Trains.
Trains
Trains
Trains.
Trains
Trains
Trains.
Trains
Planes
And Automobiles!
NO.
Autonomous pods!
Good lord that is the silliest thing I have seen in a loong time. And I’ve seen some silly fuckin things
If only there was an alternative.
What if we replace vulcanized rubber with a metal ring 🤔Maybe it could also run on some kind of metal street, to further reduce friction? 🤔
we could probably manage traffic much easier if switching was controlled vs. random drivers…
While we’re at it, maybe we could install some powerlines to provide the vehicles with electricity. That way they could run on renewable energy.
If only there was a highly efficient mode of transporting people that didn’t use tires. Ah well, nothing can be done I guess.
Yes, imagine if there was a fast and safe way of transport. Something like made to run on steel bars in order to reduce friction. I don’t know. I’m just imagining, I watch too much science fiction.
My city’s metro system uses rubber tyres, :(
I imagine it’s still orders of magnitudes better than everyone driving their own car in.
Same with busses. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good
To be fair, the most efficient mode of transportation is cycling by far. I wonder if bike tires also contribute to this.
I’m sure they do but it will be way less.
The wear rate should be proportional to the weight of the system (car plus cargo and passsengers, bike plus cargo and riders), maybe with some correction factors for things that affect wear rate like knobbiness.
Since bikes weigh a couple orders of magnitude less on average, the amount of tire wear material should also be a couple orders of magnitude less.
Edit: other lemmyer said wear is proportional to weight to the 4th power and that may be correct. I vaguely recall that from school now that they mentioned it.
should be proportional to the weight of the system
It’s that really true? Wear to the roads is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight so I would never have predicted a linear relationship.
Exponential relationships are still proportional.
No they are not. That’s not what it means.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(mathematics)
Geez, here is another issue for which we’ve known about for 40 or so years that requires “urgent Action” for the past 40 years already
Wake me up when we finally do something
Boomers have categorically chosen apathy in favor of their own self interests since 1970. By the late 90s, they were a wrecking ball.
Most probably simply didn’t know. A lot has to do with policies made by politicians that did know. Don’t pretend to be better, you would have done the same back then with the information you had. Remember, no internet.
lol, ok.
Despite your unfounded assumption, I’m old enough to know what it was like living pre-internet. Information was there, for those who chose to seek it out. Boomers, on the other hand, are the living definition of Dunning-Kruger. So no, they don’t get a pass. They chose to remain ignorant and uneducated, and when they gained any advantage, they made sure that those who came afterward would NOT. That’s not just a lack of awareness, it’s mean-spirited and selfish. Which fits “Generation Me,” to a T.
Well, no.
I am from the generation after the boomers but I grew up right before the Internet exploded onto the world and i can tell you that you would never see that sort of information unless you were looking for it. I know people love to shit on boomers, hence boomers being an insult word these days, but many simply couldn’t know better.
Hell, I didn’t know and believe me, I was (and still am) the kind of person that loves to read new things STEM. I had subscriptions on scientific magazines and I do remember reading articles about it being anything, scientists already knew about car tired being a problem, but it didn’t go beyond some reports. The general population didn’t know and pretending that they could have and should have known is simply disingenuous.
If you were alive at that time then you too know that it wasn’t that easy.
The other big offender are synthetic textiles btw.
Watch half the people in this sub completely scroll past your comment ignoring the fact that they are contributing to being insane amount of microplastics in our blood currently
Y’all don’t stand for shit
My basement Is a nudist resort. good thing no one can see through the egress windows!
You have to wipe those off once in a wile.
And on the other hand, growing cotton uses a lot of water. And wool comes from animals.
What actually is the greenest material to make garments of?
I think hemp would be the best material for clothes, but in most places it’s still an illegal plant.
would this apply to bycicle tyres as well? also, why is it spelled that way?
Yes, though note that tire and road wear scale with the 4th power of the vehicle weight. If a person on a bicycle weighs 200 pounds and a person driving a car weighs 2000 pounds then the car is going to have roughly 10,000 times as much tire wear (and microplastic shedding) as the bike.
Now consider that people on bikes can even weigh less than 200 pounds and cars can weigh far more than 2000 pounds (I heard of a recent electric SUV that weighs 8000 pounds) and it becomes clear that bicycles are a complete non-issue, relative to cars. An 8000 pound car is equivalent to 6.25 million 160 pound bicycle + rider pairings.
