As lawmakers around the world weigh bans of 'forever chemicals,” many manufacturers are pushing back, saying there often is no substitute.
You always hear about how innovative the US is but the moment there is any talk about requiring industry to find an alternative to something youd think this place was as economically crippled as north korea. An economy so flimsy and industry so devoid of flexibility that it will collapse if required to find an alternative to x y and z but simultaneously supposedly the strongest and most resilient economy in the world.
It’s all a ruse to maximise profits and minimise expenses. They’ll do anything to protect the status quo — they’ve used the tragedy of the commons to manufacture dangerous chemicals on an industrial scale for decades, and banning them now would impact entire industries and product segments; probably to the tune of tens or hundreds of billions.
No multinational corporation is ever going to voluntarily support a change that will kill its profits.
The problem is that the industry has already made replacements and the replacements were bad too. Gen X was a replacement for PFOS and PFOA, all 3 are PFAS compounds. Either we have to completely abstain, greatly limit usage, find a magic way to treat it, or replace it. Odds are whatever wonder replacement we invent will be found to be the next super bad thing in 20 years.
Sooo, as a counterpoint lets say we needed to replace “water” with something else for human consumption.
What do you imagine the cost and probability of success for that would look like?
I’m not saying it’s the same here - but people seem to think that “scientists” can just magic-up new chemicals for everything.
We can exist without forever chemicals and have, we cannot exist and have not ever existed without water.
Lemme pose another extreme then. If water killed people after drinking it for 20 years would you just say we can’t replace it and accept that reality? Or would you at least make a strong effort to replace it?
“Forever chemicals” arent water. We have survived without it. It is currently just really inconvenient to do so again given what these substances are used for. I am a chemist. We have replaced things before and were almost certainly going to do it again. Companies just have to give a shit enough to make use of our inginuity to do so. But unfortunately they dont care unless they have a legal gun to their head so here we are
“Forever chemicals” arent water. We have survived without it
Uh. Yeah. Way to avoid my point completely. But sure - we don’t consume “forever chemicals” out of necessity. Guess that chemistry degree is really paying off.
My degree is directly relevant to the topic at hand. I am qualified to have an informed opinion on the feasibility of replacing forever chemicals. You on the other hand, are not.
And? Are there easy replacements?
There are replacements but none as cheap and easy to manufacture (yet… which is the whole point of R and D) which is why companies use them. There is very little pressure forcing companies to switch to alternatives and as long as that is the case, they will still use them rather than do the work needed to phase them out. This is not a problem because we cannot phase them out but because there is no economic driving force to use alternatives.
Making things dirt cheap IS NOT an acceptable excuse to fuck up the environment. We have one planet to live on. This is like pissing in the same office water cooler you drink out of because it costs 50 cents to use the bathroom.
Are said replacements non-toxic?
I’m not saying it’s the same here
“I’m not saying the example I just used in this situation is an example that should ever be used in this situation.”
And if scientists can’t “magic” new chemicals, I wonder how they came up with the ones addressed in this article? Besides, isn’t capitalism supposed to “drive innovation” and all that? Amazing how that suddenly goes right out the window the minute anyone questions the status quo or, god forbid, the profit that comes from destroying the earth and the people on it.
Your view of the world is very pedantic and black/white. Not worth discussing.
These are critical chemistries that enable modern day life
Then maybe we need to examine “modern day life” with a more critical eye. Some sacrifices may need to be made, because they are worth being made.
There are also measures that lie between “ban” and “use freely”. If we cannot eliminate the use of these chemicals in chipmaking, then we need to reconsider the disposability of these chips, or we can even consider if less effective processes result in less damaging chemical use, and accept a bit of regression as a trade-off.
One of the main uses for PFAS is electric vehicle batteries. So if “modern day life” means reducing CO2 emissions, then it will inevitably mean increased use of PFAS.
Four words: Investing in public transportation.
Public transportation depends on buses, and buses require either fossil fuels or batteries.
Orders of magnitude less than mass private vehicle usage.
Of course. But if we want to reduce CO2 emissions then buses will still need electrification - and therefore require PFAS.
