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We just brought home some old tires to plant pineapples in. Maybe time for a rethink.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You 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.
I don't think children cause the wear and tear of 18 wheelers, no
"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?
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
150 milion tons of plastic in the sea, 1 garbage truck every minute, 46% of plastic in the pacific garbage patch is fishing nets
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The 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.
sort 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…
Funny 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)
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.
We just brought home some old tires to plant pineapples in. Maybe time for a rethink.
The 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.
Is 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.
(You can't build a new school or playground on polluted ground, for example.)
Strange 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.
The 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.
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.
"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?
The tire particles are incredibly small, so there are lots of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’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.
While 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.
And yes, it's a full time job (at certain ages), and no it's hardly the primary responsibility, it's one of many.