It’s raining PFAS: rainwater is unsafe to drink even in Antarctica and Tibet

https://www.su.se/english/news/it-s-raining-pfas-even-in-antarctica-and-on-the-tibetan-plateau-rainwater-is-unsafe-to-drink-1.620735

by nabla9 • 4 years ago

515 409 4 years ago

su.se

game-of-throws• 4 years ago

The world is being destroyed, but at least for a few beautiful moments our nonstick pans were a few cents cheaper

LadyCailin• 4 years ago

Think my unrealized stock gains are safe to drink?

hammock4• 4 years ago

The nonstick pans today still have PFAS. They removed PFOA but there are hundreds of similar chemicals that they can use instead, which reason would dictate are just as toxic but which so happen to have not been safety tested yet

madars• 4 years ago

Interesting: this sounds like BPA-free plastics -- a lot of these have BPB and BPS which animal and cell-line studies have found just as concerning, but hey you can slap a "BPA-free" sticker on them!

permo-w3• 4 years ago

what do you think the feasibility of making the laws a whitelist rather than a blacklist would be? they did it with drugs in the UK

bushbaba• 4 years ago

Funny as stainless/high carbon steel with butter is perfectly 'non stick' and way healthier. The war on fats caused substantial damage to the health and environment

RcouF1uZ4gsC3• 4 years ago

Funny as stainless/high carbon steel with butter is perfectly 'non stick' and way healthier.

I bet that the butter itself is worse for your health than the minuscule PFAS you are getting from your pan.

orev2• 4 years ago

stainless/high carbon steel with butter is perfectly 'non stick'

Except it isn’t. Try letting melted cheese, or pretty much any starch (pasta, rice, oatmeal, etc) sit in stainless for a while and then see how non-stick it is. It will glue itself to stainless but on non-stick it will slide right off.

I’m not arguing in favor of non-stick, and avoid it when possible, but we can’t also be making inaccurate claims either.

culi• 4 years ago

I don't think "the war on fats" is to blame for the rise of PFAS-based nonstick pans. Have you actually tried using both? A world of a difference

Also, vegetable oils are incredibly high in omega-6's which compete with omega-3's for the same enzymes. In general the literature suggests we should be consuming about a 4:1 ratio for Omega-3's to Omega-6 fatty acids. Corn-based oil, for example, has a 1:60 ratio

I think avoiding excessive vegetable oil intake is still a good idea

sudosysgen• 4 years ago

Nonstick pans are a negligible source of PFAS compared to various plastic products. For example some paper bowls are 25% PFAS.

lizardactivist• 4 years ago

Thanks, Monsanto!

austinprete• 4 years ago

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap —- Leonard Cohen

croes2• 4 years ago

Maybe capitalism has some serious side effects

missedthecue3• 4 years ago

Thank god my preferred economic model doesn't use chemicals

dang• 4 years ago

Please don't take HN in high-indignation/low-information directions, or post snarky one-liners.

It dumbs down discussion, as well taking it off topic and turning it nasty. Important topics deserve better than that. Unimportant topics too, actually.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

peteradio• 4 years ago

Why not use the real title? Your title indicates a meaning that is not there in the original.

andsoitis• 4 years ago

The exact title is “It’s raining PFAS: even in Antarctica and on the Tibetan plateau rainwater is unsafe to drink”.

How is the meaning different? The plateau bit?

paul7986• 4 years ago

Indeed and look above many just believe the catchy and misleading headline as truth. If it's not catchy the public doesn't care much for it yet when it is they do and are more then not they're being misled even lied too.

abeppu• 4 years ago

We keep repeating the pattern of scaling some technical innovation up to all of society, and then years later discovering that it was really harmful. Leaded gasoline, CFCs, microplastics, pesticides collapsing insect populations etc. And it can take decades to fully understand those impacts. When the stakes are literally, "all rainwater on the planet is unsafe", should we ask -- would society be better off if we were much more conservative about demonstrating the long-term safety of new substances before scaling up their use?

Also, I'm curious if there will be legal implications from this: Will literally the whole planet be able to pursue lawsuits against 3M and peers for making our rainwater 'unsafe'?

irrational• 4 years ago

How do we determine the long term safety without first scaling it up? All of these things many seem innocent in a lab setting and it is only once they reach a critical point that the issues arise.

HidyBush• 4 years ago

Usually if something is being eroded you check what chemicals the erosion releases. If you cook on a pan and you don't analyze the contents of the fumes you are totally responsible

Retric• 4 years ago

Leaded gasoline and a few others seemed really unsafe at the time of introduction.

Xeoncross• 4 years ago

I feel like just when we start to realize we're destroying things with our chemical creations - before things can get fixed the conversation evolves to salving all of climate change.

Can't we just finish stopping the C8/CFC/Pesticide/whatever before we try to stop everything all at once with some nebulous, all-inclusive climate change plan that mostly causes people to only focus on oil use?

GavinMcG3• 4 years ago

No, unfortunately multiple bad things can be happening at once, and FIFO isn’t a great way of dealing with that.

mlyle5• 4 years ago

Can't we just finish stopping the C8/CFC/Pesticide/whatever

Most of this comes down to figuring out what's harmful and regulating it. We can't outlaw "chemicals". And, of course, there's the whole cooperation in other jurisdictions problem, which affects the next point...

some nebulous, all-inclusive climate change plan that mostly causes people to only focus on oil use?

Look, uh, the climate change thing is bad. Really bad. And avoiding burning stuff is really hard. We can live without PFAS and glyphosate if we decide we really should. Avoiding burning stuff for energy is really hard.

The chemical harms are complicated: there are some that are long-standing risks, but most of our concerns do not raise to the level of something that screws up climate, agriculture, etc, for centuries.

bitwize2• 4 years ago

The solution to climate change and all these crises is a vastly reduced human population living in small agrarian communities with preindustrial lifestyles. We keep having these environmental crises because technological civilization was a mistake.

canadiantim• 4 years ago

100% this. The climate change debate takes up wayyyyyyy too much political oxygen and leaves little room for tackling a lot more lower hanging fruit. I actually think society's efforts to fight climate change have been a net negative for the environment, not to mention that many corporations have "green washed" their pollution by feigning being climate change warriors. This narrative needs to end and real progress on environmental pollutants needs to return. Hopefully sanity can prevail.

epistasis4• 4 years ago

The ecological damage from unchecked climate change is by far the largest amount of damage. I'm not sure why we should give it a pass and only focus on smaller amounts of damage.

