3M has been facing a raft of litigation that has prompted the move
Generally speaking, toxic substances are only "cheap" due to externalizing many of the costs involved, like increased healthcare costs and lost productivity. If you do a thorough analysis of the costs of using such chemicals, they aren't cheap at all.
I always thought that if our universe is actually a simulation, it's one of countless simulations trying to determine a solution to the Tragedy of the Commons.
I suspect it's one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe.
I try really hard not to use single use plastic. Especially plastic bags, plastic bottles, etc. This frequently means I’ll be extremely thirst throughout some days but will wait till I get home or to work to drink filtered water out of the tap.
I went to Las Vegas about a year ago on a work trip and realized that the hotel I stayed at uses more plastic bottles in an hour than I would use in my lifetime with no thought to conserving them.
All this to say that tragedy of the commons is an extremely hard problem to solve, even when you know about it and care.
I constantly repeat to myself “no single drop of rain thinks it’s responsible for the flood” and try not to think of that Vegas hotel.
About 20 years ago, I made a mistake at work which I later calculated put an extra 8500 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. (It had to do with the delay/routing of a cargo ship.)
There is literally nothing I could possibly do that could come even close to making up for that...
>There is literally nothing I could possibly do that could come even close to making up for that...
I can say from personal experience this is not true!
You can help fix other people's mistakes!
I was an energy engineer for a while.
You'd be amazed just how much low-lying fruit there is in terms of energy waste.
I was also GOOD at this job. Instead of doing the brainless measures, I would really dig and do a lot of modeling and data mining and stuff to figure out truly optimal solutions. My fee + cost of measures were easily covered within 1-year of savings, and yet it was an incredibly difficult sell to get people to want to spend the money.
But... I had one client, for whom I had to sign an NDA, that single-handedly blew all the others out of the water. They had been emitting LARGE (like, think ~1 ton/month) quantities of sulfur hexafluoride for years. Sulfur hexafluoride, if you don't know is 23,500 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. This had been going on for YEARS.
Our three-man team came in and was able to find all the leaks with some really nice thermal cameras so they could replace the failed seals and parts.
Sorry for going off-topic, but would you mind sharing a bit more about this business? The domain sounds really interesting to me. My e-mail is also in my profile if that's better.
Could you make your business free if you “don’t” find anything to fix, and then you charge a percentage of the benefit they receive? So if you save them 1 million, then you charge them $250k or some such percent
Yes you can do that, and some companies actually go a step further and pay for the upgrades themselves and become like a pseudo-utility (See ESCO's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_service_company) where people pay them what they were paying, and the company reaps the benefits of the savings,
but it actually gets really complex. Energy prices rise, and the clients needs change, they might sell their building, (who actually owns the equipment?) and it doesn't necessarily create correct incentives. It also delays payment by minimum a year, and it's a lot of additional hassle. (How do you handle disputes for unusual situations like them buying new equipment they didn't tell you about, etc. etc.)
That's in the range of 10x the CO2 an average human will produce in their lifetime. If you could find a way to get 20 people to cut their emissions in half, or 200 people to reduce it by 5%, or 1000 people by 1%, you could balance out your CO2 ledger :)
Or, if you still work in the industry and can find a way to make the shipping routes more efficient, or prevent future mistakes like that, you could make it into the green and achieve CO2 karmic heaven!
(Controversial comment warning) one way to save more than your lifetime’s worth of CO2 is to not have children. By not having children, you’re not just saving the CO2 output of the child itself, but the entire lineage that could have resulted from that single child.
Obviously this advice is not good advice for anyone who wants to have children :)
I don’t necessarily disagree with you per se, but I do think these “EV-lite” type analyses are too broad: environmentally conscious people may be more likely to have children who are environmentally conscious, work on climate engineering, &c.
That’s not to say that we should encourage them specifically to have children either; just that children represent potential in a way that the number of bunker-fuel cargo ships does not.
Even the most environmentally conscious person in an industrialized nation will emit massive amounts of CO2 in their lifetime, provided of course that nobody invents a "quick fix" for CO2 emissions in their lifetime. Of course in theory the child could be that person to invent that quick fix, but the expected value is still that the child will contribute to a lot of CO2 emissions.
It doesn't matter. Climate change is happening. It doesn't matter what we do as individuals, the system can't be changed from individual action and it can't be changed via collective action as that would require full cooperation.
There is no practical way we can achieve the goal of survival for all through reduction of CO2 emissions. It's a farce because we'll never get all parties to agree.
The only path forward is to hope we have some very clever science and engineering that can help us survive this disaster.
> There is no practical way we can achieve the goal of survival through reduction of CO2 emissions. It's a farce
It's a farce because it's already too late for emissions reductions to cut it. We need to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or, as you say, engineer other solutions.
But a robust solution is not going to be limited to the physical/material domain. Societies are malleable and so are people. We need to design ourselves and our activities into a vibrant planetary ecology, not throw up our hands and try to patch around historically contingent circumstances
As Octavia Butler put it, God is change, and change is not to be reacted to, but to be shaped
The earth is on a trajectory for <2.5C just based on current technology and policies. The technology and policy path we're on (including developed but not yet implemented tech and policy) is likely to limit warming to <2C, but 1.5C is nigh-on unachievable. Assuming we don't hit any runaway conditions (which is an unknown unknown that we probably won't realize until we're already there)...the vast majority of the world will be just fine. And if governments can get their heads out of their behinds and pass marginally sensible immigration reform, the people who are displaced can move to locations where there are massive demographic bombs going off (most of the west) to stabilize their workforces.
The point is that "will emit massive amounts of CO2" isn't a complex enough metric: if that's how we're calculating EV (which I disagree with in the first place), then it would be perfectly appropriate for me to go around killing truck drivers and suburbanites.
To optimize, you should aim to kill as many people as possible. Bonus points for killing children of wealthy individuals, since they have the highest potential for future CO2 usage.
That's true. It's also an entirely different tragedy of the commons. If nobody has children, we are going to be screwed when our generation is too old to work.
Overheated flooding Greenhouse with a bunch of geriatric seniors bitching at each other and pointing fingers and with no one able to actually get up and do anything sounds about right.
If nobody has children, then it won't matter if there is more or less CO2 in the air. Environmental quality doesn't have inherent moral worth. The moral worth is in the impact it has on people in the world. Nothing at all matters any more if there are no people.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think any (serious) high CO2 predictions involve the extinction of our species, but rather extensive displacement as a changing climate changes zones of habitability on our planet.
If the human population reduced to 100m - still substantial - it's not technically extinction. But it's still essentially the end of our world and society. The people who died won't take solace in humanity not dying out.
I would hope and assume that the community rules of HN don’t look kindly upon advocating the murder of any specific individuals.
That aside, I think it’s naive to assume that your proposed action would have a relevant outcome. Any successor is going to need to travel between facilities just as much — if not moreso — as they are brought up to speed and need to have ongoing meetings with executives and managers across a dozen locations.
