So if you take someone in the United States, driving an average of 25,000 km per year, they are generating something like 2,750 g of microplastics. If that same person mountain bikes 25 km per week for a year (1,300 km) they are generating something like 46 g of microplastics. I’m all for making mountain biking more environmentally friendly, but it looks like a rounding error on our microplastic emissions when looking at other sources. Combined with giving people more reason to protect nature, I’d guess it’s a net positive. Here in the US, wet need to fix our land use and transportation, as car dependency is not compatible with a livable planet.
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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They're plastic?? I always thought they were rubber.
Rubber counts as microplastic pollution, because it has the same effects: It will not biodegrade, is not healthy to have in your body, but will accumulate there
Is there an alternative to rubber tires that does biodegrade?
No afaik but I'd bet there's at least someone working on that - it's needed asap, as car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment.
Wow, that's a lot higher than I expected.
Whoever comes up with a viable solution stands to make a lot of money.
Oh that's neat! Was always under the impression that it was fine because it being from the rubber tree and how rubber bands can dry out and crumble afterba while
I think only about 25% of tire materials are natural. The rest are synthetic rubber, resins and fillers, then metal.
Huh, TIL syntheic rubber is a thing
Butyl rubber. Iirc, it's combined with plastics for bike tires. I'm hoping we can find biodegradable alternatives for cars and bikes. That said, the impact of bikes and ebikes is most likely far smaller than the millions of cars (including EVs) on the road across continents.
Ideally, we need to make rail a huge priority across the north and south American contingents. Rail and bikes will take a chunk out of microplastic production.