Furthermore, public transportation will not be able replace all private vehicles. Or at least, it cannot replace them all quickly enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. By the time the necessary infrastructure was built, it would be too late. Therefore, electrification of private vehicles will be necessary, which will also require PFAS.
Basically, we are at a late enough stage of CO2 emission that the only realistic hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change requires mass production and adoption of EVs.
Very all-or-nothing response.
Of course. But if we want to reduce CO2 emissions then buses will still need electrification - and therefore require PFAS.
Okay. But again. My comment was that if elimination isn’t possible, reduction should be pursued.
So saying “we still require this” is completely irrelevant.
Furthermore, public transportation will not be able replace all private vehicles.
Nowhere has anyone even hinted that replacing all private vehicles is the goal.
Once again. Reduction is the goal.
So saying “we can’t replace all” is completely irrelevant.
Or at least, it cannot replace them all quickly enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. By the time the necessary infrastructure was built, it would be too late.
Buses require almost exactly the same infrastructure as private cars.
Basically, we are at a late enough stage of CO2 emission that the only realistic hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change requires mass production and adoption of EVs.
No. What the hell. Why would that be true?
Public transport is a better option for basically every major population centre. And for those centres, we should not be encouraging private vehicle ownership, but rather replacing that as much as possible with public transport. Hell, even if that public transport is on-demand low-occupancy shuttles and ride sharing, that’s still better.
Electric private vehicles are better than internal combustion, but they are still awful.
So saying “we can’t replace all” is completely irrelevant.
I think it’s relevant to the person you were replying to as well as the original point of the article.
PFAS are critical to some modern technologies. In some cases, they cannot be replaced. Any time we replace cars with buses, we will need PFAS to electrify the buses. And likely we will need more PFAS in the future than we are using today.
Who would have a problem with us returning to an average lifespan of 40 years?
Yeah, me I do, which is why I want to get rid of these forever chemicals because that’s how we’re going to end up with 40 year lifespans again.
We aren’t getting rid of our nutritious diets and vaccines which are the two biggest factors in history that have extended average lifespans. Not Teflon pans and firefighting materials.
I think you overestimate the toxicity of PTFEs. You know they are used in implants?
You underestimate the toxicity of PFAS chemicals and their manufacture. I work in a toxicology lab, I know a lot of people researching PFAS right now.
To make PTFE, they used to use a chemical called PFOA, which causes multiple types of cancer and other pathologies. Everyone has been exposed to it, especially since they have been found to just dump it in whatever river is convenient. They had to stop using it after getting sued, but now they just use a different chemical that had been show to have the same effects. And again, they’re just dumping it into rivers knowing the fines for polluting won’t be as bad as actually containing the chemical properly.
That is one PFAS chemical. There are so many others. Do not let corporations poison you for profit and then lick their boots for the privilege.
Seems like the problem is the lack of proper environmental protection and enforcement.
Love the closing personal attacks. Really drives your point home.
Your mamas so fat , oops I mean PHAT.
My comment was about how if elimination of these materials is impossible, then we should figure out how best to reduce their usage in an acceptable manner.
Jumping straight to black-and-white “So you’d send us back to the dark ages?!?!?!” type of response is kinda wild.
not the people insisting on the chemicals, clearly.
Asbestos. You know how long they knew that was killing people? Lead, they knew that was toxic, kept using it. Business, under capitalism, is designed to find the cheapest path to pull in more money. Regardless of the consequences. Changing might not even mean all that much more, in cost. They would still act like they can’t at all, because any back slide looks bad on their charts. They have no financial obligation to the environment and or people. Change that and they’d become innovators overnight.
My favorite was white phosphorus, which caused Phossy Jaw in the employees making the matches. Switching to red phosphorus would mean a 1% increase in cost or reduction in profits (wasn’t sure which based on the article). Doing so would mean your employees’ bones wouldn’t dissolve. It took regulation to force them to switch.
Then there’s the Radium Girls.
