Remember that car tire degredation is a significant portion of microplastics in the environment. Investing in mass transit is as imperative as it was to move away from leaded gasoline.
You didn't expound upon your point about the unintended consequences of CAFE standards but they're very real. Instead of making smaller and more efficient sedans per the guidelines, car makers opted start making all of their vehicles "light trucks" -- 80%+ of new vehicles are SUVs or bubbly looking "crossovers" -- which are not subject to the same demanding standards. Small sedans also cost less and would require ongoing R&D to continue to meet the CAFE standards. The end result, as this thread is interested, is heavier vehicles with bigger tires and more plastic in the environment and our brains.
The end of the Pacific Electric system was not a conspiracy theory by tire companies or anything like that; the price of the cars dropped and that's what consumers preferred, i.m.o.
Pretty much any major American city is less dense than it was 100 years ago. It was cheaper to build out than it was to build up.
All of that stuff you listed comes from tax dollars, and people ultimately care less about that than what's coming out of their pockets for a home purchase. Well, until it's unsustainable, anyways.
In this country we have this ideal of a rugged individualist whose out there living off the land and making his own way. Never will this rugged individualist acknowledge that he's dependent on 10x as many miles of roads as his urban counterpart. Never will this rugged individualist acknowledge that providing him with internet access on the state's dollar costs orders of magnitude more than someone living in a sustainable location. Same with delivery costs and literally every other thing this person consumes. They get to pretend to be a self-reliant individualist while leaching off of the tax dollars of urban residents who cost a fraction of the amount to support.
Thankfully we have Starlink to replace pork consumption with actual services.
It's a crying shame that they've stopped selling them in the US. Marketing (the real men need their Rams, thank you very much!) and the CAFE loophole seem to have won the day, though, and we're all worse off for it.
That means, all else being equal, a car company makes more profit selling a vehicle that has a higher profit margin. The $80k trucks my family members buy do not cost 3X as much to manufacture as say, a nice Camry, but the price you pay is about 3X. This means the dealer/manufacturer just outright make more money if a higher percentage of people buy trucks instead of small cars.
Consumers have "signaled" that they will be fine paying three times as much for the same exact feature set (no, they are not hauling anything, and there certainly isn't a massively higher percentage of Americans doing truck things than 50 years ago), even using longer term loans to make it happen.
When the car market has been basically saturated for decades, how else do you "make line go up" than selling the same product (transportation) for more money?
> ... even using longer term loans to make it happen.
I don't understand how so many people are driving these vehicles. Not only are they 2-3x as expensive to buy or lease but they're also 2-3x more expensive to fuel and maintain. (Probably to insure, too?) I don't have any data to back this up but my intuition tells me that these vehicles and their loans could be the cause of the next subprime mortgage-esque financial crisis.
Paradoxically most of the 'small government' types are often the biggest road users.
I think it's "limited government". I'm pretty sure they would prefer roads get more spending.
Does this mean that a bus that weighs 10 times as much as a small car will produce 10000 times as much tire dust? If it does, I'm not sure if investing in buses will reduce tire dust at all. A bus can replace a lot of cars, but 10000 is a stretch. We need more trains.
I'd believe buses have a lot of tire wear compared to an individual car but I wouldn't use that relation as proof of just how many times so.
Thinking about it a different way, there isn’t much difference in recommended tire pressure among the autos I’ve owned. That means that the pressure between the road and the tire is relatively constant but the surface area of contact is directly proportional to vehicle weight. For a fixed contact pressure, I am struggling to imagine a physical process by which the rubber loss is not proportional to the contact area.
Tire wear is caused by the surface of the tire being rubbed off through contact with the road. Most tire replacements happen because too much rubber has worn off of the contact surface.
While that happens some in the other direction, that’s not what usually causes road failure. You can tell this because pot-holes and other road failures have abrupt edges - they are not the road material until nothing is left but the earth beneath.
Roads also wear by being elastically deformed by the weight of the vehicles upon them. Eventually this deformation leads to failure of the road material, and it breaks away from the rest of the road, creating cracks and pot holes and so on.