Because then the conversation will just be dominated on focusing on a smaller issue, with a similar impasse. Just because a bully gets outraged when somebody stands up to them is not a reason to stop standing up to them, and the same folks opposing environmental protection will fight just as hard on other issues.

mindcrime• 4 years ago

I feel like just when we start to realize we're destroying things with our chemical creations ...

FWIW, this was understood quite a long time ago. Consider that the EPA "SuperFund"[1] program began in 1980. And it's not like that was the first time anybody understood that some chemicals have very harmful impacts "in the wild."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund

upsidesinclude13• 4 years ago

No, we have to immediately enact a huge number of measures globally for which we don't know the longterm impact and not worry about these things that make life more convenient if only minimally

/every s

hammock4• 4 years ago

Our rulers typically solve the lawsuits thing by limiting liability through statute. They did it with tobacco and they did it with vaccines

arcticbull• 4 years ago

Guns too with the PLCAA

nso• 4 years ago

Has microplastics been proven unsafe?

mikro2nd• 4 years ago

Yes. Yes it has.

dwighttk2• 4 years ago

would society be better off if we were much more conservative about demonstrating the long-term safety of new substances before scaling up their use?

How? Why limit it to substances? Social media is unsafe What point in time were we only using safe substances so we can use that list of substances as the baseline and then somehow only allow new substances to be used when their long term safety has been demonstrated somehow?

upsidesinclude13• 4 years ago

Is this even a real point?

Yes, we should take new chemicals and study them for a significant time frame prior to extensive global use. The bar can be set higher.

Don't conflate social science with hard science.

Social media is great at steering populations, generating useful propaganda and generating useful profiles of individuals.... Why would governments want to restrict that?

wahnfrieden• 4 years ago

you think lawmakers are letting their highest-paying constituents expose themselves to that accountability?

VoodooJuJu• 4 years ago

There was a now-deleted reply to this that made a great point: Is it possible vaccines could be included in your list?

The answer to that is no, it is impossible for any vaccine to be included in that list, which gives rise to the more general point: modern scientific studies are so heavily agenda-polluted, that skepticism and conservative adoption are prohibited. That a handful of short-term (<100 years) studies are sufficient for rolling out unprecedented technologies to the entire world. That an absence of evidence of long-term effects is taken to mean evidence of absence.

Whether it be DDT, GMO's, or PFAS, if the science to date can't detect harm, then there of course cannot possibly be harm - throw caution to the wind and roll it out 100% the world over, from Antarctica to Tibet.

IG_Semmelweiss• 4 years ago

I recommend the paper "Precautionary Principle" by Nassim Taleb and co-authors

It does a great job presenting your argument in mathematical format as well as rebutting usual criticisms you may encounter

anovikov• 4 years ago

Thing is, it won't even be possible to demonstrate that unsafety on a low scale. I think we should just accept the risk. It will happen once in a while. We will adapt.

nonrandomstring4• 4 years ago

We keep repeating the pattern of scaling some technical innovation up to all of society, and then years later discovering that it was really harmful.

You missed the problematic last step.

We take technical innovations to a societal scale, discover a really harmful effect, and then stubbornly do the square root of bugger-all about it.

It's expected that harms, especially through complex side-effects take time to emerge. We can't see the future, nor can we exhaustively test everything in advance.

The problem comes with the response. A certain amount of market inertia is to be expected. Recalling and replacing products is expensive.

But what is absolutely inexcusable, and ripe for immediate radical global action to address [1], is the disgraceful, blatantly criminal behaviour of large corporations who move to suppress science, discredit researchers, silence critics and bury bad news.

Many problems concerning at-scale blow-back turn out to have been known about decades in advance of their impact.

[1] https://goodmenproject.com/the-good-life/the-corporate-death...

EDIT: A better link on the idea of the "corporate death penalty" (actually quite a good read in itself) [2]

[2] https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/08/its-time-bring...

aetherson2• 4 years ago

This is nonsense. We have solved a ton of environmental problems in my lifetime. When I was a kid, there were legitimate worries about the ozone layer -- we banned CFCs and now it's a non-issue. Acid rain is vastly mitigated. Before I was born, we cleaned up America's rivers. And we've dropped per capita carbon emissions in the US by about 40% so far from its high in the 70s.

imglorp• 4 years ago

I'm encouraged that we have made sweeping changes in the past and altered the course of a disaster. Two examples are atmospheric CFCs and DDT.

Agreed it's harder now with increased misinformation, corporate capture, and failed political systems.

gruez2• 4 years ago

EDIT: A better link on the idea of the "corporate death penalty" (actually quite a good read in itself) [2]

Okay, but isn't "corporate death penalty" equivalent to a fine that exceeds the value of the company? If we're having trouble fining companies for even 1% of their market value, then demanding a 100% fine seems a bit premature. The whole situation feel like people wanting to reduce wealth inequality by demanding a communist revolution, rather than something more reasonable like higher tax brackets.

luxuryballs• 4 years ago

meanwhile when new stuff is rolled out anyone questioning the safety or efficacy or theorizing about potential dangers is demonized as a quack, people are so compartmentalized that they can’t see that humans are still flawed and make mistakes, somehow current year everything is a godsend break through, it’s marketing bullshit and corruption

antioppressor• 4 years ago

No need, metaobeyverse is coming, and everything will be new and shiny there. Virtual cities don't need maintenance.

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

It would be good to have an objective measure of unsafe.

E.g. is the radioactive dust we are all exposed to from global coal plants unsafe? High levels of pm 2.5 from steel plants making your vehicles and roads? Low cost subsidized sugar making half the population obese?

We all die in the end, trying to balance where to act is a hard problem because time is zero sum.

epistasis4• 4 years ago

That's the very core of the issue, not knowing what is unsafe.

It's not that the concentration of these chemicals increases past what we thought was safe, what changed was our knowledge of his dangerous they are, making current levels unsafe.

Any notion for "objectively" deciding these things has to account for unknown information, which means assigning subjective risk to these unknowns. I don't find an "objective" framework a coherent concept because of that. Ignorance of the world must be confronted head on and taken into account, and those that do not incorporate that risk directly into their cognitive models will perform worse at achieving their goals.