Asbestos is genuinely a wonderful material. It’s heat-proof, it’s a wonderful insulator, it’s one of the best filters for gas masks, it’s wonderful for use in brake pads and clutches, etc.
It’s just a damn shame it causes cancer in living things.
And yet somehow we survived thousands of Years without them.
Also back then, we didn’t have massive populations. Most of the world struggled to survive. Finding food was a all-day activity. Should we go back to that?
Without the haber process modern civilization could not be sustained. We cannot go back without massive population losses. Dunno about you but I’m not picking which of my friends and family aren’t important.
Cancer causing materials are not a necessity to support global scale populations.
Also, I frankly wouldn’t mind returning to a world where almost half my time was my own and not my employer’s.
Also, I frankly wouldn’t mind returning to a world where almost half my time was my own and not my employer’s.
It still wouldn’t actually be your own. You currently work to afford your lifestyle. You’d still work the same amount, probably more, but you certainly wouldn’t have your current lifestyle.
You can have that today. You can still forage for food. It is even easier today.
So, but we don’t need cancerous materials to do so. If you missed it, that was the point
So we lose non-stick pans, how does that make us return to a hunter gatherer society?
Maybe consider for once that these compounds are not only used for pans, but also for other applications, like electronics?
I wasnt aware the laws were targeting electronics. Are we talking all electronics or just some?
Non stick pans, fire retardant mattresses, nonslip shoes, many forms of plastic, stain resistant shirts, water proof jackets, fume suppressants, metal coating/plating, high quality surfactants (ie lots of soaps), many types of pipe and the joining compounds used in plumbing, and the list goes on.
What? This stuff is in soaps and plastics? Wow this stuff is everywhere.
Is this list all products effected or the products that have no known replacement?
It’s not even a dent in the list of all effected products. For the no known replacement there should be a preface, we can generally make things without PFAS still, but PFAS is a major reason why the item is desirable.
For example, we can go back to lye and castile soap but we probably won’t be able to have laundry or dish detergent. The alternatives exist, they just don’t function well enough to be replacements. Without detergents you would need to pre-wash your dishes and laundry (or completely skip using) before using your washing machine and dish washer (hand wash everything). This says nothing about industrial usage of surfactants which is also really important.
We’d still have plastics, but we probably wouldn’t have any plastics which are naturally “slippy,” smooth, or soft. Hard brittle plastics only.
An example I used earlier, we could still have metal coating/plating, but it would probably look more like something from the early 1800s. PFAS is used in the process to suppress fumes and also to protect against corrosion, staining, and weathering.
I don’t know enough to say how far back it would set us with computers. I have the sense they’d still exist, but we’d be set back several decades.
Well, then I don’t think it makes sense for an immediate blanket ban on it.
I suspect the best path forward is to set maximum limits and slowly adjust those down over time. I really don’t think we want to continue to be inundated with carcinogens.
I generally agree. The links to cancer are a bit tenuous to be honest. We know at high levels they definitely are bad, but at low levels we aren’t really sure. Looking at the effects to people living downstream of the DuPont plants, and who were drinking high quantities of it in their source water, we known it’s bad. The problem is that it bioaccumulates and we suspect that at low levels, over long enough, it’ll be bad. The low levels we’re talking about are in the single digit part per trillion. It’s really hard to put into context how small 1 ppt is. If we took Lake Superior as an example, 1 ppt would be 32 gallons in the whole lake. Loch ness lake would be 1.95 gallons.
NYC generates approximately 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater per day, that means 1 ppt would be about 5 mL per day in the whole city.
We know that PFAS is bad at high levels, but because the low levels are so low we are having a hard time proving it’s bad. Most studies will say that there are links or that it’s a likely carcinogen.
We definitely need to cut this stuff out, but doing so is going to seriously cripple most peoples way of life or we’ll find a replacement which might not be as safe as we think it is.
What a wonderfully unrelated to my post comment you’ve made. Since you are so kind as to make up what you want to argue against, perhaps you won’t mind making up the response so those of us on topic can get on with discussing that topic.
I am so not understanding all the comments on this post that are literally defending their right to be given cancer by large corporations.
