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2024-11-11

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7,000 Microplastics Studies Show We Have One Really Big Problem (www.sciencealert.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] Jack 63 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Biggest sources:

7.6 Mt from macro plastics breaking down
1.3 Mt from paint
1.0 Mt from tyres

10-40 Mt released into environment/year, and increasing.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I'm kinda surprised that more comes from paint than tires.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think it depends on measure, if im not mistaken, by weight arohnd 50% of microplastics are tire dust.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Also depends on where you’re measuring. They make up a ton of the plastics in stormwater runoff for example. Sometimes up to 95% from what I found. And that stormwater often ends up in our drinking water.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Still both from automobile infrastructure. /c/fuckcars bleeding into every Lemmy...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

You only think that way because the material for a tire is all in one place and easy to see.

Paint on the other hand is effectively invisible when we 'inventory' a space mentally.

So a tire in the middle of your living room seems like a lot of rubber but all the paint over every inch of the wall in the same room doesnt, even if the room is big enough for the paint to fill the volume of the tire.