Aeolun3• 4 years ago

I'm curious if there will be legal implications from this

Since it was considered to be perfectly safe when they used it, and they stopped 20 years ago (presumably when they discovered it was unsafe), I don’t think there’s any legal ground to stand on.

aaaaaaaaaaab5• 4 years ago

They made money on something that turned out to cause damage. It's only fair that they give back the money they've made to mitigate the damage they caused. It doesn't matter that it was considered safe back then.

zackmorris• 4 years ago

To be clear, the US political party that starts with a D has been actively spreading awareness and working to ban the substances you mentioned since the at least the 1960s, while the party that starts with an R will never stop being in denial about their dangers.

But we're all guilty of buying products created with those substances and driving cars so.. the fault lies with each of us on an individual level.

What breaks my heart is that the people with all of the money and power actively prevent the rest of us from inventing better solutions. They've created an entire economy around dead end service jobs instead of automation, to keep us distracted and disillusioned so we can never catch a breather and disrupt their meal ticket.

If it were up to me (it will never be up to me), I'd work towards creating open source alternatives for all resources necessary for life. I'd make a wiki of everything people work for (food, water, housing, incidentals) and make each one sustainable and as close to free as possible. Money would be optional and used for aspirations beyond necessity.

It would be kind of a Jetsons solarpunk future where a backyard robotic hydroponic garden grows all non-animal macronutrients. Eggs and kefir would largely replace meat. The house would be made of 3D printed hempcrete and recycled materials. Power and HVAC would come from free (7 year amortized) photovoltaics and passive solar-thermal heat pumps connected to the buried irrigation system.

This stuff is honestly so easy that I can only blame conspiracy for lack of adoption. Or maybe extreme laziness. Whatever the reason is, it's defeatist.

So I'm trying to deprogram myself and incorporate these solutions into my own life. So far I've only succeeded in buying a used electric car though. It's just too hard to save the $10,000 to fix each problem one by one, so I pay out more than that to be a consumer and stay trapped in the matrix. Where are the loans for these solutions? Where's the political will?

aaaaaaaaaaab5• 4 years ago

Leaded gasoline, CFCs, microplastics, pesticides

Cigarettes, sugar, asbestos, hydrogenated vegetable oil, "clean" diesel cars...

jiggawatts• 4 years ago

In a lot of cases the harm was known up-front, but then a handful of people in charge of the profits decided to scale up to “all of society” anyway. Cigarettes, leaded fuel, and fossil fuels are all in this category.

No individual manager at any corporation involved in this has a KPI that says: “Terminate the entire category of industry on which our profits are based.”

This is the problem, and governments these days are just an extension of the same broken system.

Chasing after profits will lead humanity off the edge of a cliff.

formerly_proven• 4 years ago

They are referring to crossing these thresholds (from Fed 87-118):

EPA’s health advisories, which identify the concentration of chemicals in drinking water at or below which adverse health effects are not anticipated to occur, are: 0.004 parts per trillion (ppt) for PFOA, 0.02 ppt for PFOS, 10 ppt for GenX chemicals, and 2,000 ppt for PFBS. Health advisories are non-regulatory and reflect EPA’s assessment of the best available peer-reviewed science.

0.004 ppt is also more commonly known as the number zero. It's probably just the currently best limit of detection for PFOA in water.

daenz2• 4 years ago

Related, in June 2022, the EPA changed its guidelines, which is directly triggering this news cycle about all water being unsafe to drink.

In other words, the sky is not falling, we've just adjusted the definition of where the sky starts.

https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-health-advisories-pf...

7sidedmarble2• 4 years ago

More like we were being overly optimistic about where the sky starts for years.

Spooky232• 4 years ago

Related, there was a pretty significant discovery of long term release of these chemicals that contaminated the water supply of a county in upstate NY.

Alot of money and research is exploring the topic, not surprisingly, guidance changes as knowledge gets refined.

peanut_worm• 4 years ago

Or the sky has already fell and no one has noticed yet because our sky-watchers told us it was fine

bergenty2• 4 years ago

The EPA’s new recommendation is still not low enough. You realize there is a some cause to panic right? We can’t fish in our streams and rivers, can’t drink rainwater, can’t raise domestic animals without them being full of heavy metals etc. We’ve ruined the basics and this isn’t hyperbole anymore.

rasz4• 4 years ago

Just like there was no reason to panic about leaded gasoline pre 1996.

RcouF1uZ4gsC3• 4 years ago

If the research in PFAS is at all like the article posted yesterday which did multiple statistical tests without doing the appropriate correction, I am not convinced that PFAS are all that harmful.

Because PFAS are so widespread and they have been around so long, if they were really bad we would be seeing massive issues. However, we are not.

Likely they do cause some harm if you have enough statistical power, but likely below the threshold that we live with (for example birth control, going to the beach, driving a car, red meat, and maybe even cooking itself).

7sidedmarble2• 4 years ago

Likely they do cause some harm if you have enough statistical power, but likely below the threshold that we live with (for example birth control, going to the beach, driving a car, red meat, and maybe even cooking itself).

Isn't the entire reason these things are unsafe that they bioaccumulate over long periods of small dose exposure?

landemva• 4 years ago

I am interested in where/if this bioaccumulates, like mercury does in marine life.

defterGoose• 4 years ago

| and they have been around so long, if they were really bad we would be seeing massive issues. However, we are not.

1. They really haven't "been around so long". Not even a single human lifetime.

2. Plenty of other things cause cancer, endocrine disruption etc. Red meat and the beach are here to stay, but why should I be ok with some unaccountable corporation dumping additional pollutants into my environment?

But, by all means, continue to avoid a rational, cautious mode of decision making. It's probably not that harmful in my opinion.

edgyquant• 4 years ago

Interesting thought, can you talk more about the methods and their flaws? Also what’s the article you’re referring to?

RcouF1uZ4gsC3• 4 years ago

The discussion is

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32438368#32442794

Here is my comment:

This is actually very poor statistics. Take a look at the actual study:

https://www.jhep-reports.eu/article/S2589-5559(22)00122-7/fu...

And look at table 3. They are testing 6 different types of PFAS, and only 1 is statistically significant. They need to be using the Bonferroni Correction because they are checking multiple hypothesis. To do that, you divide the required p-value (0.05) by the number of tests (6). If you do the Bonferroni Correction, none of the PFAS is statistically significant.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/

Thus the real conclusion is that the study did not find any statistically significant link between 'forever chemicals' and liver cancer.

pm90• 4 years ago

Why haven’t we seen higher incidence of cancer in global populations if its leached into all global water supplies?