Wtf are the responses to this comment? “No, I like being poisoned for profit!” Jfc.
It’s the same stupid bullshit as the 2a nuts. There is no logical reason, they just like a manmade product, which is a great extension of any interesting person :)
No it’s not.
an Argument’s an intellectual process. Contradiction’s just the
automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.No it isnt.
Yeah, not everyone is worth arguing with.
We also survived thousands of years without any of the creature comforts our society has taken for granted. Unfortunately, all the scientific advances we’ve achieved for the betterment of mankind involved these forever chemicals in one way or another.
I’m not saying they’re not terrible, but at least some of the voices against these restrictions aren’t in bad faith. It just speaks to the importance of finding alternatives, and we have to accept the fact that some things might not be replaceable with biodegradable solutions.
I thought we were banning forever chemicals in manufacturing, not science.
These chemicals made the creature comforts cheaper, not the creature comforts you wish to claim require them.
If you want to return to a feudal experience, I’m afraid it’s not like your local renaissance faire. What was it actually like?
Well, let’s start with Yersinia Pestis, the little scoundrel…
Antibiotics? Never heard of em.
None of which require any of the chemicals involved, so…
For large scale manufacturing in the electronics to make them? Sure they do.
You like glass? Modern glass? Required.
Oh man, I love you Chema-kills people. You make me feel so intelligent.
Humans existed before these compounds were created. One of the ones mentioned in the article PFAS were first created in the 1940s.
So my question would be, what did we use in their place before that?
And what will happen if we stop using them.
One of their uses is in firefighting chemical fires.
When an electric car is on fire, you need PFAS to stop the lithium fire. Water just can’t stop it.
Of course, before batteries we used gasoline.
I imagine their might be more of these cases where modern technology relies on unsustainable practices.
Another factor that makes lithium-ion battery fires challenging to handle is oxygen generation. When the metal oxides in a battery’s cathode, or positively charged electrode, are heated, they decompose and release oxygen gas. Fires need oxygen to burn, so a battery that can create oxygen can sustain a fire.
Because of the electrolyte’s nature, a 20% increase in a lithium-ion battery’s temperature causes some unwanted chemical reactions to occur much faster, which releases excessive heat. This excess heat increases the battery temperature, which in turn speeds up the reactions. The increased battery temperature increases the reaction rate, creating a process called thermal runaway. When this happens, the temperature in a battery can rise from 212 F (100 C) to 1,800 F (1000 C) in a second.
Just because PFAS is one way doesn’t mean there aren’t other things that would work.
I really hope there are others. I haven’t heard of alternatives yet.
Regulate it and the ev car manufacturers will spend the money to find one.
So for electrical fires, they use carbon dioxide to smother the fire and sodium bicarbonate to aid in putting it out, along with class c fire extinguishers. Class c are just carbon dioxide.
For chemical fires, carbon dioxide extinguishers are also used. They can use extinguishers with bromochlorodifluoromethane, aka Halon 1211, (which I guess could be a pfas chemical, but I don’t find anything either way).
Electrical fires don’t generate their own oxygen.
Good thing a lithium fire isn’t an electrical fire then, isn’t it?
I don’t know that it is a good thing. It just means you can’t use baking soda to out it out.
Wouldn’t it just be better to cure cancer? Why don’t the scientists just do that?
Sand. You use sand.
The big one is airplane fires, AFFF is the best foam for putting out a jet fuel fire.
If that means we’ll have to forfeit the use of, for example computer systems, or some actually vital modern infrastructure - I don’t think we’ll agree to the ban.
On the other hand if their use is unavoidable, for any valid reason - there should be sufficient effort in recycling them…
recycling, containment, disposal… i’m pretty sure forever chemicals aren’t actually forever: put enough energy into them and we can probably make them no longer forever chemicals… it’s only a problem because we don’t contain and process them
Use your brain for once and realise that there weren’t modern electronics in the 1940s, and without these compounds, we couldn’t have useful computer systems now.