Not to mention the travel involved in post-death matters of funerals, media coverage, high profile criminal investigations, and so on. And of course the wealth of one person then gets inherited by perhaps a dozen people, any of whom might live a more lavish (i.e. carbon intensive) lifestyle when they inherit even a small fraction of such enormous wealth.
Quite frankly I don’t see how your proposal has any chance of being remotely carbon positive.
I’ve thought about this. I think it really depends on whether we need more climate-minded voters in the future. If we do then those susceptible to this message are exactly the wrong ones to hear it.
there is nothing controversial about pointing out the connection between having kids and CO2 output, the controversy begins when telling people which way they should decide.
Sure there is. I'm assuming you also routed cargo ships more efficiently in your job which prevented extra CO2 from being released. You can't pull the CO2 back in, but you can still prevent future CO2 from going out.
You can plant 8500 trees. Various entities do it for as little as $1 per tree (e.g. https://onetreeplanted.org/). If that stops you sleeping that's possibly affordable.
In one sense it may never, but in another sense it will. In that other sense, you know a mistake to avoid and perhaps can enlighten those around you not to make the same sense. Accidents happen, but you make up for them by making sure those accidents don't happen again or are very likely to be repeated.
Fortunately, this planet has abundant land and sea life that will absorb and fix that carbon dioxide for you, liberating highly reactive oxygen in the process. No problem - the amount of carbon used is proportional to the amount of carbon available. All available evidence shows that CO2 lags global temperature rises, rather than leading it. Science IS real, and it says carbon is NOT a pollutant.
You should have no guilt over this (although efficiency is always to be aimed for). And carbon is probably the least objectionable byproduct of burning the bunker oil that fuels ships - you can't make anything that heavy burn cleanly without insane combustion temperatures.
> "This frequently means I’ll be extremely thirst throughout some days"
Why not carry a reusable water bottle? I have a great double-wall steel bottle (Hydro Flask), which is much better than a plastic bottle because it keeps water cold all day long and is basically indestructible.
In most places I travel to it's not difficult to find sources of clean, cold water to refill it. Worst case, I will buy a large bottle of water to refill it from, which at least is cheaper and generates less waste than using multiple small plastic bottles throughout the day.
>I have a great double-wall steel bottle (Hydro Flask), which is much better than a plastic bottle because it keeps water cold all day long and is basically indestructible.
They actually dent quite easily. I have a 40oz Hydro Flask with a couple dents from an incident with a spider a couple years ago. I had my bottle on the counter top while I was eating and suddenly a spider was on it. In an attempt to kill the spider, I knocked over the bottle on to the wooden floor (trying to squish it). It dented the bottle near the top and on the bottom. I looked up some videos and it's definitely not just me. Found one where it looked like a whole family dented theirs and they used a trick with dry ice and a hair dryer to fix them. I don't know if it gets harder to fix the longer you wait. Mine still works okay, so I haven't done anything about it.
I'm pretty sure the outside is aluminum, fyi, unless they make multiple types. The inside part is probably steel.
I love my Hydro Flask and have drank more water because of it. My only complaint is that the straw lid gets a lot of crap building up in the small gaps and it seems impossible to adequately clean. Maybe an ultrasonic cleaner could do it.
I've had good luck with Simple Modern steel bottles, including back when I still hiked and did urbex and kept one strapped to the side of my backpack. It came through everything from scrambling up and down steep forested hillsides to getting bounced off crumbling masonry with little more than the occasional chip or scratch to the finish. I've dropped it plenty of times too, of course, and it's likewise survived unscathed.
I can't vouch for its durability when used to beat a spider to death because I'm not afraid of tiny harmless animals, but in every other respect I have nothing but praise.
Stainless steel starts with a metallic taste, but after first week of use it is usually gone. Also there is titanium and aluminium.
Or just get a reusable plastic one, perfect can be an enemy of good.
Individual use of plastic is not relevant, as long as it goes to landfil and not ends up in the ocean througg recycling fraud. In UK most plastic ends up sent to poland, where it's burnt or sent onwards to Turkey where it becomes untraceable. I stopped recycling plastic because the system cannot be trusted - at least if it stays in UK you know it wont be hurting anyone.
Half of plastic waste in the ocean waste is discarded fishing nets.
I once did a fair amount of experimentation and found titanium to impart a much stronger metallic taste than stainless steel.
Aluminum is not an amazing food contact surface — it’s quite reactive. I would not use an uncoated aluminum bottle for anything other than plain water.
If you’re sensitive to metallic residual taste, then look for containers made from a type of stainless that meets your needs. There are many kinds [1], I prefer 316 but you might need 321 for example. Some day I’ll engage a machinist to fab one up for me that uses standard gaskets I can get from any MRO firm in the world.
Glass with a silicone sleeve over it is surprisingly resilient. I have had a few glass bottles with silicone covers that I carry around (not all at once...) and have dropped them more times than I can recall and they always just bounce. Of course they can break, especially if you do something like put it in your shopping cart and drop something heavy on it (whoops).
The inertness of glass not only makes it always the first choice for food contact, it's also the most cleanly recycled material on the planet, when it does break. Unlike plastics (which for all practical purposes can't really be recycled), and metals, which require complex separation and realloying, glass can be easily separated visually and reused indefinitely. It is quite likely that the glass in your refrigerator right now contains glass first produced by the Romans.
(Of course, we should just reuse glass containers, like we did when I was a kid - a small deposit is a big motivator for kids to collect bottles for reuse!)
More than steel? We're talking about reusable bottles here, shipped empty. What is the comparison of empty glass or steel to full plastic? What is the difference in mass?
There exist industrial reaction vessels etc which are made of stainless steel with a bonded liner made of glass. That seems like the ideal "forever" food container material to me - chemically nonreactive and easy to clean, but lightweight and resilient to impact. The glass layer would be lost in recycling, but it shouldn't impede recycling the metal too badly as it'd just be a tiny bit more slag in the crucible.
Some also come with a non-stick (Teflon-type) coating. Zojirushi makes incredibly nice vacuum-insulated bottle [1] that unfortunately has a non-stick liner. The inside of the bottle is super easy to clean, but the chemicals used in the manufacturing are awful.
In theory the liner is PTFE (or maybe a different fluoropolymer) with nothing left to leach out. PTFE and its relatives are stable to temperatures well above that of boiling water, so leaching shouldn’t be an issue.
(One big problem with PTFE is that it starts to slowly decompose at a lower temperature than its melting point. This makes it messy to work with. As I understand it, the decomposition products are gasses, so this is a problem at the factory and for the environment, but I don’t think its a problem for end users.)
I've seen people try to have a full course fast food meal at a dog park. Maybe they got some funny looks (mostly from the canines), but everything was fine in the end.
That example is one reason why legislation is necessary.
There will always be detractors saying we should just make people want to make the right choice, but all it takes is one person in a company to make a decision that outweighs the collective efforts of millions.