RF_Savage2• 4 years ago

Who says we havent? PFAS have been in use for +50years.

s5300• 4 years ago

Most of the global population doesn’t have access to cancer screenings/health treatment. Come on.

permo-w3• 4 years ago

that would be almost impossible to control for

azinman22• 4 years ago

But it is increasing over time: https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/

Global trends are difficult to accurately capture as we’ve seen with Covid. Most countries don’t have the infrastructure to get accurate and good statistics from.

missedthecue3• 4 years ago

And as people die from other curable illnesses less and less, cancer incidences increase and increase.

lossolo• 4 years ago

From the graphs it seems it's not increasing but decreasing. Population is getting higher so number of cancers is getting higher too but rate is decreasing (first graph).

kybernetyk• 4 years ago

Yeah, and that’s why you should drink commercially packaged water instead.

nsxwolf3• 4 years ago

I feel like we are talking past the sale here. Is rainwater actually unsafe to drink, or did someone just change a number in a spreadsheet? After I learned about how residential radon was determined to be the “second biggest cause of lung cancer” I stopped immediately trusting these things.

aaaaaaaaata• 4 years ago

Are you one of the folks that doesn't have kitchen ventilation because, after all, how harmful can a little gas be?

nsxwolf3• 4 years ago

No. I even have a radon mitigation system. I just don’t think the science that led to its installation is rigorous. It’s a basement not a coal mine.

p1esk• 4 years ago

Is rainwater actually unsafe to drink, or did someone just change a number in a spreadsheet?

Both can be true.

daenz2• 4 years ago

We know for sure one is true. The other is still TBD. Publications should be more forthcoming about that.

RF_Savage2• 4 years ago

No surprice as to why the amounts of PFAS in the enviroment are not decreasing, when more of it is pushed into it. And have for years.

https://illinoisnewsroom.org/pfas-can-still-be-incinerated-i...

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/pentago...

https://earthjustice.org/news/press/2020/department-of-defen...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/company-linked-to-toxic-forever...

suby• 4 years ago

The floss I use apparently has PFAS in it (Oral B Glude). Many paper straws contain it. Nonstick pans. Food wrappers designed to avoid grease. Water resistant clothing, cleaning products, candy wrappers. I used to drink out of plastic bottles and plastic glasses.

We need to do a better job of regulating what is allowed to be sold to consumers. We're likely going to see a a whole host of rare medical conditions become common when my generation gets older. Not to mention that on top of destroying human health we're destroying the planet too. I don't know what to do about any of this but I feel powerless to make an impact.

sirsinsalot• 4 years ago

This. This is what regulation is for and should be doing.

Trying to keep track of what is safe and isn't is basically impossible for an individual.

I tried for years to avoid PFAS and friends, only to discover my sofa was covered in it.

What's the point.

chmod6002• 4 years ago

Regulation works when experts really do have the answer.

But the problem here is that we just don't know. We know about a few worrisome problems and signs, but we don't have a clear picture like we do with lead or asbestos.

We could switch from "allow by default" to "deny by default", but I'm not even sure that would help. Often problems are hard to find even once its widespread.

We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists.

I think the right answer is more funding for long-term rigorous studies. That way we know.

anjel• 4 years ago

The fireproofing chemical sprayed on fabrics for sheets upholstery etc since the 1970s in the US is and has been a known forever chemical but also very profitable so the mfr basically used the tobacco industry strategy for 20+ years at which point its in everyone's bodies for the rest of their lives. [1]

The book was published over a decade ago, so news travels slowly sometimes, even to regulators.

[1] Slow Death By Rubber Duck https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Death-Rubber-Duck-Everyday/dp/15...

tresqotheq• 4 years ago

Regulation

People, people. Why do you all expect regulation to work in the presence of corruption?

All regulations break down with high enough stakes. We are in this mess right now, because we made the mistake of thinking that regulations will be good enough to stop it.

layer8• 4 years ago

Regarding the floss, the study doesn’t seem to have been corroborated. Instead I found this: https://www.ada.org/publications/ada-news/2022/february/ada-...

twistedpair• 4 years ago

This is why I switched to silk floss. Just search for it on your favorite Bezos emporium.

bilsbie• 4 years ago

Waxed seems almost as good too.

specialist2• 4 years ago

floss I use apparently has PFAS

I too had no idea. Pisses me off.

After trying a handful of alternatives, I settled on bamboo floss.

For all I know, bamboo floss contains arsenic and midi-chlorians.

...whole host of rare medical conditions become common when my generation gets older.

You mean like how leaded gasoline caused populate wide cognitive and behavioral problems?

briantakita• 4 years ago

It's not considered "unsafe" until there's enough sponsored scientific studies. Until there's enough ontological awareness, funding, time, & inclination for these studies, it's considered "safe". Welcome to public perception through the lens of Positivism.

TheRealPomax• 4 years ago

s/to consumers//

rocqua3• 4 years ago

I was recently in the market for high end rainproof hiking gear, and most brands are only offering PFAS free rainproof coatings.

DoingIsLearning5• 4 years ago

Well either it does not contain PFAS but used PFAS in the manufacturing process thus harming the environment anyway.

Or it used some other long fluoropolymer with a similar biological effect as PTFE but can claim to be "PTFE free" because on paper no PTFE was used.

colechristensen5• 4 years ago

The thing to beware is X-free! Products often contain a slightly different X with similar risks.

DoingIsLearning5• 4 years ago

Another example people miss is plumber's tape. That tape is effectively all PTFE.

Literary every plumbing system in the last 20 years or more has all your water inlets lathered in PTFE along every joint of the pipework.

zbrozek• 4 years ago

Is that one so bad in its end use? I would imagine production byproducts would be the bigger issue for plumbing tape, which is effectively solid and used in non-abrasive applications.

hef19898• 4 years ago

Which, as bad as it is in general, shouldn't be that much of a problem since it is not in direct contact with water flow, being used to seal the joints.

aaaaaaaaaaab5• 4 years ago

Just use crimped fittings or hemp.

bandyaboot• 4 years ago

I could be mistaken but I believe PEX has been the dominant type of pipe used in new water systems over the last 15 years or so. There’s not really any plumbers tape involved with the various types of fittings that are used with those pipes.

jefftk2• 4 years ago

That's not correct. Neither PEX nor copper use tape, and that's been the vast majority of new water piping for 20+ years.