It’s just more expensive to make a new substitute and stop selling the toxic shit you still have in storage with no way of getting rid of it. So regulation has to lead the way…otherwise there is no incentive to stop. How about letting THEM come up with a way of removing the chemicals they already put into the environment first, before giving them the next free ticket to pollute.
Yeah, there was a point in time where none were used. To say there isn’t an alternative is to say this isn’t true. They might not like it, but we don’t require whatever they’re producing with it.
There was a point in time we didn’t have smartphones either. Just because they weren’t used before doesn’t mean we don’t need them in modern society. Developing an alternative that works just as well just needs gut funding boost to get there.
Smart phones aren’t killing us and everything else on the planet.
PTFEs aren’t killing us and everything else either.
Smartphones require PTFEs
Necessity is the mother of all inventions. When you take away their forever chemicals they will come up with new replacements quickly.
Often, the replacement will just be a derivative that isn’t necessarily better. The narrative that will then go out through the media is: “We’re no longer using this evil thing. Full stop.” The replacement ends up just being something similar with similar problems. People stop paying attention because they assume the problem is solved, when it really isn’t.
Example: there was that whole BPA plastic stink years back, now most bottles and food containers are “BPA Free”…but if you look into the chemical they used to replace BPA, it has the same synthetic estrogen problem BPA did. (Arbitrarily searched source: https://www.plasticstoday.com/study-says-bpa-free-plastics-still-show-estrogenic-activity )
In the case of replacement for water bottle or food container plastics, the best answer is to just not using them anymore, although glass and metal have their own difficulties, namely fragility and weight.
I remember the horrible transition period of the terrible “energy saving” lightbulbs back when EU banned incandescent bulbs. Expensive, took minutes to warm up, had terrible colour rendition, filled with mercury and saved barely any energy. It felt like such a moronic decision.
Now with over 50 LED bulbs all using like a tenth of the energy they used to with lifespans so long I can’t even remember when I last had to replace one, it feels totally worth it. Sometimes someone has to make you suffer before it gets better.
Though with chemicals in contact with food, hopefully they take it just a bit slower to make sure they are safe first.
Led was obviously on the horizon when those bans were passed, it was bad legislation to ban at that point when fluorescent was the only real option.
How did we ever survive without them?
It’s not about survival. Manufactures are just letting people know if we ban these chemicals they will need to stop producing some products.
So you’re OK with EV batteries no longer being made, along with numerous other things?
It’s kinda hard to tell. I would need to find a specific list of things that we could no longer produce with the specific laws.
If it’s just that we no longer get non-stick pans, I am fine with losing those if we get less cancer.
The list is so long you can’t fathom how much it impacts. Pretty much anything with anti- or resistant used to describe it has some sort of PFAS compound. We can live without PFAS, but we would need to do like people used to do and give up a lot of creature comforts.
One thing it’s commonly associated with is surfactants, so no fancy shampoo, but also probably no washing machine because it doesn’t scour your clothes well enough. Plumbing uses it to join pipes. Any sort of metal finishing/coating uses so no more chrome or nickel plating unless you want it to look like you dug it up at a 500 AD site. One of the higher containing things I’ve seen was women’s make up.
How much less cancer do you prefer from these vs internal combustion cars?
The point is being missed. We shouldn’t use pfas for convenience items like pans and such. If we keep them well contained in EV batteries, that’s probably ok.
I concur. Plastic makes great electrical insulation, but not great disposable cups. Petroleum is very versatile feedstock but not a good energy source.
I do wonder if cooking in nonstick pans without oil is less risky than cooking with oil in conventional pans.
I don’t know. We stop cars, cancer goes away pretty quickly. Forever chemicals are well… Forever.
That is why I need specifics. You deserve specifics too.
We stop all cars. Build nanomachines to cure cancer and enable cold fusion. Abolish capitalism . It’s all so easy.
There’s a great conversation going on under this comment that I totally agree with. There’s probably valid uses for which an exception could be made, but these largely do not belong in mass produced consumer goods.
To answer your direct question, though: In a rational world, EVs would not be a thing, or would be a very limited thing for special use cases like farm work or accessibility. They will not solve our problems, only mass transit and better planning can solve things.