I recently mail-ordered rice, and because I wanted to buy two different styles I did not opt for the 3kg (like 6 lbs) bag but 2 packs of 1.8kg. Turns out 1.8kg were packed in 3 bags of 600g, so now I have 6 bags at 600g rice, that on first glance look like they are paper, but its actually plastic coated paper. Its really hard to avoid at times.
As for avoiding bags I have two wicker baskets like this https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B009BMXLLI/ which means I can avoid shopping bags and they are actually quite convenient for carrying.
Tap water is luckily very drinkable in Germany (rumor has it that Coca-Cola company bottles it and sells it under their 'Bonaqua' brand).
However, there is so much out of our control with plastics that require regulation. Just think of the packaging.
This varies by market. In the US, they just bottle tap water. In Europe this is really unusual, bottled water uses their own wells with different requirements and regulations. For example a stable mineral concentration and taste is very important for mineral water, but of secondary concern for tap water. Also tap water might come from surface water (rivers etc) while mineral water doesn't.
In Poland, there's "mineral water" where it needs to fulfill those requirements, and "spring water" that is basically bottled tap water. The first one costs like 0,5$ for 1,5L , while second one can be bought for as low as 0,2$.
Germany has mineral water and table water. Table water is the bottled tap water.
Though where I live, even table water would be better than unfiltered tap water. Not because of health concerns (I actually had my tap water lab tested as the building is from the 60s), but because of limescale in the kettle and disgust on my tastebuds ;)
Does the preferences for the qualities bottled water in Germany have any intersection with the history of public springs emitting carbonated mineral water?
You mean if everyone else's preference for flat water is linked to their springs emitting flat water?
After the world seems to be in agreement that CocaCola and most lemonades are best served carbonated. But for water there's this weird schizm over carbonation.
I would say it varies pretty widely on a much smaller than country level, moreso by source. Water from an aquifer almost always tastes much better than water from a river.
London tap water varies a lot in different parts of London. When I used to live in North-West London it was very hard (ie: full of minerals) so you'd constantly be cleaning the limescale gunk out of your shower, off your taps, etc. And I also remember it smelling noticeably "chlorinated" at times. Now I live in East London (E14) and it seems much softer - we get a bit of limescale but nothing like it was at my old place, and no pool-water smells.
But anyway, I think anywhere in London, so long as you run it through a filter (ie: Brita filter) and chill it, it tastes more or less as good as any bottled water.
Dehydration is more of a risk to you than the environmental risks you marginally save on others. Still I applaud the effort since the economists view is too restricted.
Get a stainless steel container and hydrate for a lifetime.
The risks of dehydration are way overstated imo. And I live in a warm weather country.
Whole being thirsty isn’t optimal the actual risk of something serious happening is negligible. Especially since I monitor my urine color and other signs. It’s more convenience and the habit of convenience we’re all so used to these days.
I’m not so sure about that. Some people are more susceptible to it than others. There’s also some weird trait that makes some people drink less water than others. Both my father and myself seem to share this trait. We have to force ourselves to drink water. For whatever reason, I could go an entire day without drinking water. Not sure why it is, but it causes problems. I was on vacation with my father and he collapsed in literally the middle of nowhere because of dehydration. It was pretty scary and he almost didn’t survive.
I have the same thing. I have to “force” myself to drink. Especially in Warmer weather. My daughters have the same. I’m not sure whether it is genetic or nurture.
Most people are constantly dehydrated. The fact lots of people drink sugary drinks makes it even worse. As someone dealing with a 3rd round of kidney stones - please stay hydrated! You don't want this pain, trust me...
This strikes me as something constantly asserted but never proven. It should be pretty trivial to find out if this is the case, medically, so there should be data. I went ahead and searched around and although I see a lot of headlines about it, there is a lack of definitive corroboration. I found these sources:
"According to the lay press, 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. While this is not supported by medical literature, dehydration is common in elderly patients."[0]
" In fact, scientific studies suggest that you already get enough liquid from what you're drinking and eating on a daily basis. We are not all walking around in a state of dehydration."[1]
"The notion that there is widespread dehydration has no basis in medical fact"[1]
The thing is that if you monitor your urine color (and act upon it) you are already managing hydration?
My mother in law was hospitalized twice for dehydration. She is mindful of it and still some days she doesn’t drink enough. Drinking is hard for her as other commenters mention here too. After that I just started drinking an extra liter of tea by just carrying the bottle around. Even the extra peeing stopped after a few weeks.
Exactly. What I always tell vendors when I get a strange look after refusing their plastic bag is that we use it for 5 minutes but it stays in the environment for 1000 years.
They make plastics that biodegrade in a few years. Supposedly even in a landfill they degrade (I've seen this debated, I'm not qualified to figure out who is right). However they are more expensive and so rarely used except when someone wants to make a point about being green.
Nothing wrong unless it is used to store food or water and contains some BPA-like compound (AFAIK it includes most plastic produces nowadays even so called BPA-free).
^^^^THIS!^^^^
There is early evidence that most BPA and pthlalate replacements may be considerably worse for you than the things they are replacing. (At least, worse in the sense that they are possibly more dangerous as endocrine disruptors and hormone mimics, and also possibly harder to remove from the body...)
Best choice is to insist on glass packaging wherever you can. It's inert and infinitely recyclable.
Do you know if that metallic taste is considered (in-)healthy? I have no clue and actually like that taste and must admit that in the steel for everything department I’m following the trends as well (steel for cooking - no PFAS; steel for drink containers - no plastics).
It's harmless. The sensation is electrolytic in origin rather than caused by taste receptor activation; it's like when you put a 9 V battery to your tongue except much less potential and therefore weaker feeling.
Single use plastics literally don't matter if they end up in landfill. The vast majority of plastics in the ocean are coming from about 5 rivers in China. Plastic in a landfill is fine, it's a no-op: oil comes out of the ground, does not get burned into CO2 in the atmosphere and then will go and sit in the ground for several thousand years (or more likely, we'll dig it all back up once energy is cheap enough that it can depolymerized and reused).
You wrote: <<The vast majority of plastics in the ocean are coming from about 5 rivers in China.>> I tried to Google about it but found nothing. Where did you learn about it?
You need to stop thinking about bringing your own footprint ever closer to zero, you must also stop thinking that doing so is a powerful revolutionary act, and join or create organized groups vowing to bring about social change. Be it in your family, your neighbourhood or your municipality.
Yes, unfortunately the core item that more hardcore evangelists for topic XYZ seem to be unable to grasp, maybe due to being too close/deep in the subject. If I had a NFT every time somebody on HN stated 'we need to abandon cars, or abandon plastics altogether' and similar, I would be drowning in a lot of useless tokens.
The thing is, the motivation for given topic is always fair and just, and so are the goals, so its normal to want to do more and more. But at one point they move so far from general population they are seen as extremists, and whatever good their push is trying to achieve is completely blocked by this extreme approach and negative emotions it sparks.