In connections that do use tape, like old galvanized steel pipe, the tape is entirely within the joints, because it's a lubricant.

(Just checked with my uncle who's a plumber)

stjohnswarts2• 4 years ago

can you point me at an authoritative source that says PTFE is bad and not inert in humans (unless you reach a temperature of 500F or so)? All I ever see are "holistic medicine" and food babe level sites saying it.

refurb2• 4 years ago

You realize we implant PTFE into human bodies as medical implants? What makes you so concerned about PTFE tape on a tap?

maguirre2• 4 years ago

This is awful. That's the only floss I can use that doesn't disintegrate between my teeth. Where does one go to find pfas content in items like these?

williamscales• 4 years ago

This[1] has been a useful resource for me. It has lists of PFAS chemicals and products.

[1] https://pfascentral.org/data-hub/

nimos• 4 years ago

FWIW Tom's of Maine Naturally Waxed Antiplaque Flat Dental Floss works well for me. Pretty thick though.

p1mrx2• 4 years ago

Listerine Ultraclean floss is made of PEBAX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyether_block_amide

ChoGGi2• 4 years ago

I use a water flosser, my teeth also like ripping floss.

tartoran• 4 years ago

I think we should study the effects of materials well before jumping ship to production and consumption. The industry is guilty for rushing this and for the lack of knowledge pretends there’s no proof of effects on human health. They could always use something that is not (yet) banned but also not well tested in the first place. The regulators ‘regulate’ within the framework but if the framework is bad is complete different thing. The industry has bigger pockets so it can almost always put the consumer’s interest at the bottom of their priorities. Till we fix this imballance we’re likely to suffer again and again in different ways in the future. To me the return to simpler times really means simply consume less and if we all did that and coupled it with strong repairability movements and proper recycling we’d all benefit from this as well as the environment.

southerntofu4• 4 years ago

Exactly. Low-tech and repairability are the only way forward for humanity... all other scenarios end up in painful dreadful collapse. But our tyrannical overlords are ideologically opposed to this conclusion because it's a path of degrowth and sharing economy which is fundamentally contradictory to capitalist doctrine and interests.

ijidak• 4 years ago

I feel powerless to make an impact.

Sadly, we are.

This system is broken beyond repair.

I'm not holding my breath for humans to fix this.

I have my money on an alternative.

coding123• 4 years ago

What is your alt?

dvt• 4 years ago

Why is it so in vogue to be a doomer? Malthus, the original doomer, was wrong on just about all of his predictions. Most likely, we're wrong too. I mean, the planet survived like half a dozen mass extinction events, what makes you think it won't survive another one?

I just don't understand the "woe is me" nihilistic narrative so many intelligent people are deeply fond of. Recycle, turn off the lights, vote with your conscience. Get a wife, make some kids, live a happy life, try to make a positive difference in the world. It's not hard.

kube-system6• 4 years ago

The “doomers” who were right are what we call “modern health and safety regulation”. All that stuff is written in blood.

colechristensen5• 4 years ago

Yup, the truth is that there are a host of things that are going to make all of our lives slightly shorter. Our doom is that we’re not living absolutely optimum length or quality lives… but the real doom is that some people spend their long lives terrified of losing the last few percent and spread the fear instead of focusing on what makes life worth living.

There is an amount of attention appropriate to give risks, but many people really overdo it and turn it into a kind of religion and obsession.

cheschire• 4 years ago

It's not hard to look at everything we have and do and see how fragile it all is. It feels harder and harder to acquire the "things" necessary to feel successful, and once you get them, and see how easy it is to lose, it's not weird to think people might feel extremely vulnerable.

It also doesn't help that most popular cinematic futurism is post-apocalyptic now. I remember RedLetterMedia pointing to the success of Independence Day as the turning point and I can see some validity in that.

throwaway675309• 4 years ago

Because for people who don't have their heads buried in the sand it can be very difficult to fully enjoy one's privileged position in the world without failing to recognize the vast socioeconomic disparity that got them there in the first place, and thusly be deeply frustrated when one's impact on the problem seems so inconsequential.

bonzini2• 4 years ago

"The planet will be fine. The people are fucked!" said a wise man.

rwnspace• 4 years ago

The only thing I've done in line with the absolute pessimism of my beliefs about the future is stop paying into my pension (for now). I still plan to have kids, gods willing.

It's one thing to worry about the planet and the animals, and people dying directly due to climate events (floods and storms, heatwaves and drought) etc. I am far, far more worried about what we will do to each other when the 3 billion of us who are vulnerable to climate change want to move somewhere else.

mlyle5• 4 years ago

Why is it so in vogue to be a doomer?

Let's not be "doomers", but let's not ignore emerging risks of catastrophic outcomes, either.

Playing Russian Roulette a few times and getting away with it doesn't make it safe.

And plenty of stuff that would have been really bad has been stopped by diligent response by people and governments considering those risks.

If we keep making the same mistakes and exposing consumers to toxic things, and lacing the entire environment with them... maybe there's some processes that need to improve instead of just shrugging and saying "well, that's how we do it 'round here!"

mtlmtlmtlmtl13• 4 years ago

The problem is we're effectively using the public as a guinea pig. Then when lots of issues are detected, the specific chemicals used are banned. Then industry quickly replaces it with a very similar compound(see e.g Bisphenol A being replaced with Bisphenol S and F in "BPA free plastics" even though it's not known that they are safer) which is likely to have similar problems, but not proven to yet, kicking the can down the road.

Some possible regulations come to mind. For instance, maybe a ban or very strict regulations on the widespread use of compounds like PFAS that have no known biological or other natural path of degradation. Because it's become very clear that such compounds are inevitably going to end up spread all over global ecosystems.