We powered our cars with gasoline instead of batteries.
Because without PFAS, we can’t make EV batteries.
The point of transportation reform isnt to get a new type of car, its to eliminate the need for cars
Many parts of the world currently depend on cars, and that cannot easily be changed. While it’s not impossible, eliminating cars will require a long time. Much longer than the amount of time we have left to avert catastrophic climate change.
Unless those electric cars are running on entirely renewable energy, it’s a non-positive
Electric vehicles add demand to the power grid. These days, increased demand is met by increasing renewable energy production (mostly wind turbines). Nobody is building coal plants any more.
If you think personal forms of transportation will ever disappear you are straight up delusional. That’s not “reform” that’s ignorance.
Agreed, but social media has become an echo chamber for fuckcars and good luck reasoning with them.
You could replace most of this shit with glass, ceramic, cardboard, and some cooking oil to replace those non stick cooking appliances
It feels to me like a missing piece in this conversation is any consideration at all for balancing private profits against public costs when weighing whether or not a particular chemical or technology ought to be sold or used.
Yes, they’re better for solving the narrow use case of being a fire retardant now and that’ll save someone a little bit of money while it’s in use vs. using more water or soaps, but what of the costs thereby put on everyone whose drinking water now has that stuff in it and their increased cancer risks over time? Or what if instead of non-stick aluminum cookware, we used seasoned steel and iron cookware and nobody has to die of cancer because DuPont dumps its manufacturing waste in nearby waterways?
I remember having this conversation about fracking fluids and how “economically important” fracking was to the economy at the time, but those wells are tapped in a matter of a year or two and if the neighbor’s water is rendered undrinkable, that’s a spoiled resource that will remain spoiled for a long, long time- long after the profit is all gone and the well operators have abandoned those wells. If the mess costs more in externalities to others than it creates in profit and value for the people doing it, the thing has net negative value and probably ought not to be done.
The situation is much more nuanced than that. PFAS chemicals are in (almost literally) everything. Your nonslip shoes, your water proof jacket, your stain resistant table cloth, and your fire retardant mattress. On top of that the list of PFAS chemicals that the EPA is looking at is around 70 compounds long and only scratches the surface of all the compounds. The test to detect PFAS is in its 4th draft and can’t reliably detect low enough to reach the levels of concern, except in nearly pristine waters, so you can’t even detect if you have it in most water. The levels of concern that are being discussed are in the single digit PPT for individual compounds or 70 PPT total PFAS for some health advisory levels. Detection levels on normal waste water are generally somewhere between 50 and 4000 because the test is so sensitive other compounds fry the machine and it has to be diluted.
Another problem is that the thresholds are so low that it’s hard to draw any conclusions definitively. It’s associated with so many things you could write a novel: altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, cancer, decreased birth weight for infants, infertility, and more. The thing is that the only way to make a more conclusive connection is observing high exposure areas where people were drinking it at thousand times higher than the risk levels, so interpolating down smaller values has a lot of theoretical connections, but few smoking guns.
In general industries are trying to move away from PFAS, but the areas where they can’t include things like AFFF foam used for fighting jet fires. Some areas, particularly the military, are unlikely to make concessions as they want the best option available even if a close substitute is available. Your average PFAS using company; however, is moving away from PFAS in general.
EDIT: also the quantity of PFAS in most items is so small that it actually is below the threshold on an SDS for requiring it be reported, so trying to find out if a product you use has PFAS means you have to call the manufacturer. Maybe they can tell you, maybe they don’t want to tell you, or maybe they don’t know because it’s not listed on the SDS for the raw ingredients they use. In the industry it’s gotten into a near legal situation where companies are telling their suppliers and vendors to look for PFAS and certify that their products don’t have it, only for the vendor to turn around and do the same for their vendors and suppliers. The portion at the end of the article captures this well, an example would be, “Well we don’t use PFAS, but our machine has gaskets which probably have PFAS. This doesn’t touch the final product so are we able to use it?”
PFAS chemicals are in (almost literally) everything.