Now consider the effects of 18-wheeler tractor tailors with a maximum weight upwards of 80,000 pounds. These things absolutely disintegrate their tires. If you’ve done any highway driving you’ve likely seen the shredded debris of tires on the shoulder of the road.
Edit: as an addendum I’d like to note that electric vehicles tend to weigh a lot more than ICE cars, by upwards of 1000 pounds. This is one of the reasons I’m dismayed at the rush to EVs: it’s going to accelerate the microplastic problem even as it reduces CO2.
While there’s no doubt tires are bad for the environment, a quarter of all microplastics seems a lot, especially since plastic is everywhere. Gladly there’s a source for that claim, a link to tireindustryproject’s FAQ… Claiming that this number is a gross overestimation. What the fuck is this article? Is it supposed to be satire or something?
Bear in mind that the denominator is plastic pollution. Most plastic waste does not directly pollute the environment. If it is not recycled then it goes to landfills or incineration. Not ideal, but at least the damage is contained. (The bulk of ocean plastic comes from the rivers of poor countries without proper waste management.)
The issue with tyre microplastics is that it’s all but impossible to channel the waste. It’s the same with synthetic fabric: just washing it creates pollution that’s really hard to control.
What if we wrapped the tyres in bags to contain all the dust?
Can we take the tyres out of the environment?
There’s nothing out there. Just water, fish, and 200 tons of crude oil. And a fire. But nothing else.
Lots of things contribute to this. Vehicle weight (extra stress on the tires), wheel alignment (toe-in/out causes scrubbing which causes more wear), unmaintained suspensions (worn out shocks, struts and bushings causing the above), burnouts (obviously, but, even in winter being the guy doing a burnout on summer tires while trying to get up an icy hill or across the intersection still counts), tire compound, road design, and driving style. If we had more cargo trains doing logi instead of long haul trucks we could probably cut down on a lot of pollution both in exhaust particles and tire particles.
Yet another problem not solved by EVs
But the manufacturer and my government said they were eco-friendly, what do you means my 6000 pounds of steel and plastic isn’t good for the planet?
It’s actually made a little worse by EVs because of battery weight.
Vulcanized RUBBER tyres shed PLASTIC microparticles … hmmmm something sounds very rubbery and not at all plasticky… i truly wonder what it could be …hmmmm…
Edit: “Is rubber considered a plastic? Although materials such as rubber, textiles, adhesives, and paint may in some cases meet this definition, they are not considered plastics.”
Here is a Scientific study MIS-CONSTRUING Rubber as a Plastic AND MAKING ASSUMPTIONS WITHOUT PROPER EXPLANATIONS !!!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5664766/
This is the problem with Scientific studies, Media, Reporting and bunch of people running with studies that make a lot of FALSE ASSUMPTIONS WITHOUT TELLING YOU THE FULL FUCKING STORY.
Tyres are made from synthetic rubbers which are plastics.
hi HOW ARE you TODAY?
i’m pretty GOOD MYSELF!!111!!!
I TOO like to RANDOMLY SWITCH TO upper case.
I HOPE YOU RECOVER SOON!
Rubber can mean both, natural rubber from specific trees, or synthetic rubber, which is made out of plastics.
Again there is a difference even when you say synthetic rubber,
DO NOT MIX AND CONFUSE RUBBER and PLASTIC.
Rubber === mixture of ISOPRENE and ELASTOMERE polymers ( naturally occurring from Latex/rubber trees but 50% naturally produced and 50% synthetically produced from petrochemicals)
Plastic === mixture of various Ethyl,Propyl,Poly-Propyl Polymers mainly derived synthetically from petrochemical sources ( may or may not be combined with elastomere for rubberized properties).
So MOST MODERN Industrial processes are DIRTY and HEAVILY POLLUTING.
Dont confuse Rubber and Plastic manufacturing and lump it into a single problem unless and until you have definitive and REPRODUCIBLE PROOF THAT PROBLEMS ARE COMMON TO BOTH.
Are you a bot? lol
This is too incoherent for even a bot.