Get engaged in politics, create groups, figure out who has real deciding power and apply soft pressure there... this is how good changes are done in timely manner. Other way is to wait till SHTF and there is reaction, but damage is already done like in this topic. Otherwise society just heads to division and conflict on many levels, and as for example covid showed us if you push big part of population hard/long enough they will eventually move to some outright non-smart positions that will be then very hard to abandon.
The secret is to aim for lesser goals. Don’t try to get rid of all plastics just aim to reduce some specific kind of single use plastic etc. Setup an organization to ban cars in the central core of your city.
The advantage to ‘save the whales’ over save every endangered species is it’s much easier to gain traction and you can pick the easiest targets.
The problem is so many of the revolutionary groups are full of anarchoprimitivists and the like. I sure wouldn't want a revolution that put them in charge. It's getting scary out there with how many people openly want industrial society to end.
Many of them don't even care about reducing resource consumption, they're goals are much more philosophical.
We'd wind up with wood stoves instead of solar panels. Resources consumption would go down, maybe, but it might just be because a lot of people would die.
Other than than that, obviously I'm all for improving society and all.
> I try really hard not to use single use plastic. Especially plastic bags
People treat plastic bags as single use, but you can reuse them for years. I’m not saying you should seek them out, but don’t just throw them away after one use when you find yourself with some.
I love thin grocery store plastic bags, and reuse each one dozens of times. But my local government (small Massachusetts city) banned them, so now grocery stores have to use paper (much less reusable) or extra-thick bags (more bulky, less flexible, don't last significantly longer).
It takes real amounts of thought to reduce your footprint; the visible/obvious solution often isn't the right one.
I end up using the bags I get (from food delivery, shopping for fruits etc) as garbage bags or dog poop bags. So I reuse the ones I have. But they still last 1000 years in our environment to save me a minimal amount of convenience.
Actually the tragedy of the commons cannot be stopped by one government. If USA chooses to tax all externalities perfectly, both our production capacity and consumption will be a tiny sliver of its current quantities. By GHG alone we'd lose 80% of our economy, but that doesn't take into account the potential cost of removing dioxin and PFAS from our groundwater, remediating lithium mines, cleaning our air of fly ash, preventing any toxic chemical leaks, making our rivers and lakes and ponds drinkable again, etc. I believe that would reduce us to about 1% of our current GDP.
Assuming we didn't riot ourselves to rubble, other nations will quickly outstrip us. Eventually we'd be a vassal state of another superpower. Either because they'd buy our politicians, use crises of supply shortages to force us into free trade deals which axe our externality taxes, or via outright force.
Other nations would do to us what the USA did to Latin America when those nations wanted to throttle their development for ecological reasons in the 60's and 70's.
Sustainably, we probably wouldn't even be able to keep and train a competitive military -- 6% of our nations carbon emissions are from our military, accounting for 52% of federal carbon footprint, and our military emits more GHG than 140 countries (individually/separately).
> Actually the tragedy of the commons cannot be stopped by one government.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
The US could focus on lower cost - high impact externalities taxing.
It could persuade, cajole, bully its partners and allies to agree to a treaty doing the same. It did it for FATCA, for sure it can do it for climate change and general environmental destruction.
Once you have such an international treaty in place, most of the rest of the world would follow. US partners and allies are probably 70% of the world economy, and the countries with the most slack, economically, that can best afford this.
I've got to a similar conclusion as you but with a very different outcome.
It makes absolutely no difference if i minimise my plastic or diligently sort them for recycling because a Vegas hotel will make all my efforts for naught.
Climate change is already here and there is nothing the individual can do about it. The optimum play now is to accept that the group is useless and make individual steps to mitigate the effects on you personally.
You can carry a water bottle in a small backpack or if you're in a city with fountains use them. Or buy water that comes in cartons though I'm not sure it's easy to find these or if they're actually plastic free.
Water (or any other liquid) packed in cartons is mostly just green washing.
Most of the cartons are either lined with plastic, or they are tetra packs. Both of these options (especially tetra packs) are much more difficult to recycle and worse for the environment than simple PET bottles.
I have used the Stash bottle from Hydrapak [1] for a few years now, that one is the definition of light, and very versatile. The interesting thing is that the opening fits the filter by Katadin made for their BeFree bottles [2], so you could even take that on hikes where you are not entirely sure of the water quality (filters particles and bacteria, but not viruses). I actually carry and use this combo, not related to the companies.
The amount of plastic ending up in oceans/nature from "The Western world" is not very significant relative to the total.
There are entire continents that essentially dump most of their (plastic) trash straight into rivers (and thus oceans). Looking at you (South East) Asia...
The Western wolds is comitting massive fraud and has you fooled too.
In UK recyclers get paid by the government a small amount per ton recycled. It is , however, not enough to trully recycle anything. So they take out a few valuable plastics, and pay randpm company in poor country to tale this plastic, and to sign paperwork saying that it's going to a recycling facility. In reality it will simply be dumped, and money will be pocketed.
Then when someone complains, they pull the documents thst were signed by some random fall guy, make a surprised face, and claim they thought the plastic would be recycled.
Where does it end then ? Burned in the air ? I don't know if it is worse or better, I have no data about it. But I suppose it's neither neutral.
Recycling plastic is very hard as a single product is often a combinaison of different kind of 'plastics', which happen to be a generic name for different materials, and which impose different kind of treatment for each of them. Colored plastics add up to the issue as you can't recycle different colored plastic of the same kind together...
For example, a single coca-cola bottle is typically made of 3 kind of plastics : the bottle itself (transparent), the cap(red with white or black scripting), and the wrapping around of the bottle (made of 2 or 3 different colors).
And that's nothing compared to toothpaste tubes, which was taken as an example in a recent 'Der Spiegel' issue to illustrate the ecologic nightmare plastics represent. And let's not forget ketchup plastic bottles, which is also some kind of marvel of assembled plastic enginering.
Plastic recycling is currently more a matter of vertue signaling than a reality as only 1 to 5 percent of plastic (I don't know the exact numbers) is curently recycled worldwide.
In western world (or at least in europe), most of them are incinerated in electricity thermal generators or buried in waste dumps.
Until recently, american waste (plastics) were send to China to be buried or burned, until the chinese government made it illegal.
The real indicator should be some kind of a 'plastic consumption index' by countries and/or companies and/or household, used to monitor the amount we produce it, use it and get rid of the waste.
A lot of it doesn’t just go into the ground. It ends up getting washed (or dumped) into the ocean where it pollutes beaches, and gets ground down into micro-plastic particles which poison sea life. Still more gets incinerated, creating local air pollution and contributing to carbon emissions.
If you're putting single use plastic in a non-recycling bin in the developed world its pretty much guaranteed to go to landfill, not the sea. More so than putting it in a recycling bin where they might transport it on a ship to China.
Welcome to the developed world (in my case: Germany), where recycling is enforced by ordinances and/or contracts with your waste removal organisation, which will check if you did so properly, and refuse to take your refuse away if they think you have not recycled properly enough.
