• Skua@kbin.earth
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    5 months ago

    Rubber, including natural rubber, is a hydrocarbon polymer and should probably count as a plastic in any useful definition of the word for this context. Normally natural rubber is biodegradable, of course, but we vulcanise it for usage in tyres, and that makes it much less so. As such, tyres are a huge source of either microplastic pollution or, if you want to call it something else, functionally-identical microrubber pollution