PieFedHow much microplastic is generated during mountain biking?
www.uni-bayreuth.de/en/press-release/microplast…
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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.
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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
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I think only about 25% of tire materials are natural. The rest are synthetic rubber, resins and fillers, then metal.
sabreW4K3Is 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.
WahotsButyl 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.
So, 1/3 the production rate per tire compared to a car over 100km. Not to mention half the number of tires. I wonder how much of that is due to the weight difference alone.
Has anyone ever made tires out of something that isn't plastic? Looks like NASA has. Nickel-titanium alloy flexible mesh. No popping and lasts the lifetime of a bike. Doesn't look like the company has a mountain-bike version yet.
It actually appears to be per bike per 100km. I find that quite surprising given it's half the number of tyres, there's substantially less initial volume per tyre than a car's and, as you say, there's a lot less weight on them.
Given their focus on MTBs, I wonder if it's related to the type of terrain being ridden (higher incidence of gravel/sharp rocks than your average road) or different tyre compounds between the two vehicle types.
I would bet on different rubber being the culprit. My downhill and trail tires are super soft in order to grab the rocks and roots better. They wear out quicker than road tires because of this. Still takes a few years in with me riding every day but it’s noticeably faster than the roadies.
The Germans, of course.
The problem is that it lasts the lifetime of the bike
@Fingolfinz @anindefinitearticle and only replaces the tubes, it still needs to be retread at some interval. So 'lasts the life of the bike' is a bit misleading....?
(Just going by the linked article)
Thank you for the clarification, I’m definitely not qualified to make any claims on it
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Reduces waste and profit, that is a no-no.
I guess it went over your head. I’m saying that a company won’t make it because capitalism rules everything so since this is something that would be helpful for the consumer, it’s bad for capitalism.
Think of the poor shareholders!
Oh wow thanks that is super interesting!
I have been wondering if you could do something like that with carbon fiber (using carbon fiber as springs) after once seeing a bicycle wheel with spokes that was made using carbon fiber wrapping. Which is a process that can be / has to be automated. If you could create the entire wheel including the tire through carbon fiber wrapping it could become really cheap and worth the downsides. This could be done by a machine that isn't much more complex than a 3D printer, plus a special 3D printed mandrel to build this tire on. Basically they just seem to be large loops the size of the tire that provide the springiness plus a mesh that holds it together with a rubber tread on top.
PS: Not sure if that "superelastic shape memory alloy" is fundamentally different from normal springs or if that is just marketing speak, or the need to function without maintenance or replacement in space.
PPS: Apparently it is vastly different from my idea.
Look, it's obviously good to have knowledge like this, but I am not worried about the mountain bikers out trying to get some exercise while having fun.
We can address this issue later when we detach from fossil fuels as our main power source.
Emissions from burning fossil fuels that poison our air is a completely different issue than microplastics that poison our water, soil and everything that comes from that. Two separate issues that need to be addressed at the same time.
Where .... Where do you think plastics come from?
Yeah, I'm only worried about the environment when it's somebody else's problem.