> It ends up getting washed (or dumped) into the ocean
Not where I live (northeastern USA), where the vast majority of discarded plastic ends up in landfills. Virtually none gets "washed (or dumped) into the ocean"; the minor exception is trash dropped by thoughtless people.
> "the minor exception is trash dropped by thoughtless people."
In many parts of the world, this is completely normal, unfortunately, not a "minor exception". Even here the UK, canals and rivers are often full of floating plastic bottles, bags, and other litter. I know because I've volunteered to clean it up: the quantities we pull out is insane. And a few weeks later, it's all back again. Frustrating and sad.
I had a similar discussion with friends who said they were going to stop flying completely. To me all you are really doing there is reducing the cost at the margin by reducing the demand by a tiny amount.
You really shouldn’t do this. You are risking your health by becoming dehydrated. I’m not sure your avoidance of plastic at all costs even makes sense on any level.
Funny how Europeans and others aren't constantly "hydrating" (in fact, they tell me they think Americans are silly for carrying water bottles around), yet they never suffer any effects of dehydration. (Most European meals are served with only single-digit ounces of liquid.) You really don't need to drink very much, and in fact drinking large quantities can produce some bad effects by demineralizing the body (magnesium in particular, but many others too), especially over the long term...
I monitor my urine color and how I feel. If I feel bad I’ll grab a glass of water or even buy a plastic bottle, but that happens maybe once a year.
I really think that people aren’t that fragile and the bottled water industry has done an excellent job of making people think they need to constantly hydrate in order to not have a heat stroke.
Imo it’s enough to just pay attention to yourself and how you feel.
Doesn't look like much of a 'law' to me. His optimism ignores some fundamental facts, like living in a (nearly) closed system. So there must be a point at which oil production will decline because our usage far outstrips it's production. Humans are trying to adapt yet I don't think extraction from shale, fracking, and giant super buildings in the desert are going to solve the fundamental issues around sustainability.
He’s not saying to ignore problems. Rather that we tend to fix things just in time once the problem becomes very apparent. Y2K is the best example. Fixing the ozone hole would be another one.
I really don’t worry too much. I’m lucky to be surrounded by the tech seen in Israel and just see so many innovative ideas and solutions to various problems on a daily basis.
It’s more that it just doesn’t seem worth it. We use a bag for a few minutes and it’s in our environment for 1000 years. It seems like such a bad trade to me.
Tragedy of the commons was a false-flag by british aristocracy which enabled them to seize Commonhomd land from Commoners in 1500's and drive them into poverty and endantured servitude.
In a single masterstroke they gained assets and labour.
Your article says that the tragedy of the commons does not have to happen, but we don't really have the numbers. Those examples could be cherry picking, and everyone's personal experience kind of says that the opposite is more common (commons mismanagement). That's why the original article was so influential: it gave a name to something we've always seen.
It's great that we can assume tragedy of the commons is not as immutable as some law of physics, but it still looks like a powerful social force unless proven otherwise.
And I imagine, like any social study, it's going to be very hard to get actual numbers for the tragedy of the commons versus comedy of the commons scenarios.
People act in their own self interest which is often at odds with the entire population’s interest. See: prisoner’s dilemma.
Tragedy of the commons is now defined in game theory and is a naturally occurring phenomenon when people have limited resources and the drive to survive.
Sure. But define “limited resources” and “survive”. When life is zero sum - i.e. either you die or I die, yes humans are often selfish. But in actual day to day life those situations are exceedingly rare. Our normal drive, in my experience, is to form communities around shared care of common resources - because that is often both in our personal self interest and in our communal interest.
Is it really that hard though? On the top of my mind I can come up with several success stories of solving tragedy of the commons type of problems. For example:
Global regulation around CFCs made the ozone hole shrink
The don't mess with texas anti littering campaign and similar outreach programs worldwide reduced littering
In general taxing negative externalities seems to have an effect
Or is most of the difficulty in trying to convince people who've read articles about "the tragic of the commons" and think that's the natural state of the world that they're wrong?
Earth's ecosystems have evolved biodiversity for exactly this reason: to recycle the waste products of life forms at all levels. They've gotten really good at this. There is still geologic evidence of this having gone way, way out of control, like vast limestone deposits, coal, and fossil fuels. Those were the unrecyclable byproducts of the day. Who knows what plastic will look like in the geologic record, but at this point they look destined to be a fine dust that will give future (non-human, likely) geologists a perfect marker of the Holocene.
Life optimizes for the most efficient resource usage. Those deposits were not an efficient source of energy.
But life itself is incredible, we have non-oxygen using lifeforms (inefficient, the earliest lifeforms), sulphur-eating lifeforms. Life can use up almost anything, <<if it has to>>.
Calculate the hidden cost. Tell the companies that you'll either vote for a tax or accept a lucrative post in their board of directors after your term is over. Profit!
Calculate the hidden cost. Spend half of the cost on a marketing campaign to sway public opinion against a tax. Profit!
Maybe one way to mitigate is to have a separate branch of the political system dedicated to calculating the costs. Then make the methods for calculating as publicly available as possible so that they can be reproduced by non-profits.
We have managed judicial systems. We can manage this too.
I don't see how that helps. For example there are many publications available that calculate the cost of CO2, eg [1] from the German government. Yet global warming is still a problem.
Calculating the hidden cost isn't simple "hard", it's nigh impossible. We've spent billions trying to calculate the externalities of a single gas (CO2) and we're still incredibly uncertain with giant error bars even with a ton of assumptions.
I mean it's hard in the same way as converting from a dictatorship to a democracy is hard. There's a huge political transaction cost. And then you'll wonder what took you so long.
Money is just a proxy here for the harm it does. Some people would rather not get a check for having lost body parts, a la that scene from Erin Brockovich. They would rather not endure the harm to begin with.
the funny thing about your comment is that it is only a hard problem because you were fooled on the premise.
the term itself was a fake argument against the commons, in favour of privatization of commons. every single word of the argument today is known to have been a falacy.
so the answer to the tragedy of the commons is to not believe in it. property is the real issue. but even thinking that way will offend your sensibilities.
"I suspect it's one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe" ... and yet solve it we must. I feel it will begin with a new enlightenment which will be thrust upon us as our survival becomes increasingly threatened and that will manifest in a rewriting of our core values and a redefinition of wealth more in line with and reverence for the natural world.
Evolving into a culture of totalitarian rationalism like the Vulcan, would require irrational parties to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. That rules out any modern democracy from ever doing it, since discriminating anyone acting on instinct or feelings won't ever get a majority vote.
I wonder if we are "beyond the basics of evolution and selfish genes" now in terms of human intelligence, technology, society and soon: AI. For example once a species can edit it's own genes, you get to a point where maybe the genes "competing" and "being selfish" becomes meaningless, and some other defining "replication force" takes over as the dominate shaping of future life.
We might get to "the selfish data"? Genes being a special case.
