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Feed your Neighbours
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
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Just remember that most microplastics come from tires so you kinda don’t want to have food you eat growing right next to the road
Are they absorbed into the plants? Or just wash off?
My understanding is that they get into the soil and can then get into the plants. Then into your body.
That is unless you make a post on Facebook stating you revoke their permission to get into your body
Repost immediately!!! TOS update incoming!!!
I don't know anything about biology but that's not how I imagined that would work.
Toxins concentrate as you climb trophic levels. It's why tuna has so much mercury in it compared to other fish.
I don't think that has anything to do with what we're talking about.
Are microplastics "a toxin"?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7567360/
Toxin was a poor word choice of mine there.
Link has some light reading on the subject. TLDR, there is evidence of biomagnification in some trophic levels, but the findings are inconclusive.
Again, not the topic being discussed here.
Plants don't absorb microplastics from the soil, or at least that's my assumption.
Therefore, if you live near a road, washing your veggies should remove the microplastics that have accumulated in the leaves
Whoaa I didn't think plants absorbed microplastics but apparently, they do.
Here's the article I found. And the relevant article it cites.
Fuck me.
God that hurts to read.
I really like that one song by the Buggles
Depends, but most will wash off.
Wait til you hear what kind of wheel tractors have
A tractor isn't driving there nearly as frequently as cars on a road though. Also, I would imagine tractor tires are far harder and sturdier than road tires. They're driving slow, and there's no need to shed material to stick to the road like with road tires.
I have no knowledge of any of this, but tractors seem like they wouldn't be much of an issue in my mind.
nah you got it right. the tire:surfacearea ratio is much higher on streets. and the wear is much higher due to type of rubber (grippy for street cars) and how it wears down due to surface roughness / friction
Could make everything within ~3ft of the road non-edible natives, either companion plants for the food or native cultivars to help pollinators (which in turn, will help the edibles closer to the house). So there's still a way to make this work!
Not much besides crab grass will grow within 3 feet of our roads anyway because they literally salt the earth all winter with insane amounts of road de-icer in our part of the country. The only places that get a slight reprieve are homes near reservoirs or when it gets too cold for the melt temp and they switch to sand.
It’s also why cars don’t last much more than 10 years unless undercoated and carefully maintained and cleaned all winter.
I've got so much crab grass this year because of the plow tearing into the yard and then the municipality reseeding it and nothing growing there lol
and both of my cars are rusty pieces of shit because I didn't undercoat. body looks great, relatively... the frame and suspension and all brackets underneath are falling apart. a gas tank bracket disintegrated in my hand the other day.
yeah tbf i would not wanna eat anything that close to sidewalk anyway. dogs pee and poop there
Do you know what dirt is? Do you know what a honey-wagon is? Do you know where birds shit?
Obligatory rinse your produce remider here.
TIL what a honeywagon is! Never heard them called that. Mostly know them as a sucker truck or vac truck but I'm in Aussie so...
People here are pretty delusional about how food gets to the table and being overly concerned with some micro possibility of them actually noticing because they saw a study online.
they do?
Topsoil is mostly shit.
How can that be? Aren't tires made of rubber?
Not exclusively.
Can rubber not be abraded into small particles?
Sure, but rubber can not become microplastic
Ah, gotcha
Don't forget the heavy metals, too.
You know where and how they grow the food you buy (assuming you don't always buy organic at the farmers market)?
you remember we're a bunch of weirdos here on the fediverse, right? i live in a city, right on the edge of farm country, and i go bike out to farms and flirt/banter/barter BBQ with the farmers until they let me buy a couple logs of wood off their orchard so's i can smoke with local apple and peach. the only time i get produce from the grocery store and not the fruit stand/farmer's market is when (a) my mother drops by any extra she's picked up, (b) they don't have kumquats at the local fruit stands and i don't want to drive out 45 minutes out to the good tree and pick 3 kumquats offa one of my favorite brunch spot's kumquat trees, or (c) i forget c but I swear it exists. i gotta plant me a kumquat tree.
Who are you telling that to? I pick up trash in my free time...
But seriously: That’s awesome—I tip my hat to your lifestyle and take back what I said.
In my free time, I also enjoy gardening, hunting, and fishing.
This is more of a personal opinion, but I think that with homegrown vegetables (as long as you don’t use chemical pesticides and aren’t gardening right next to the highway), you’ll likely still have lower levels of contaminants than with regular, non-organic vegetables from most supermarkets—even if your garden borders a street in a residential area.
In any case, good luck with the kumquat—I have a small tree in a pot, and it would have borne a good crop this year… if I hadn’t neglected to water it over the winter.
Ah, yes, a field where any single square foot may be run over by a tire about 2 dozen times per year obviously has the same rubber exposure as a road.
Quit with the dumb, snarky retort. It doesn't make you look smart, it does the opposite.
Proximity to roads not only exposes a garden to tire dust, but also the asphalt can leech into the soil and be absorbed by the plants. Plus there's the volatiles in car exhausts.
It's common gardening advice to keep gardens at least 30ft from roads to prevent these problems. It's far better to grow vegetable in the bacl yard instead.
,,The pot calling the kettle black."
The amount from traffic one residential street would be infinitesimal I imagine.
From low-speed, light vehicles? I can't imagine it would be significant compared to farms on the interstate with 50,000+ lb (25,000 kg) trucks going 70+ mph (110 km/h) nearby.
That's a fucking long truck
Oops. I fixed it.
Somewhere between 9 and 28%, depending on the source. Far from "most", but I learned something new today
It's going to vary a lot depending on the road, specifically traffic volume and speed. Or, a four way stop where loads of drivers slam their brakes right in front of your property would probably also be pretty detrimental. For a quiet neighborhood street it would be paranoid worrying about micro plastic in your cucumbers imo.
Gotcha, garden in sleepy neighborhood, good. Garden on pit road at Talledega, bad.
what about four way stops where loads of drivers drop their truckloads of, let's say tomatoes
i saw a tomato spill on the interstate the other day and i been thinking about it
Busy roads, yes. Typical suburban neighborhood? Not really an issue.
Doomers have to comment on every nice thing