Edit: So I did some more research. Not only are BPS and BPF not known to be safer, they are already known to have many of the same problems as BPA. To make things worse BPS and possibly BPF are even less degradable than BPA. So they may even be worse. This is not even a little surprising. Their structure is identical except for the linkage between the phenol groups. From pharmacology it's well known that highly similar structures tend to have similar pharmacodynamic properties. So they're not even remotely likely to have been good replacements before the growing mountain of evidence to the contrary appeared. Clearly this blatantly irresponsible behaviour from industry needs to be stopped.

theropost2• 4 years ago

Corporations need to focus on being efficient, and doing what they do best within the rules. Government should concern itself with doing its best to continue a healthy, happy nation. Regulation does not always need to be complex, and it should put public interest ahead of corporate agency.

efnx• 4 years ago

Along with banning the chemicals, the corporation could be “murdered”. Like a death sentence for a corp. They would cease to exist in that country. I’m sure this would make them think much harder about the effects of their actions.

MisterMower• 4 years ago

Can you post those links for inquiring minds?

hombre_fatal• 4 years ago

Consumer products are only part of the problem. PFAS are emitted from industry, like from farms and smoke stacks, straight into the atmosphere where they deposit and precipitate back down onto everything.

That's one of the main issues here: you don't avoid it just by avoiding the consumer goods in your post.

Zamicol2• 4 years ago

Regulators were forcing its use and regulation was one of the main drivers of the PFAS industry. California forced furniture makers to spray new furniture with PFAS based flame retardants for years. As of just this year, 2022, in California, even though they are no longer required, PFAS are still allowed in furniture until 2024.

mizzao• 4 years ago

The "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) safety guideline from the FDA seems like it should be renamed

"we don't have statistically significant evidence this will kill you yet, but we're also not looking very hard for it"

stjohnswarts2• 4 years ago

non stick pans use ptfe not pfoa, this has been a scare tactic by "holistic nutritionists" on the internet for ages. If your non-stick is from a name brand and less than 10 years old, they haven't used PFOA (or PFAs) in ages. Don't toss your stuff out.

pwpw• 4 years ago

I feel powerless to make an impact.

Following a plant-based diet and trying alternative modes of transit to the car make a pretty great impact!

twobitshifter• 4 years ago

If I get a reverse osmosis water filter, will that eliminate the PFAS?

anonuser123456• 4 years ago

It will filter about 95%.

amelius5• 4 years ago

So, use multiple filters in series, I suppose.

purple_ferret• 4 years ago

It's pretty common for the Arctic and the Antarctic to have higher levels of such contamination as water cycles upwards/downwards from the Equator, compounds as it moves along, and then gets trapped in the ice.

cato_the_elder5• 4 years ago

This is an exaggeration, of course. The EPA guideline of 70 ppt for PFAS is probably just too low compared to other standards. For example, a Canadian guideline suggests an MAC of 200 ppt for PFOA, and 600 ppt for PFOS. These are the most common PFAS. Also, these are based on a lifetime exposure, and short term exposure to these amounts is probably not particularly harmful.

Additionally, even in the US, the guidelines by the individual states vary between 13 to 1000 ppt. [2]

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/services/health/publications/health...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-018-0099-9

koheripbal2• 4 years ago

How can we have a guideline for ALL PFAS? They are all completely different molecules with different Hazzard levels - likely many safe.

These generalizations make conversations about them useless.

superchroma7• 4 years ago

There is insufficient evidence for "likely many safe". You can't just start throwing that around.

djbusby• 4 years ago

Which generalization should we change ? The "they aren't safe" or the "likely many safe" one?

eurasiantiger5• 4 years ago

The guideline is 0.02 ppt for PFOS and 0.004 ppt for PFOA.

cato_the_elder5• 4 years ago

I think you have the units, the number of the zeroes, and and the actual figures wrong. Each µg/L is 1,000 ppt (part per trillion, i.e. ng/L).

jcrben3• 4 years ago

Since PFAS never really breaks down and we're still creating it, is a 200 ppt inevitable at some point?

superchroma7• 4 years ago

The scary thing for me is that it's in the rain, so it'll be in crops, water reservoirs, trickling into the water table and into drinking supply. We have to stop this right now.

mlyle5• 4 years ago

Most of the PFAS do break down -- a half life of a few years. It's mostly PFOA that's of grave concern.

specialist2• 4 years ago

I'd settle for 0 ppt.

southerntofu4• 4 years ago

I'd settle for what's already here and it's too late, but stop this industrial madness right now without further delay.

bergenty2• 4 years ago

Research suggests even the EPA recommendation is too high.

Panoramix• 4 years ago

What short term exposure? if it's in the rain in Antarctica then you can bet it's in your water, vegetables: it's likely a lifelong exposure.

spywaregorilla• 4 years ago

Guidelines for all of these things individually seem to ignore the likely unstudied possibility that they have synergistic effects. Or even just additive effects because many of them are so similar to each other.

zzo38computer2• 4 years ago

If the water is unsafe (although there can be different level of being "unsafe"), then I would expect this would be bad for anyone (animals (including humans and nonhumans), plants; some might be more impacted than others). But even if it is only partially unsafe still it should still be reduced and eliminated to make it not unsafe like that. I do not know how to fix, other than possibly to reduce adding more PFAS, but maybe there is some. I do not know if lawsuits are the way to do it, but even if it is, it will not alone be the way to be done, I think. Stop making such chemicals which are potentially unsafe, don't do things bad just so that you can earn too much money (they say love of money is the root of all evil, and I think so; that is what they see anywhere), etc.

Qem• 4 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if we are rolling dice with synthetic substances life never had contact in billions years since it's origins until one of them gives us a Children of Men scenario.

jkic47• 4 years ago

about 10 years ago the EPA had a mandate to reduce use by 95% before 2011(?) and eliminate it by 2025(?). I may have the dates slightly wrong. went through the process on tens of thousands of SKUs. so far so good.

The reason I am conflicted is our vendors got rid of PFOA but replaced it with something similar to it but not the same.

Effectively, we now have 2 "forever" chemicals in the environment. rinse repeat.

I don't know what the answer is unless we make a conscious decision to forego the performance benefits these chemicals provide to our products. waterproof shoes and sofas, dental floss, med dev, etc.

Aeolun3• 4 years ago

So let me get this straight, they’re excited because some government agency divided the ‘allowable’ levels of these chemicals by 40 million, and now the values (which are still the same) are too high.

…Wut?

Like, I get that the values are still ‘bad’, but there must be a different way to present that.