Narh, when it comes to breeding, we humans tend to be quite predicable. Outliers definitely exist, but they generally don't procreate as much as people who just feel the urge and go for it. In order to shape evolution you'd need to make what would essentially begin as an edge case and make sure it's such an advantage that it reduces the likelyhood of others having more children than you.
True, and this is why ants and cockroaches are more
“evolved“ than humans. (although is it the being or the gene?) But humans can conceive bigger goals: we could genetically engineer new beings, and replace natural gestation with something else. These are untenable ideas but in 100 yrs ethics might change and the temptation to change how we and things evolve would be there.
Are you familiar with the work of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics, who won it for debunking the so-called Tragedy of the Commons in general and specifying where it applies in particular?
Want the lived-experience argument? I live in Palestine. Palestinian villages managed their lands collectively for ages and ages, up until the 20th century. This broke down not because anybody was misusing the commons, or fencing, or whatever - it broke down because the damn Ottomans started a land registry and you got a few people making themselves official owners of huge swaths of land they should not have had any claim to. So the only tragedy was external elements disrupting the commons by force.
This article is both an illuminating critique of the author but also an ad hominem to the argument.
Terrible people can be absolutely correct. In this case, the tragedy of the commons both exists and affects many things (like international fishing).
It is true that history shows examples of communities managing their common resources over generations. This need not be the default; when it isn't you get the tragedy of the commons. That is why its important to both understand it and to build community norms that encourage respect for common resources.
Would I be correct in my read of your take that you don't believe the tragedy of the commons exists? If it does, do the original author's other beliefs matter when discussing it?
The author of this article agrees with you, and says so; I was more interested in the latter half of the article, where he explains why "the facts are not on Hardin's side".
> Would I be correct in my read of your take that you don't believe the tragedy of the commons exists?
The privatization of the commons seems to me the much greater tragedy, leading to large-scale exploitation and irresponsible environmental degradation. From what I see, distributed networks of human-scale communities tend to manage shared resources in a sustainable way; to fuck things up on a grand scale, you need centralized power and a managerial distance from consequences.
> It's true that history shows examples of communities managing their common resources over generations. This need not be the default; when it isn't you get the tragedy of the commons
It looks like you're agreeing that counterexamples to "tradgedy of the commons" being a default state exist in history yet your conclusion is "tragedy of the commons is the default if a better option isn't employed".
Why can't it be true(based off your same evidence) that tragedy of the commons is an unnatural state, and respect for common resources is the default?
Along with a sibling, I agree that the concept of "Tragedy of the Commons" can be useful while its original author is a deeply flawed human being whose other arguments and extrapolations are insupportable and morally reprehensible.
Still, I'm grateful for your linking to this excellent critique of the source article which, among other things, provides a handy label for an ethically and morally dubious extrapolation the critique labels "lifeboat ethics" which I often seen deployed by the wealthy against the impoverished.
> an idea [Hardin] called “lifeboat ethics” [0]: since global resources are finite, Hardin believed the rich should throw poor people overboard to keep their boat above water. [1]
The humans making the cost/benefit analysis are largely the ones whose cost is actually external. I certainly wouldn’t do the same math, but I’m not casually enriching myself by making people sick. The people who buy their products are largely their victims, not their accomplices.
Nearly everyone does NOT own the means of production, and the few who do know exactly what’s wrong and keep on doing it to everyone but themselves until they’re forced to stop. Maybe someday we’ll realize that too.
Technically, Blackrock and Vanguard own the means of production. We gave them the capital to do so through our pensions and 401(k)s. My 401(k) menu doesn't include ESG funds, but those that exist have higher expenses and lower performance than an indiscriminate index fund. If the regulators have been captured by lobbying and revolving doors to industry, the only option left is to vote with your wallet, but that's easier said than done.
Divestment without regulations doesn't work. You dumping your polluting investments is just someone else's opportunity to pick them up for cheap and make a profit.
Voting with your wallet is noble, but pointless. Vote with your actual vote.
> the only option left is to vote with your wallet
I know it’s not popular here but I’ll say it: class analysis. You can vote with your fingers and bones. You can vote with your personal dignity. Your investment portfolios are just part of capitalism and it isn’t predestined.
I haven’t done my homework but I find it strange that I hear so much about 3M while DuPont seems as bad — or worse — but it could simply be that I’ve read more about DuPont and I’m missing some inexhaustible list of atrocities 3M has committed.
DuPont discovered PTFE while exploring for new refrigerants. It was used in the Manhattan Project because it could resist flourine used in the gaseous diffusion of uranium, then marketed as Teflon after WWII.
3M discovered PFOS while developing rubber that wouldn't degrade when exposed to jet fuel, then marketed it as Scotchgard.
It's a difficult balance to strike though. Forcing companies to consider all possible externalities is very difficult / expensive to get right. And if you don't get it exactly right, you very quickly increase your surface area for issues like regulatory capture, etc.
Just another in the long list of coordination problems where it is hard to arrive at the pareto-optimal solution given human selfishness and our lack of omniscience.
These companies often know quite well there is a huge cost they are offloading on others. Evidence for this is seen in the huge sums spent on lobbying and politics in general.
Agreed. If we could force companies to pay for externalized costs we could get to a net-zero earth immediately. Suddenly investments in green energy would increase 1000x
We do get it. Sometimes the costs aren't known in advance, and you can't include every potential future issue in the cost/benefit calculus.
Isn't that literally what the article is pointing at? Shareholders put pressure on the company to stop this, and they are. Sounds like a success story.
3M knew for decades about the dangers of exposure to PFAS chemicals but didn’t inform the public.
During the 1970s and ’80s, it conducted studies on its US workers that showed PFAS building up in the bloodstream.
In 1977 the company determined PFOS was “more toxic than anticipated” in a study of rats and monkeys; in 1978 a monkey study had to be stopped after all the animals died within the first few days because the PFOS doses were too high.
In 1980, minutes from an internal 3M meeting said workers at the factory in Antwerp were told the chemicals had been found in human blood, but the company decided not to tell the government
I don't think it's a success story when a chemical company is pressured to stop producing something because of it's health effects after that chemical has made it into the blood of nearly every individual on the planet.
Expecting investors to vote against their own financial interests for the greater good is a terrible system. 3M investors only care because of the threat of lawsuits and other legal trouble; those are the mechanisms we need to improve. Stricter environmental rules and enforcement will force companies to reduce harmful externalities. The shareholder pressure is incidental.
Free markets are generally bad at handling pollution because the costs are so diffuse and long term; there's often a way to increase profits at the expense of someone else's health in a manner that can't be precisely quantified immediately.
The same thing applies to many other activities: fossil fuels, usage of single-use plastics that someone else will clean up, promotion of unhealthy and addictive substances like tobacco, etc.
I am skeptic that market mechanisms achieve the best outcomes at all times, but I'm positively certain they don't when externalities are not even priced in!