Because the cause of failure is different, I don’t have any reason to expect the effect of vehicle weight to be the same. Moreover, unlike tire wear, its easy to hypothesize a physical reason that heavier vehicles will disproportionately wear the road: heavier vehicles will cause more deflection, and every material I have experience with will fail from repeated deflection faster if it’s deflected more.
Cheap, easy maintenance, good fuel economy and speed, traffic jam immunity..
you're correct. I mistakenly thought it was only carbon coming off the tires. So yeah, EVs have a significantly lower carbon output that ICE vehicles. My point still stands but thanks for the callout.
But really cycling and transit are the way to go to make cities more liveable. Personal cars take too much space in a city and ruin the built environment for everyone not in one.
To think that the minuscule difference in tire dust is significant at all, compared to the pollutants that EVs completely eliminates, is absolutely ridiculous.
The devil is in the details, yes. Have you considered that the policy makers have actually looked into the details? Have you looked into the details? Have you read any detailed reports about tire wear or did you just make up a problem based on your own intuition? Because I’ve seen reports from EV fleet operators that indicate that they see no difference in tire wear. Most likely the added weight (which isn’t all that much for modern, smaller EVs.. you know, the ones that people actually drive in urban/suburban areas in Europe) as a factor is drowned by other larger factors.
And we’re not that far away from EVs with the same or lower weight than their ICE counterparts, so getting these kinds of policies in place has some forward-looking aspects to them as well.
Despite their own health hazards no amount of tire particulate from EV's can achieve that level of widespread public health impact.
If there's no regulation then there's no will or urgency to waste money doing so.
Because I have a well. A deep one. And an osmosis system.
Yes they are unavoidable, just the plastic containers etc probably give some and I do eat candies and imported bananas and bread etc. But pretty sure I get a lot lower dose than most people.
However I'm not sure it matters that much until a mechanism of actual damage is established.
Do you really grow enough food to make up most of your diet on RO water? And is this specifically to avoid microplastic exposure, or what?
Specifically produce, however we grow most of what we eat. We pressure can, dehydrate and ferment to preserve. I have background and decades of experience in growing, which is to say it's more than just standard hobby garden level.
The RO water is not to avoid microplastics (although that might a side benefit) but rather that the water is highly mineralized. It would be a long post to explain why I do this. Some is theoretical health concerns, some is more practical.
I don't have any links I just figured it out, but it's not super complicated. I made it out of undersink RO membrane housings (housings from those little RO systems you can buy for around $300 that do a couple of gallons a day). The membranes have pressure pumps in front of them that get it up to a couple hundred gallons RO water total a day.
Basic steps are 1) Soften the water, 2) Pass it through very tight filters (like 1 micron), I also carbon filter for organic contaminants, 3) Booster pumps put water through osmosis membranes and from there into a storage tank.
I just used plastic totes with gravel in the bottom to house the membranes and booster pumps.
I should write up a blog post on it one day because professionally installed osmosis can be expensive.
This is the thing about all the microplastics articles I see popping up: they rarely include any description of harm. If they even mention it, it is only speculative, as in this article. Until I read a scientific article about real harms, I am going to regard most of the microplastics news as fearmongering. Humanity has been surrounded by vast quantities of plastic for decades; if there was a big effect, wouldn’t we have seen it by now? If it has big effects, those effects would be surprising, which means that the evidence would have to be strong. I don’t see a lot of strong evidence.
If anyone reading this has a paper like this, please share.
If microplastics are making our lives 10% worse in some dimension, we will have to stumble onto what that dimension would be basically by luck and then spend at least a decade rigorously studying it before we could make useful assertions.
The hubub about microplastics is that, we don't have great civilization wide health data on most health dimensions, so we don't even have good baselines to figure whether we have regressed in many ways. IF there is a negative effect, it will effect everyone all over the planet and there is no escape
It's an extreme corner of the likelihood/amount of harm graph, and some people think that corner of the graph warrants caution even before harm is proven.
