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US waterways are full of dumped tires. The ‘River Cowboy’ won’t stand for it
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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When I was a kid, it was a fairly common practice to "recycle" tires into fish habitats. I know at least a couple who did their eagle scout community service project doing this
Which is one of those things that sounds great at first but after a few more decades of research we realize it's actually horrifically bad. Leached chemicals and microplastics are having such profound impacts on life that we're not even sure how bad it is yet, just that it's very VERY bad.
A few hundred years from now, if husband aren't extinct yet, they'll look back on this the way we look back on pre-modern societies using lead for everything, except the solution to lead was to simply stop using it while a solution for microplastics doesn't even exist yet. It's likely that, even after a solution has been found, microplastics will haunt all life on Earth until they get cycled out by geological processes.
The good news is with all the small plastic bits floating around the environment, it’s only a matter of time until something evolves to decompose it. Tons and tons of surface area in a wide variety of environments and exposed to a wide variety of microorganisms. I mean heck even our anaerobic gut microbes are getting a chance! And plastic is basically just energy in solid form, so it’ll happen sooner or later.
The bad news is if that happens while we still use plastics, we are going to have a bad time with it.
We probably won’t even know it’s happening until it’s spread far and wide.
It's already happening, but the issue is so big it'll take a lot more than this to even make a dent.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/plastic-eating-bacteria-enzyme-recycling-waste