Yes, this is more or less the circumstance we arrive at when the burden of proof for consumer safety is on injured parties to prove the particular thing unsafe, or its use negligent after the fact, in courts against often powerful corporations with lots of money to spend defending themselves, as opposed to the burden being on would-be sellers to prove its use safe and environmentally responsible before bringing it to market.
I appreciate your post, it really is informative, and it explains how problematic it will be to connect injured parties with the people that harmed them, how now that some people depend on those things and will accept no substitute and will continue emitting more of it into the environment, that the rules as they are don’t provide real remedy or solutions for problems that were perfectly legal to create and everyone involved did nothing wrong.
That right there, really, prompts the question- would we really be that much worse off if we had consumer safety rules that put the burden of proving a product or technology’s safety and sustainability on the seller, or on some sort of product safety testing system?
If that were to mean industrial chemicals had to undergo trials or studies in the way that pharmaceuticals do, sure there probably would be fewer new things. OTOH if there had to be even the most-rudimentary plan for the lifecycle of a product up front, maybe we wouldn’t have millions of tons of discarded plastics or forever chemicals in the environment that everyone knows there’s no money to clean up (because our system protects those that profit by externalizing costs).
Great post, but just throwing this out there. Teflon was invented in 1938 and brought to the commercial market in 1948. PFOA is one of the top 2 legacy PFAS chemicals under scrutiny and is a chief ingredient in the manufacture of PTFE (Teflon). PFOA wasn’t noticed at all until 1968 and links to health impacts weren’t noticed until 1999.
This specific chemical existed before many of the consumer protection laws we have today, but even if those laws had been in place it would have likely been decades before we had made the connection. 20 - 60 years to test a new chemical is a long long time.
can’t be replaced… By something that works as well, is as cheap and most importantly : makes them as much money.
Were without these chemicals before, we can so again.
Yes, if you want technological regression.
What would that be, exactly?
Because from where I’m sitting it mostly looks like we’d end up paying a little more for things, having things that might stick a little more, that sort of thing.
Between that and having pfas in my body, I’ll go for being slightly inconvenienced
Yes, if you want technological regression.
You know, when I learned about the problems associated with non-stick cookware, I stopped buying that shit and replaced mine with cast iron, steel, and ceramic-coated cast iron. That might be regression in someone’s book but really the cookware I’m using now isn’t going to wear out in a couple of years, these things will last the better part of forever- and keeping them seasoned is not difficult once you know how to do it.
I also don’t miss the lead in gas or paint, the asbestos in construction material, industrial coolants based on CFCs, or DDT-based insecticides, or thalidomide-based anti-emetics.
The article opens by saying something totally different than the above summary. The point is that it’s difficult to replace a lot of these chemicals, not that there isn’t any substitute.
Expensive more like. Profit at all cost.
This is an excuse by the entire world to not spend money on solving the problem because they can just keep spending money the same way and not worry about it changing. This sounds like capitalism 101. They need to spend money is the problem their is no excuse for “there is nothing that can substitute it” aside from “I don’t want to spend money on trying to figure this out”. Their is always a solution to a problem you just need to you know… solve it.
These terrible chemicals are just not worth it at all.
The only people suffering from forever chemicals being banned are the people producing these poisons.
You can’t even drink rainwater anymore. This is killing us.
No, everyone on the planet will be suffering, because PFAS are vital for the manufacturing of integrated circuits, without them, we wouldn’t have computers, and by extension, all the products the latter made possible.
Quiz question : when electric vehicle catches on fire what do you use to put the fire out?
Hint : you can’t use water
Smother it with the corpses of billionaires
Nor anything else as the fire creates its own oxygen and thus must be allowed to burn itself out.
Sand. You use sand.
What about a 20’ x 20’ smother blanket?
You put it in a box and set that box on fire. You have to fight fire with fire.
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They mean serving as the agent for whatever industrial need or process is being performed.
Like replacing eggs in a meatball recipe. Sometimes you can’t substitute the ingredient and end up with the same or similar end product or effect.
Man, that joke flew so far over your head I think even Drax would have had trouble catching it.