It's the same situation we faced with leaded gasoline, and the US is pretty bad when it comes to those kinds of "mild, diffuse harm that mostly affects people who can't afford whatever system the wealthy use to avoid the harm" problems.
It's not fearmongering, we are literally gambling that microplastics have minimal harm right now.
We don't have control groups, they're found in virtually every complex organism on Earth, including (best we can tell) all humans, so we can't form a control group. We've only recently really started to notice, care, or study them, so we don't have strong historical data to compare against. We don't have many isolated populations (especially of large enough size) where microplastic bioaccumulation is the only major difference in how their lives have changed in biologically relevant ways over the decades, so we can't effectively isolate the effects of microplastics from other confounding factors.
So you have these things that basically became completely ubiquitous--an unavoidable fact of not just human life, but all complex life on Earth--before anyone realized, with several other major global factors shifting concurrently. The end result is that, by the tools and methods with which we perform science, it's nearly impossible to study their exact effects. Maybe they're a slow-burning apocalypse subtly disrupting the mechanisms of life at their most fundamental levels and only getting worse with time, or maybe they do nothing or next to nothing like having a glass of sherry with your Sunday brunch once a week, or maybe they're somewhere in that vast, murky expanse in between the two extremes. Hell, there might even be a net benefit somehow. We just plain don't know, and don't know how we could know, so speculation is just about all we've got at present, and without knowing it's really hard to say if the messaging and literature surrounding the subject is aggressively over-alarmist or recklessly under-alarmist. The best we've really got is the simple fact that we notice them now, and thus have the chance to pay close attention, part of which is regularly taking basic measurements like these to try and correlate trends.
About all we do know is that they weren't here before, and "before" encompasses 99.9999% of all life that we know to have ever existed, so it's definitely weird and maybe probably bad.
There's definitely criticism to be had with the broader state of public health and science communication that harm, or at least the understanding that "we have literally no idea what the broader implications of this are but they're maybe probably not good", are considered to be implicit, either due to fallacious appeal to nature or the simple fact that alarmist headlines catch more attention, generating more traffic and revenue, and thus acceptance rates and grant money downstream. Which is, I think, the real core of the issue.
US supermarkets are massive, take forever to buy small amounts of groceries, and even the walk to and from the car is long.
A better world is possible! (If better grocery stores constitute a "better world")
I lived that life in my 20s
Turns out I don't actually want to go to the grocery store every day. I want to go once a week and stock up, which I can do thanks to inventions like the refrigerator and the automobile
running errands with your own two feet every day by walking, cycling, etc keeps people healthy and lean. this country has a major car problem. it’s sad.
of course one can go to the gym to stay lean and healthy, but that’s even more time consuming than stopping by the store for 5 minutes on the way home, and it requires extreme motivation. Hardly an improvement i’d say.
I did live this exact lifestyle in my 20s. I was definitely more active but my diet was way worse. I was closer to a lot of restaurants, and I was closer to a lot of bakeries and convenience stores and such as well.
A healthy lifestyle also requires a healthy diet and city living gave me far too much easy access to snacks and junk food. A lot of "it's only 5 minutes to go buy a snack". Daily stops for coffee that often included a pasty
Yeah, the walkable city does mean people are more active
It doesn't necessarily mean they are much more healthy. It still requires other forms of self control (which I admit, I struggled with)
I agree, it’s not a magic fix for all issues! But it does address one major component, the physical activity part. The other is diet, which is a separate issue of course.
one can go to the gym
Nobody wants less flexibility, rigid plans and higher maintenance costs. I think what you really want is a big house with lots of space away from other people and since you can't have your cake and eat it too you've sacrificed everything else.
I actually did live in an apartment a block away from a grocery store and yes, you're right. I would not trade my current house for having a grocery store that close
Because living in apartments sucks
But even if I did live in my current house with a grocery store right next door, I still would prefer to go as few times a week as possible. Planning ahead and limiting how often I am at stores helps me tremendously with sticking to a budget, which is also something I place a lot of value on
When I lived close to a grocery store not only did I spend more because the prices were higher, I also made more frequent trips for things on a whim, like snacks and treats. It was a much more expensive lifestyle
Maybe other people don't have that same struggle with convenience, but I do. By making the barrier higher, my life is more affordable and I eat less junk food for sure
This is all just my experience though
This depends on a) what you want, and b) the apartment. If you want a garden, then an apartment is a non-starter, obviously. Also if you care about what the exterior of the building looks like that you'll want a house. But other than it doesn't make much difference.
