Hacker News Reader

Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I would really really like to emphasize: the biggest source of micro polymers, those that you can find in antartica, oceans or the everest comes from car tires.

If we want less plastics pollution, this has to be handled first.

The world desperately needs a tax tied to how polluting things are.

If money's on the line industries and people will quickly adapt. Without it? There's way too much convenience to prompt looking for serious alternatives.

View on HN

Is there a viable alternative to current car tires?

Using cars less (investing in public transport) and reducing the average weight of cars sensibly would make already an extremely huge difference.

The difference in tire wear between a Corolla and a EV SUV is quite huge, e.g., you're gonna change tires way more often on the second one.

This feels like a distraction, though.

If car tyres cause unrecoverable pollution then we don't need to reduce that by half or something, we need to almost eliminate it.

That means that we need a type of car tyre which does not cause this pollution.

I don't see how would that be possible, tires work based on traction which depends on friction, you're gonna have to lose material.

At the end of the day, I disagree with you, you play with the cards you have at hand, and at the moment tire technology isn't gonna change, so at least we should push for using less and smaller cars.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com