While so-called climate experts wring their hands about fossil fuel vs. EV powered vehicles, it turns out that the biggest climate threat from vehicles comes from their tires.
According to a recent report, 78% percent of the microplastics in oceans come from synthetic tire rubber, all by way of stormwater runoff. Those microplastics end up in marine life, and ultimately end up in the seafood that humans consume.
Tire rubber contains more than 400 chemicals and compounds, many of them carcinogenic, and research is only beginning to show how widespread the problems from tire dust may be.
“Tire wear particles” are emitted continually as vehicles travel and they range in size from visible pieces of rubber or plastic to microparticles. It is estimated that tires generate 6 million tons of particles a year, of which 200,000 tons end up in oceans.
The silver lining is that scientists studying the pollutants in stormwater runoff have found that green infrastructure solutions such as rain gardens could prevent more than 90 percent of tire particulates from entering our waterways.
AquiPor’s technology is being developed to accomplish the same thing, but at a much larger scale, by capturing and filtering runoff through our permeable system right within the urban landscape.
As we begin our water quality and filtration testing of our permeable concrete, we’ll keep you close to these developments!
CEO Greg Johnson and product engineer Josh Chastek talk about progress made on the tech front of AquiPor. They also talk about how our concrete tech acts as a filter, and what that means for cities that implement it.
Did you know that AquiPor is taking investments to increase production and grow?
Check out what we’re doing at StartEngine.com/Aquipor
AquiPor Community,
Did you see the recent investigative article in the New York Times regarding groundwater depletion in the U.S.?
Aquifers supply 90% of our nation’s water supply, but they are being over-pumped to levels that could cause irreversible damage to the U.S. economy and society as a whole - emanating in lower crop yields, poor drinking water quality, and shunted land development (housing).
A quiet contributor to this problem that doesn’t get enough attention is the amount of impervious surface area that covers our cities. With 40-60% of the urban landscape covered by impervious surfaces (streets, sidewalks, parking lots, etc.), rainwater that should be naturally re-entering the ground never gets the chance. Instead it becomes runoff that contributes to urban flooding.
These very issues are at the forefront of AquiPor’s mission to develop the permeable concrete technologies and engineering systems to help manage stormwater and recharge groundwater right within the built environment.
With a commitment by cities to introduce more permeable surfaces and upgrade existing stormwater systems with green infrastructure, we can start to reverse these trends.
Can your community benefit from AquiPor? We’d love to hear from you.
Find out more about AquiPor and learn how you can invest in this technology from the ground up!
The U.S. Geological Survey recently put together a model that estimated the amount of impervious parking lot coverage in the United States.
According to the report, 5.5% of all developed land in the lower 48 is covered by parking lots. That’s close to 26 billion square feet of surface area that is impervious to stormwater. All of this impervious surface area contributes to stormwater pollution and localized flooding when it rains.
With U.S. cities responsible for discharging up to 10 Trillion gallons of polluted water into clean waterways and flood damage costing the country $9 billion annually, parking lots represent an obvious opportunity for implementing green stormwater infrastructure.
By my very rough math, parking lots are responsible for tens of billions of gallons of stormwater runoff annually. That represents runoff that not only needs to be treated, but it’s also water that never makes its way back into the ground to recharge groundwater. In drought-plagued regions like the southwest and California, groundwater recharge is one of the most critical water management strategies that can be implemented.
One easy solution to this problem is to make parking lots surface-permeable. The right permeable pavement technology, when it’s accompanied with good engineering, is a no-brainer approach to stormwater management and groundwater recharge.
Besides the environmental benefits, the economic benefits of permeable pavements are understated. Getting stormwater back into the ground naturally is extremely valuable. Simply put, every gallon of freshwater that doesn’t need to be treated at a downstream wastewater treatment plant or imported from hundreds of miles away, represents real savings for a community.
In a previous post we addressed why we don’t yet see permeable pavement everywhere. At AquiPor, we’re working to change that with a technology that makes permeable paving the norm and not the exception in cities. The parking lot seems like a good place to start this trend.
On this Water Drop episode, Kevin and Greg talk about the recent weather whiplash phenomenon in California where the state received over 30 Trillion gallons of rain, and how proper planning and development can help cities utilize this stormwater to bolster freshwater resources.
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