I’d also like specifics on exactly how bad ‘bad’ is, because these agencies tend to present their 0.5% increase of lifetime risk of cancer as something exceptional, when you can also get such a thing from, say, eating too much cheese.

perrygeo• 4 years ago

some government agency divided the ‘allowable’ levels of these chemicals by 40 million

That's one way to put it, yes. Another way is that recent scientific studies have shown these chemicals are way more harmful than we once thought. Should we not adjust recommendations accordingly? Seems rather obvious and undeserving of a "Wut?".

How bad is bad? Check out how they calculate the HA values here: https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-06/technical...

aaaaaaaaaaab5• 4 years ago

Sometimes we find out we were wrong about the safety of a substance.

Radium used to be sold in patent medicine tinctures because it wasn't considered dangerous. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor

FelixVega1• 4 years ago

There's a difference in increasing your lifetime risk of cancer 0.5% by eating too much cheese compared to atmospheric levels of PFAS. I can choose to not eat too much cheese, and in fact I don't, for that same reason. I can't choose to stop breathing in or drinking PFAS in the environment.

I don't know about you but 0.5% increase in lifetime risk of cancer is not something I'm comfortable taking on, and it's not fair that I don't have any say in the matter.

Cancer sucks.

Aeolun3• 4 years ago

I don't know about you but 0.5% increase in lifetime risk of cancer is not something I'm comfortable taking on

My point was rather that there’s probably a variety of things you do in daily life that have exactly that effect, but nobody is excited about those.

Probably because cheese is tasty and random chemicals in the air aren’t.

dimensionc1322• 4 years ago

Quick update for everyone .... life is lethal and we will all die ... but our addiction to technology since the industrial revolution is adding to the cumulative toxins we are ingesting into our bodies.

Before the 1930's we were able to live lives without plastic, now, we have plastic in our lungs and blood because of technological progress and convenience. The very things that were designed to help us are now responsible for quickening our demise.

Why don't things change? Because everyone is too addicted to this modern lifestyle and will not do what is necessary to reduce plastics and contaminents in our life.

Just look in your house, how much you have of these contaminating technologies....if you feel so stongly about it, try to eliminate all but the most essential.

superchroma7• 4 years ago

Not far enough. If people feel strongly about it, they need to be writing to manufacturers and politicians, demanding change.

dimensionc1322• 4 years ago

agreed

chinathrow• 4 years ago

We are fucking us sideways and have no plans to stop doing so.

Someone• 4 years ago

PFAS accumulates in animals and plants, so if all rainwater is unsafe to drink, I would guess most of the world’s food will be unsafe to eat soon, if not already.

Luckily, ‘unsafe’ here, for now, means a relatively small increase in the risk to get some diseases.

⇒ Apart from trying to buy less stuff that contains these chemicals, I think it’s not worthwhile to worry about the health impacts on our individual lives, as it’s an as good as unavoidable risk now (eating only food grown using melting ice caps or millennia old aquifers would work, but has other disadvantages. Filtering PFAS out of all water used in agriculture seems infeasible)

jszymborski• 4 years ago

This isn't necessarily true for aquaponic/hydroponic crops, but I'm not sure how much of a percentage of food supply that makes up.

chaisch• 4 years ago

Just wait until you find out that PFAS is already being spread on crops from the common practice of using sewage "sludge" as a fertilizer.

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2022/04/ewg-forever-c...

upsidesinclude13• 4 years ago

To all the chemical engineers: (And computer engineers for that matter)

Your time is coming. The rest of the hard engineering disciplines have had their failures and now we have licenses and accountability.

The amount of damage one bridge can do is limited, but the amount of destruction caused by endocrine disrupting chemicals and authoritarian enabling surveillance tools is unlimited.

The civil engineer will be held to account for his failures. Hopefully, soon, the same will be true for the likes of your professions

skrebbel• 4 years ago

I agree that some more pubic accountability for chemical engineers and programmers would be great, but I hate the hostile, anti-intellectual "us good, chemists bad" vibe with which you say it. There's no need to threaten people.

There's chemists who make the world better and chemists who make the world worse, like with every other profession.

southerntofu4• 4 years ago

the hostile, anti-intellectual "us good, chemists bad" vibe with which you say it.

I personally didn't get that from the parent comment. It's just really weird (from an outsider/alien perspective) that in many sectors of the corporate mafia like in the chemical/IT industry obvious and sometimes intentional malicious schemes (which result in actual deaths) are either rewarded or ignored... when in many other branches harmless errors can get you kicked from your job (eg. in restaurants/shops).

It's not contempt to point that out. If you believe in the idea that there should be a social contract by which we are bound, the social contract must apply to everyone fairly. So why does it often not apply to cops, judges, landlords and some sectors of the engineering community?

There's chemists who make the world better and chemists who make the world worse, like with every other profession.

True, but like in every other profession, it's very hard to make money if you're really trying to make the world better, and i do mean any money (as in find a job at all).

upsidesinclude13• 4 years ago

have had their failures and now we have licenses and accountability.

Read it. We made those engineers accountable and should have done the same for the others.

Please review what it means to make a threat, as nothing stated is remotely a "threat". Sounds weakly middle management, BTW.

It is a notice that soon there will be accountability.

If you are an engineer making the world a better place, then there won't be much to account for will there?

gruez2• 4 years ago

The civil engineer will be held to account for his failures. Hopefully, soon, the same will be true for the likes of your professions

So some mid level manager/engineer gets to be the fall guy and all the executives gets away scot free?

upsidesinclude13• 4 years ago

Try to engage the situation. Executives are all the same. They are looking to sell something.

Engineers make the world. Be accountable to yourself and your fellow man. We can deny the CEOs of the world our knowledge

rasz4• 4 years ago

The civil engineer will be held to account for his failures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_International_Universi...

search jail : 0 found

salawat• 4 years ago

I'm totally okay with this to be honest. I've been waiting on it.

I'm tired of software companies that just go hire another shmuck.

thereisnospork2• 4 years ago

What is it, exactly, that you think chemical engineers do? Blaming them is like blaming the plumbers' union for Flint Michigan's drinking water.

upsidesinclude13• 4 years ago

That is not a good analogy.

But I will add that professional chemist licensing should be required and revocable

sneak• 4 years ago

The state that benefits from authoritarian surveillance is the same state that issues professional licenses.

upsidesinclude13• 4 years ago

No argument here. But the state is not one entity.

