older vehicles, but I don't know that that extends to using vehicles that old, most vehicles with drums are 40+ years old at this point, and keeping something that old alive starts to get spendy because parts are trickier to find, and it costs time or money or both to adapt parts from other vehicles (like upgrading to disc brakes from a newer car)
    - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
      Some modern EVs already use drum brakes on the rear. Since they have regenerative breaking you don't get brake fade on long downhills. New EU regulations are coming in to limit brake dust and so people are looking at them again. And other ideas, like mercedes has a prototype that puts the brake inside the motor.
    - sokoloff 2y ago
      Note that some cars have parking/emergency brakes as drum brakes in the center of a rotor that provides disc brakes for the service (“normal”) brakes, so you can still get disc braking performance with the parking brake cable mechanism. Drum brakes are also slightly more efficient, with the shoes exhibiting less drag when not applied, which is important on small battery EVs. (They are worse for high-energy or repeated braking, but better in cruise.)
- more_corn 2y ago
  Regenerative braking converts 90% of braking from pad on rotor to running an electrical generator.
  - observationist 2y ago
    If it costs more to replace degraded magnets or motors every million miles compared to brake pads, it will raise the cost of transportation. It's also not feasible to use in ICE vehicles - once you've filled your battery, the only place for that energy to go is heat. It's not just a tradeoff between ICE and electric, or drum vs pad brakes, or rubber additive A vs B. It's a complex ecosystem upon which people's lives and livelihoods are dependent, with unpredictable and chaotic relationships. The naive view is to simply replace the apparently "bad" material in tire dust, but if that raises the cost of transportation, food prices go up, quality of life goes down, nutrition suffers, and possible downstream effects end up causing more harm than good. This isn't to say we shouldn't bother, just that a superficial approach targeted at a single issue could end up doing a lot of unintended damage, and there's no bounded scale of harm. Trying to reduce cancer rates by .0001% might end up reducing average lifespan by a decade, or some other consequence that's orders of magnitude more impactful than the thing being "fixed". We live in a complex and dynamic system; the supply chain sits at the base of it all. We benefit from the economies of scale serving the supply chain, so we have access to cheap vehicles, efficient and cheap long haul trucks give us access to food and products. Tinker with that too aggressively and people can die. The best route toward action on things like this are cultural - educate individuals and make alternatives available. People can adjust at their own convenience, and the trend of markets will resolve on a balance between health and safety risks and convenience. You could simply ban private cars, and presumably 35k fewer deaths would occur each year in the US, and we could work on monolithic solutions to things like brake dust and tire dust. We've decided that our collective quality of life and the benefits conferred us by allowing private transportation far outweigh the harms. We need to find where the balance is between the potential harms of these dusts and how much we're willing to give up in mitigating those harms. Anyway - it's not a trivial exercise, it's a microcosm of the global economy, with surprising complexity and dependencies at every level.
    - 2y ago
taeric 2y ago
Last time this came up, the story was about plastics in the ocean, and following the links on the story was specifically challenging how much tires contribute. Such that I'd love to see any more sources on this. To be clear, it is a plausible sounding claim. I'm just growing nervous accepting plausible things.

jeffbee 2y ago

Here's the thing that makes tire dust and lead different: at least we get some measurable value from the tires. You can argue that our transportation system is wasteful, that we can use better means and modes, smaller vehicles and tires, but it remains true that we get non-zero benefit from the process any way you look at it. In the case of leaded gas we got literally no benefit. There was never a legitimate reason to put lead in motor fuels.

JoshTko 2y ago
I'm sure there can be many mitigation approaches that could reduce tire dust exposure by an order of magnitude if regulated. Vehicle weight limits in high density residential areas, plastic mix % in tires, toxic chemical limits in tires, etc.
benterix 2y ago
> smaller vehicles and tires That's the easy model where you basically know what you are doing is wrong but you like it so you decide to do less of it. The net result is still positive. An alternative approach is to try to actually innovate and/or invest in means of transport that don't require tyres nor friction for braking (e.g. eddy current brakes).
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Didn't (early) engines run significantly better with it? Less knocking, if nothing else? That was the stated rationale, anyway. It was an anti-knock compound. So, was that false? Did it not help knocking at all? Or was reducing knocking not a benefit at all?
- maxerickson 2y ago
  You also have to consider alternatives. Ethanol was skipped because it was more expensive, and then we circled back around once we realized that we were contaminating ground water with MTBE.
nayuki 2y ago
> In the case of leaded gas we got literally no benefit. There was never a legitimate reason to put lead in motor fuels. That's not true. The benefit was anti-knocking without using more expensive high-octane fuel (or later, ethanol). It was still a terrible, terrible decision though, given the centuries of knowledge that lead is a poison.

hereme888 2y ago

How would you go about dealing with tire dust pollution in a sensible way that doesn't destroy the global economy? I'm all for it, I'm for policies that "force" people to change certain careers or lifestyles in a sensible way, and I'm sure there's a good solution however imperfect it may be.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Tax it. Do a carbon tax too while we are at it.
- hereme888 2y ago
  So we pay more for tires, the pollution keeps happening, and the extra money is used for virtue signaling with minimal change?
  - oefnak 2y ago
    No, investing in healthier tires becomes economically viable.
    - krisoft 2y ago
      What does “healthier tire” mean and how will the taxman know which tire is healthier and which one is not?
      - terribleperson 2y ago
        You start out by measuring tires with some metric, like "pounds of of particulate released pe 50,000 miles when loaded at x", and tax tires with a worse rating higher. Them you're gonna have to keep an eye on additives to tires, because it's always possible someone will find something that makes tires wear slower but the particles more toxic. It's not impossible.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    There will be less pollution if polluting costs more

bobthepanda 2y ago

cars + tires did represent a major public health breakthrough at the time, because cities were struggling under the weight of daily animal fecal matter and animals dropping dead in the streets.

tomjakubowski 2y ago
Do you have a source for this? Per Wikipedia, starting in the late 19th century, electrified streetcars began replacing animal-drawn trams in US cities; by 1917, New York's trams were fully electrified. That would have been before widespread adoption of the automobile. By that time, was private transportation by horse really so prevalent in cities that it was a public health problem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcars_in_North_America#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcars_in_North_America#Hi...
- vages 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1894 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1... While streetcars may have made it easier to transport people, you still need to deliver goods to stores. There’s also the problem of having to wait for tracks to be built.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCterstra%C3%9Fenbahn#/media/Datei:VW-Cargotram-Dresden.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCterstra%C3%9Fenbahn#/me... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCterstra%C3%9Fenbahn#/media/Datei:Cargo_Tram_outside_Zurich_Hauptbahnhof.JPG https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCterstra%C3%9Fenbahn#/me... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCterstra%C3%9Fenbahn#/media/Datei:G%C3%BCterbim_Zugfahrzeug_und_Anh%C3%A4nger.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCterstra%C3%9Fenbahn#/me...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- dredmorbius 2y ago

nomoreusernames 2y ago

[dead]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]