Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Well, no, we don't know that & that's prob false, it's just all plastics.
Tire microplastics just get circulated faster bcs they get grinned to a fine powder as part of their initial use (& that float gets flushed away with water). And the stat is stated for water or air.
Which is a problem, I'm just saying that we are producing a much larger scale of this problem that we can currently detect (and detecting microplastics is still in it's infancy even in lab conditions).
But sooner or later all petroleum based (non-biodegradable) plastics get to be microplastics, we just won't be around to see it.
Microplastics are the sedimentary boundary that will mark the current extinction event in rocks.
You can weigh new tires and compare them to weights of replaced tires. That would give you the low end estimate environmental tire microplastics deposited based on tire sales. I can't imagine its not a massive number.
Yes, it is. But compared to all plastics production it's not a third. Much like clothes aren't a third either.
But they both release microplastics directly into the air & water, so they enter the circulation quicker. The printer that is gonna end on a landfill will be in the balls of creatures millennia from now.
That printer is not “micro”, it won’t shed detectably, and it will be confined to one part of a landfill
Confined-ish. Rain will still wash it further eventually.
All fossil fuel (+many other) plastics = microplastics eventually.
But my og reply here was just making that point - that within our lifetime most of the microplastics we will breathe & ingest comes from clothing, tires, and food-adjacent plastic products.
Toner is basically bulk microplastic.
Supposedly you can recycle them, but normally they will be confined to a a small section of landfill. While “on a landfill” is not a good answer, it’s much better than “in the environment “
You could even argue that leachate is “good” in that it pulls all these contaminants out of the landfill to a concentrated place where they could in theory be removed (and placed in a landfill 🤪)
You can't recycle them (very poorly at best, with extra harmful byproducts).
And landfills are not built like nuclear waste storage facilities.
Everything around us is 'the environment'.
Landfills at least in the us absolutely are designed to encapsulate waste, to minimize leachate and to control runoff. The whole point is to bury it in a way that it will tend to stay buried.
There is evidence of paper not decomposing because it doesn’t get enough oxygen or water for microbes to do their thing
In landfills things stay buried if/until they can't get washed away. That's how microplastics get out, but bcs of the filtration of the ground that is very very slow.
And paper actually decomposes, usually with bacteria or other oxidation precesses. Plastics don't really do that. If they did there literally wouldn't be a microplastics problem. Something that smol would "decompose" basically immediately.
(Before bacteria ate celuloze trees would litter everything, basically a catastrophe, and then they became fossil fuels bcs there was nothing to decompose it.)
But it's a hella convenient way of thinking that plastics in a landfill aren't a problem.
Unlike cellulose, plastics do degrade into microplastics.