The main difference for me is insulation from your neighbours. I've lived in good apartments and bad ones. The best ones you simply forget that you even have neighbours. The worst ones you can't forget because you can hear their conversations and them locking doors etc. The trouble is it's hard to tell what it's going to be like before you move in and this isn't the kind of thing that has standards or that anyone seems to think about. So for someone sensitive to noise, but also likes to make a lot of noise (I'm a musician), I'm resigned to living in a house too. But I'm not sure it has to be this way.
Now, if you are really attached to your car and are only open to using your car for groceries, stay in suburbia, it's oversupplied through centralized planning and not at risk of going anywhere!
Dunno about you but I only have two hands and can only carry so much at one time
I could have bought and brought a wagon or something I suppose, but that presents its own problems.
Where do I store the wagon in my tiny apartment?
What do I do with it when I'm actually in the store shopping, to make sure no one steals it while I'm in the store? I can't bring it into the store, it's too bulky for narrow urban grocery store aisles
How do I get my wagon full of groceries to my apartment, with no elevator?
Actually how do I get my empty wagon up to my apartment even, it's not going to manage narrow stairwells very easily even empty. So even if I leave it at the bottom and carry my groceries up by hand, I still have to get the wagon itself upstairs somehow
And then I also own a wagon that takes up my limited apartment space, which I only use to get groceries and provides no other utility for my life.
Unlike a car which I use all the time and only one of those uses is getting groceries
They're incredibly popular here, and yes, all supermarkets will have a lock stand near the checkout area so you can leave them there and easily reach for them as you're bagging your groceries. They're also foldable and/or small enough to fit in almost any closet.
Never seen a grocery store with a lock stand for these things either
So you really need to move away from roads. That's possible, but it's really hard to do in most developed nations. Just moving away from a city won't get you to where you need to be. Even when you get there, you have other issues. Like, food, energy, water/sewage treatment, etc.
I don't think people realize how difficult it would be to get away from this particular pollutant in our environment. I mean most of us don't own 500 acres in the Brazilian, Namibian, or Ghanaian countryside that we can retreat to. Even Brazil may be too far gone at this point to be honest. And Brazil is enormous. A lot of space. The number of tolerable nations that would have unaffected areas is decreasing fast. This really is a global problem.
ETA: Some remote parts of Canada and Alaska might fit the bill? Assuming you're not big on quality of life.
I’d wait until somebody can clearly state what the demonstrated harms of microplastics are before you conclude that there’s nothing you can do. An EV reduces emissions that we KNOW are bad, and over their lifetimes, the reduction is huge compared to an ICE vehicle. If you’re worried, though, walk or bike whenever you can.
Biking to grocery store is not an option for you, but you can still make a difference if you think about it. Eg, go to the store less frequently. Switch to a chest freezer for perishables. And so on. Draw up an energy budget and do the math.
There is a cost to human life, sure. But you can make it work if you really care enough. You are definitely not screwed.
"Microplastic Free", no, there is no such thing right now. But I'm very far from any major roads/interstates and hundreds of miles to any big city. I didn't move out here to avoid microplastics though, it just (maybe) turned out that way.
I'm actually not terribly afraid of microplastics at all, I just don't like urban environments.
In a prewar US mid sized city, the density supports multiple grocery stores I can reach in about the same time as driving and finding parking.
I may stop by a store again during the week for a smaller trip if there's something I really need, or pop to a corner store if I need to grab something like drinks for guests, but it's not out of my way.
It's really not a big deal. Bike panniers can hold a ton.
>short of a rickshaw you ain't getting all of that on a bicycle with or without panniers
Four Americans, maybe.