Is that your only retort to being shut down with logic? I love the spirit of this sub but the people in here are so unbearable
Is all of your clothing natural fibers? I guarantee you are shedding pounds of microplastics into the environment every year personally
Got a goretex jacket? You are killing the earth with PFAs
Shut down with logic? My entire comment was about differentiating between natural and synthetic rubbers and he wrote an entire wall of text about how I have to differentiate between natural and synthetic rubbers.
And yes, except for a couple jackets, which I don’t really wash at all, all my clothes, bed sheets etc. are out of 100% cotton. Always have been. My top level comment in this very thread is literally me calling out synthetic textiles. Any other things you want to project onto me?
Imagine things being made of multiple components and not one pure component. /s
Imagine confusing Tigers and Lions and claiming BIG CAT micro-pussies are causing problems all over the world!!!
Tigers are different and Lions are different. They are big cats but different species have different habitats and habits.
So dont mix Plastics and Rubbers when they are chemically different and may have different manufacturing processes.
Was that really hard to understand ?
I worked at a tire factory. Half the rubber used in tires is synthetic rubber, which is made from plastic. Your car tires are not made from 100% natural rubber from a tree.
Synthetic rubber is not plastic. It is from petrochemicals but not the same chemical substance.
A plastic is just a material made from polymers, you are the one adding artificial limitations on what polymers can be used. The belts in tires use both nylon and polyester which are both plastics by anyone’s definition. So even by your strict definition, tires are made up, at least in part, by plastic.
Tires also used to last longer. They are designed to wear out faster now.
This is so far from the truth.
The real reason is cars are heavier. The more weight, the more wear on the tires. You can only make a tire compound so hard before they become uncomfortable rolling chunks.
In the 70s when the fuel crisis hit, cars were very inefficient. Heavy steel and heavy engines that guzzled field. As the technology has progressed we use composite materials to make them lighter where we can. Some of these materials are more expensive than others, so you won’t find them on all models. Magnesium and Carbon fiber for example. We started to make cars lighter.
Then there’s features, creature comforts, etc. We started adding more and more fancy features over time. These all add up. Heavy sound deadening pads are placed all over the bare chassis. Rip up your car’s carpet, underneath you’ll find them. They’re in the door and behind the dashboard. There’s even foam in the A, B and C pillars. We figured out that we can make cars quieter. Now that we can make them quieter, let’s add a lot of creature comforts. Power, heated seats and mirrors. Power windows, powered lift gates, and anything else that’s powered. These require electric motors. Not sure if you’ve ever seen these electric motors, but these are actually quite heavy little things. A few speakers is now almost a dozen in many models. Lots of trim pieces that make the car more aesthetically pleasing add weight.
Safety is a huge factor as well. One or two airbags has turned into about a dozen. Extra beams that are used to dissipate energy around you in a crash. My car has 8 alone for just the front driver and passenger.
Got a hybrid or an EV? These absolutely demolish tires because the additional components adds a lot of weight.
Even though we got better at making composite materials and reducing weight where we could, our need for creature comforts and advancement in technology has caused the overall trend for a car’s weight to go up. This information is readily available if you’d like to search the Internet.
A set of tires wear endurance has only gone up over time. But because of a car’s weight, it reduces its ability. Your driving habits also greatly impact how long your tires will last. Do you have a Rivian or Tesla? Go easy on the acceleration and showing off with the spirited driving. You can make your tires last less than 10,000 mi. Do you add additional weight? How long is that additional weight being hauled around? In other words, if your trunk is full of stuff, clean it out. You’re increasing fuel consumption and increasing tire wear.
This is also yet another reason SUVs are bad: bigger tyres, higher weight, more wear, more pollution.
It’s also another reason to have lower speed limits: less friction, less wear, less pollution.
Wow, now imagine what tractor tires are doing to the fields we grow our food in. Plus the exhaust and tires deposit heavy metals. I have been bitching about this for years. We need drone fleets in fields and to ban tires and exhaust in fields.
The tires aren’t breaking down like they do on asphalt. Not the same.
I come from farmers. They are still breaking down and still an issue. They also cause soil compaction. Anyone familiar with farming understands that tractors aren’t good for soil
This makes people that harass people with vehicle drive-bys and creepy vehicle stalking just that much more destructive and shite evil.
They might as well go exploit a child to poison a puppy dog like my neighbor the state patrol trooper did.