Licensing for many professions is bullshit. Licensing for engineering requires mentorship and certification by non-government societies in the US. They determine the amount of rigor to join their group and hold the status as a professional engineer.

Everything after that is just registration, which confirms you have evidence of the the prior

amelius5• 4 years ago

That all depends on the amount of lobbying going on.

chaosbutters314• 4 years ago

lol, ok. sure, whatever. as a ChemE, we have already made so much progress on making plants blow up less, spilling toxic chemicals into waterways, stopping destroying the ozone, make food safer, ....

you maybe need to go talk to chemists who make this. ChemE just mass produce what the chemist makes. but the chemist just makes what the business needs and the business you makes what the consumer wants.

so oh wait, this is on you for being an irresponsible consumer. don't buy it and we won't make it.

also, north America and the west have already done impressive reforms contrary to Asia which really needs to learn environmentalism

upsidesinclude13• 4 years ago

...so much progress...

Great, love that for you. When your company is ruining the world you should take a stand.

... irresponsible consumer...

No. Won't accept that shirking of responsibility. Consumers expect that the product isn't poison. We expect that planes fly and cars don't explode. It isn't reasonable to say that consumers want nonstick poison. They were sold a product that was "better" than the alternatives. They believed that would include not being poison.

acd• 4 years ago

Lets stop using PFAS if its raining down on us.

dsq• 4 years ago

Fast and loose with definitions is what gets us to a place where no one believes anything anymore. I’m pretty sure that if one was stuck in a forest somewhere and drank only rainwater for a whole month, they’d come out just fine.

isoprophlex• 4 years ago

Sure, smoke cigarettes for a month and you probably won't be dead from stage 4 lung cancer at the end of those ~30 days.

Adulterating our entire ecology with hyperpersistent, novel, toxicologically dubious chemicals is bad. This should be self-explanatory and completely obvious. The benefits of PFAS and friends do not outweigh the downsides.

wiradikusuma2• 4 years ago

Can companies that benefit from PFAS, even in the old days, be held accountable? Heck even you have to keep your tax records for 7 years.

It makes me so angry some people benefiting at the expense of millions of others, under regulatory nose.

rasz4• 4 years ago

Of course not.

https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground...

wiradikusuma2• 4 years ago

Really depressing.

ironmagma• 4 years ago

For anyone interested in this topic, I recommend season 41 of the podcast American Scandal, which depicts the DuPont cover-up of C8 dumping and how it was discovered. Great narration.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-scandal/id143...

There is also a less dramatic version in book form, called Exposure by Robert Bilott, the attorney who prosecuted DuPont.

leobg• 4 years ago

Also great: The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare (The New York Times). And the movie, “Dark Waters”.

CommanderData3• 4 years ago

Public campaigning and awareness. We need to know what consumer products contain PFAs and the likes. It's perverse this exists so close to our food chain.

These companies have our govnement officials in their pockets but they live on the same planet. They have no conscious even for themselves or their children.

gremlinsinc• 4 years ago

PFAS is almost like optimizing for paperclips scenario. Except we did ourselves( for a little convenience). Micro plastics too. Both permeate every human in existence and now I guess is in rain water. I'm rural and get water from a well, pretty sure That's not even safe.

I drink mostly bottled tea or soda but that's usually in plastic which has bpa... There's really no getting away from this shit unless you literally carbonate or maybe your own organic teas using highly filtered water and maybe live in a bubble that catches and filters unhealthy particles.

I have two toddlers and I'm saddened they have to face this world. I honestly feel the last decent decade to be a kid was the 90s. I grew up in the 80s graduated in 98, and maybe it's just nostalgia but it just feels like the world is much darker and less safe.

I mean we could run all over town when I was 7, no worries.

We'd be dropped off at the swimming pool, or video arcade, etc... Or just ride our bikes exploring.

Now that's child abuse. I'm glad my kids are safe in their child harness but I'm also glad I only had to worry about seat belts as a kid, after 3 or so. Now it's like 8 or older...

And don't get me started on how weak Halloween is compared to the glorious 80s. Beggars night was an entire community affair, now there is no community anywhere that really gives af.

I'm reminded of the Queen song "is this the world we created" or when the children cry by white lion... Two excellent songs that sum up the world we're leaving our kids... It's beyond sad.

rasz4• 4 years ago

But I can ski a little faster, McDonald's burger didnt seep thru the wrapper and my disposable umbrella is excellent!

boksiora• 4 years ago

Now this is concerning

LAC-Tech• 4 years ago

I'm just over 3000 miles from Antarctica, and I've been living off rainwater for the past 10 months. No ill-effects so far.

fuzzfactor4• 4 years ago

About fifty years ago I stayed in an old hotel called the Compleat Angler [0] on the desert island of Bimini, where the indoor plumbing was fed by collected rainwater. The Bahamas was still a British Crown colony at the time.

I'll never forget washing my hair in the water closet, and with a rainwater rinse, having a better hair day than I ever had on the mainland.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compleat_Angler_Hotel

ratsmack• 4 years ago

It's not just one chemical we're talking about here, as there is over 9,000 variations of PFAS chemicals[1] identified to date.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/pfas/default.html

freeflight2• 4 years ago

PFAS always remind me about how we as a species knew about the toxicity of lead for very long, yet still decided to blast it all over the environment for decades [0]

Also makes me wonder how much similar hubris exists with other topics; Afaik to this day there is still no medical scientific consensus weather damage from radiation is actually cumulative or not.

By now we have myriads of other compounding factors, particularly for cancer, that make it increasingly difficult to filter the actual signal, of what causes these issues, from all the environmental "noise" we keep creating by changing our one and only habitat in such massive, and lasting, ways.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#History

userbinator• 4 years ago

It's very hard for me to reconcile scary headlines like this with the fact that living conditions for many people now are definitely far better than they were 1000 or even 100 years ago. The relative risks of different things may change over time but ultimately I think we are better off for all the positives these chemicals have given our lives. If anything, this sort of environmental alarmism is going to just increase the anti-science sentiment, the effects of which are already saw some effects of in the pandemic. After all, it's not a huge leap from "these chemicals are bad" to "these vaccines are bad".

greyhair2• 4 years ago

This is how microbial life ends in a petri dish.

Either by consuming all the nutrients, or so polluting the dish with their metabolic waste that they can no longer survive.

It’s raining PFAS: rainwater is unsafe to drink even in Antarctica and Tibet

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