this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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Biggest sources:
10-40 Mt released into environment/year, and increasing.
I'm kinda surprised that more comes from paint than tires.
I think it depends on measure, if im not mistaken, by weight arohnd 50% of microplastics are tire dust.
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.
Still both from automobile infrastructure. /c/fuckcars bleeding into every Lemmy...
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.