> 3M has been facing a raft of litigation that has prompted the move
Seems like yet again corrupt and incompetent regulators and oversight fails, and real action only really happens when the courts are used to hold them to account for damages.
EDIT: Maybe those libertarians do have a good idea now and again...
We get it, but we don't care because capitalism / free market / small government / money / competition.
Competition goes beyond just companies too, countries compete with each other, to the point of starting wars over e.g. natural resources, territory, and access to infrastructure. And one future scenario is wars over more basic resources like food and water, as climate change will cause droughts and famines. At the very least it will (and already is) triggering mass migrations.
Who are you referring to? You use the past tense, which means you're probably not pointing a finger at china - which is hardly communist, making huge strides in cleaning up their emissions, and their emissions are largely the result of making stuff for the rest of the world. Which means you're probably talking about now-defunct communist countries, i.e. the soviet union?
So your argument against capitalism driving pollution in the hundreds of countries around the world where it appears to be driving pollution is a single example? A country that did most of it's polluting during a rapid industrialization with the stated goal of "catching up with the west". Meanwhile during that same soviet period not one but *two* rivers caught on fire in a single year in the USA.
Which is all to say that I'm unconvinced. It really seems like the driver of most of the pollution in the world has been capitalism. Perhaps communism is worse, but that doesn't let capitalism off the hook - it's not a two-choice binary system here.
Not really. Countries define property rights and solve problems. Domestic overfishing is countries removing externalities and making them part of the market
Nuclear objectionable due to the highly toxic waste product for which no accepted solution has been implemented yet.
I mean don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of nuclear energy as a CO2-less high potential source of energy, it's just that they're fucking around with the waste too much and umming and arring about it while it just sits near the nuclear power plants, instead of just burying it in a mountain like they do in finland [0]). They could decomission a strip mine and fill it back up with lead-and-concrete encased nuclear waste, then bury it in another few hundred meters of sand - nobody would be the wiser for the next millennia. In theory.
It’s pretty safe being stored near nuclear power plants. The folks keeping it from being buried in a mountain are folks opposed to nuclear energy… ironically due to (overblown) waste concerns. They don’t WANT the waste problem to be solved.
In Belgium there is a huge issue with pfas caused by 3M [1], having contaminated things like drinking water etc, so it's not even safe to eat vegetables from your garden or eggs from your chickens.
It's a massacre TBH, mostly exposing the head-in-the-sand, umbrella using fingerpointing mentality of Belgian politics. I can imagine 3M has sites like these all over the world, so I would assume this only scratches the surface...
There's a pretty informative video on PFAS in Germany; at the end of the video there's a guy in the US (southeast I think) who is located about five miles away from a PFAS plant whose pets keep dying and who is underwater on his mortgage because no one will buy a house near a literal toxic-waste-producing plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovCvW22ol3Y
How does this argument not apply to everything? The counterfactual (where 3M continues to produce these) is ... obviously bad? Producing materials that are bad for the environment and human health! Now less is produced, at least in the short term.
An example where your argument doesn't play out like you say: many chemicals manufacturers decided to no longer sell chemicals that would be used for administering the death penalty via lethal injection. So many did this that states _had to basically stop applying the death penalty_, and basically try and trick companies to sell them the materials. A win for those who pushed for that to happen (mitigated by the endless cruelty of the SC but..). Alternative companies didn't show up to "fill the gap".
At one point doing things actually matters. Especially when we look at how large conglomerates own many parts of the value chain, at one point the end result is simply that these chemicals stop being used.
Well one hypothetical way it wouldn't apply is if the US federal government backed 3M's move and banned Chinese and other foreign companies from unfairly competing with a company that is choosing to avoid intentionally poisoning their customers.
It seems like there are many usable substances which are hydrophobic (usable as a water repellent). Not so many alternatives which are oleophobic (oil repellent).
I am sure proper research is being conducted to find replacements.
This is the prisoner's dilemma situation. Everyone would benefit more from a reduction, but if only one company does it, they benefit (in the short term) even more.
I think the signalling is also valuable -- humans have a remarkable tendency to adopt attitudes over time, and I think every contribution towards the attitude that we should not harm the environment is a good one.
I for one currently support and will continue to support companies with sustainable environmental practises even if the cost is higher, and I encourage everyone to do the same. For, that increased cost is like a payment for that piece (however small) of the environment that I otherwise would not have, and I think that's worth it.
PFAS are used because there isn't a better alternative. A globally coordinated reduction in production only increases the price of products for consumers.
...which is a good thing! we should stop taking $20 teflon pans, nonstick fast food containers, and $40 raincoats with negative externalities for granted.
We did fine without PFAS, we'll be okay with expensive PFAS (where externalities are internalized and built into the cost) too.
Does paying for the pollution really help fix the problem? Will the government use that money to filter rivers for PFAS?
I think a lot of this need also comes from other supposedly environmental choices. My work banned plastic cups and now has paper cups with PFAS which are more toxic. I think the plastic ones were the better choice if recycled properly.
And raincoats were really really horrible before Gore-Tex.
Price elasticity is real: if PFAS is more expensive, people will buy (and businesses will produce) fewer PFAS-derived products. Raising the price is especially nice because it causes price-elastic use cases (think PFAS coated paper cups) to drop out, while price-inelastic use cases (think teflon joint implants) are not made illegal, just more expensive. If the government earmarks PFAS tax revenue for remediation, that'd be awesome, but that's just a side benefit - the price increase is the main benefit.
I do thing greenwashing and environmental whack-a-mole is a real problem (heck, we see it in the PFAS space with GenX replacing PFOA). I don't see that as a valid reason to do nothing.
Paying for pollution makes the customer consider the full cost of the product, reducing demand to cases when the benefits of using the chemical are actually bigger than the external costs.
It's not about using the money to solve the problems. It's about making the economy more efficient.
> And raincoats were really really horrible before Gore-Tex.
Nope, they were fine. A bit heavier but far longer-lasting, including the waxed versions which can be re-waxed if needed to keep up waterproofing. I'm still using my army-issued raincoats from when I served in 1992, one of them has been with me on a number of expeditions (months of paddling the Yukon from Whitehorse to the Bering Strait, climbing several mountains, etc) where it doubled as a tent bottom, it is still perfectly serviceable. The lighter version I still use when cycling, it is still waterproof and the seams - which usually are the weak spot - still hold. I'm also using a 20yo wax coat which I re-waxed a few times (still using the original tin of wax), that one hardly contains any synthetics. Anything made of Gore-Tex would have delaminated after a few months of this type of use.
Waxed fabrics do "breathe" more or less as much as much as Gore-Tex does and - important - keep on doing so as long as you keep them waxed enough but not too much. Don't make the coat look like a waxed cheese, you're using too much wax. Use enough to get the fabric to reject dripping or flowing water, no more. Gore-Tex was made to imitate this characteristic without the need for wax but once the membrane is damaged it can not be repaired, unlike waxed fabrics.
