this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
108 points (99.1% liked)

Fuck Cars

12441 readers
435 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32367927

Tire wear particles enter rivers and lakes primarily via wind and rain. These particles account for 50% to 90% of all microplastics that run off roads during rainfall. Furthermore, scientific extrapolations suggest that nearly half (45%) of the microplastics found in soil and water come from tire abrasion.

The concentration of tire wear particles in water bodies can vary by several orders of magnitude, ranging from 0,00001 to 10.000 milligrams per liter.

The particles contain a complex mixture of different compounds, including toxic substances: heavy metals such as cadmium and zinc and organic substances such as the ozone protection or antioxidant 6-PPD. If the tire wear particles end up in freshwater ecosystems, the pollutants are leached out there.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

We need to regulate vehicles by mass, which is directly proportional to the tires. Pay $0.10 per pound of vehicle annually.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm not sure about tire wear, but fun fact: road wear and tear is proportional to vehicle mass raised to the fourth power. If road users were taxed fairly for that and cyclists with average-weight bikes were made to pay 1¢, drivers of average-sized sedans would need to pay millions of dollars.

(That's my go-to response when idiots start talking about bicycle license plates or "cyclists need to pay their fair share," BTW.)

Considering how thin bike tires are compared to car tires and how long they last nonetheless (unless you're doing skid-stops all the time), it seems plausible that the same weight^4^ relationship might apply, which means tire-abrasion microplastics from bicycles would be relatively negligible, compared to ones from cars.

Of course, rail is the real winner in this instance, since it doesn't have this problem to begin with.

Wow, /fuckcars shilling for trains just because theyre 'so much better, objrctively, that there aren't even numbers to compare on this issue.'

You people need to grow the fuck up and be more original.