Every year, billions of vehicles worldwide shed an estimated 6 million tons of tire fragments. These tiny flakes of plastic, generated by the wear and tear of normal driving, eventually accumulate in the soil, in rivers and lakes, and even in our food. Researchers in South China recently found tire-derived chemicals in most human urine samples.

Electric cars are not THE solution.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    403·
    3 days ago

    Yet another example of how pretty much every problem is, at its heart, a zoning problem:

    • Microplastics? Too much driving, because trip origins and destinations are too far apart to be walkable.
    • Greenhouse gas emissions from cars? Too much driving because not enough walkability.
    • Greenhouse gas emissions from housing? Poor efficiency because too many single-family homes exposed on all sides instead of high-density housing with shared walls.
    • Greenhouse gas emissions from concrete production? Using way more of it than we really need to build huge amounts of unnecessary parking (and much wider streets than we’d need for bikes + transit + only delivery vehicles).
    • High housing prices? Not enough housing density.
    • Obesity? Sedentary lifestyles, i.e., not enough gym of life.
    • Racism? Redlining.
    • Wealth inequality? (Among other things), protecting rich landowners from market forces by eliminating competition from multifamily developers that would build out the land to its highest and best use.

    See also, this video: The Housing Crisis is the Everything Crisis. He almost gets it, but fails to connect that very last dot, which is that the housing crisis is itself caused by bad, density-restricting zoning!

    • Salvo@aussie.zoneEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      <sarcasm> but if more people were walking, they would all be run over by tiny men in Dodge Ram250s</sarcasm>

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        32·
        2 days ago

        You’re not entitled to choose otherwise unless you’re actually willing to pay for it. Zoning laws that force an oversupply of single-family homes are effectively a subsidy of that lifestyle, and it’s high fuckin’ time for that subsidy to end!

        In other words, if you own a house in the suburbs, you might think you’re a rugged individualist who bought at fair market value, but you’re actually a damn welfare queen and don’t even realize it.