This isn't true. The Gore-Tex layer isn't damaged like this. You're referring to the DNW coating, and there's no reason this can't be a waxed layer like old-school rain jackets. In fact a lot of companies started offering wax based DNW coatings in the name of environmental responsibility.
The actual "Gore-Tex" layer, now no longer under patent and produced by many under names such as Dermizax, H2No, Sympatex and many others, is a thin, flexible, *fragile* PTFE membrane. This allows air through, and via a heat-pump-like mechanism drives water on its surfaces from the warm side to the cool side. There is no 'old school rainjacket' equivalent for this.
Usually when your Gore-Tex jacket stops working it is because the DNW layer is gone. If you used a wax replacement the actual Gore-Tex would still be fine and your rain jacket would still be miles better than anything available 100 years ago.
It might work fine for a weekend hike but the stuff does not hold up to repeated strain. Eventually it'll start to delaminate at the shoulders due to wear from backpack straps, cuffs and other exposed spots. This 'eventually' will depend on what you're doing while wearing the things, as said that weekend hike won't put as much strain on it as does walking the Appalachian trail or crossing the Hardangervidda, let along climbing a few mountains. I like to use material which keeps and can be repaired if needed so for me this is a no-go. My backpacks are between 30 and 50 years old, my raingear between 20 and 30 years, my tents and sleeping bags between 20 and 25 years, my cooking gear is more than 40 years old. It may not be fashionable - who cares about fashion when you're alone in the woods - and it may not be the lightest or most high-tech but I know I can depend on it.
You can get Gore-Tex patch kits for any punctures you encounter.
There are also a wide range of textiles available for the outer layers. Many have high Kevlar/aramid content and are much tougher in abrasion than waxed cotton.
I have a Ventile jacket which should be the pinnacle of cotton waterproof design, and it is much easier to damage than modern synthetic jacket, and on top of this it doesn't breath as well, or keep me as dry under continuous downpour conditions. It's also harder to repair due to the high density of the fibres.
That delamination doesn't happen for normal gore-tex where the membrane is one of the inner layers. It's only with the ultra-thin version used by cyclists that is hydrophobic on the outside. My gear usually starts ripping before the waterproofing is compromised.
But I replace my gear when needed anyway and recycle it. I do hike, but not very far from the civilized world. And previously I lived in a place where it rains every day in winter (western Ireland) so good breathing raingear is really a must have.
Why are people big on recycling plastic? In the West, non-recycled plastic goes to landfill and is LESS likely to end up in the oceans or whatever, as "recycling" is often sent overseas.
In fact, single use plastic means more oil being used for plastic and less burnt for fuel, leading to lower CO2 emissions.
>> I think a lot of this need also comes from other supposedly environmental choices. My work banned plastic cups and now has paper cups with PFAS which are more toxic. I think the plastic ones were the better choice if recycled properly.
Why do you need to choose between plastic or paper (PFAS)? Does your work not provide glasses? Ceramic mugs? Can you not bring your own reusable water bottle?
We should stop taking the pans, one-time use containers, etc, but a GoreTex jacket costs $400, not $40, and even the "cheap" GoreTex knockoffs cost $200...
What will happen is that the PFAS pan becomes $26 instead of $20. PFAS is not the most expensive part of the pan, only a minor component. A doubling or tripling of PFAS prices is unlikely to price anyone out of getting that pan or raincoat. It's just going to make middle and lower class people cumulatively billions of dollars poorer.
Iron pans are ridiculously cheap these days and they last forever if you bother to read the 3 line instructions included with them.
Teflon isn’t as great as people were deceived into believing. Even if you’re absolutely meticulous with care, it’ll have a noticeable lack in non-stick abilities within months and be noticeably sticky after 2 years, and rapidly degrading into useless territory. An iron pan starts out about as sticky as a slightly used Teflon pan and feels like brand new Teflon after a few uses and stays that way for as long as a human lifespan.
I mean pans are only one thing. PFAS are used in many products. Yes you can make inferior substitutions but again this reduces standard of living.
This is not to mention its widespread use in military applications. There is already concern about China's lock on the global supply of rare earths and other raw materials like silicon and magnesium (80%+ market share). What happens when the US can't make fighter jets because a belligerent China refuses to export PFAS?
There is no proof that PFAS is causing large scale poisoning. Industrial workers with insufficient PPE may get increased risks of health effects if they are subject to prolonged exposure to concentrated amounts. But so does exposure to fertilizer and aspartame. The research is not anywhere near saying PFAS are causing large scale poisoning.
It reminds me of the microplastics debate too. Lots of panic about it, little scientific evidence that it is causing large scale health problems.
I’m glad lawmakers, investors, businesses, and nearly everyone else are not waiting around for “proof”, since that is a nearly impossible standard. We know that these substances are everywhere, and there is evidence of it causing harm in animals and in humans
> With many health effects noted for a relatively few example compounds and hundreds of other PFAS in commerce lacking toxicity data… [1]
If we were to wait to run studies on all of those hundreds of substances, there will just be that much more pollutant in our environments and bodies that will be virtually impossible to clean up. The risk/reward tradeoff is pretty clear.
It depends on demand elasticity. Products with very little demand elasticity like energy or medicine just make everyone miserable and worse off when production is cut, because you can't live without them. Yes you can scrimp and save and stretch your dollar, but at the end of the day you have to pay up no matter the price.
I'm not sure that anyone knows what the demand elasticity for an industrial chemical like PFAS is, but it's obviously not a completely discretionary item.
Energy has a lot of demand elasticity, it just takes a few years for demand to catch up with price changes. See for example how fuel efficiency changed during the oil crisis a few decades ago. Or how building insulation changes with rising energy prices.
Let's take one example. Teflon coated cookware. As an alternative there are cooking sprays, butter, oils, or stiring the contents of the pan more frequently.
In this case it's not a nessacity but a convenience. Why don't we start by restricting the use of PFAS to those products in which there are no alternatives and are a nessacity.
In my experience non stick pans are pretty awful, basically anything else is a better alternative.
You can't get them hot enough to sear a steak properly without damaging the non stick coating, and the non stick coating is oleophobic which means that oil pools rather than spreading out so you can't get proper browning on anything even if you do cook it at an appropriate temp.
Seasoned cast iron and carbon steel will be non stick without either of those downsides, and even regular stainless steel is perfectly fine as long as you let it heat up properly before using it.
I agree. I used nonstick pans for a long time. But once the coating starts to degrade, they're worse than decent-quality traditional cookware. Because food starts to stick, but you still can't use metal utensils to scrape it off.
Now I just use stainless-steel or (rarely) cast iron, and I'm much happier.
And it's even cheaper, long-term. A decent stainless-steel pan costs $50-$200 USD, but lasts approximately forever. Whereas a decent non-stick equivalent costs $30-$50, but needs replacement every few years even if I'm careful with it.
IKEA make a fantastic stainless steel[1] pan called "SENSUELL". Best pan I ever bought! Heavy indestructible construction, heats evenly, retains heat, cleans easily, can be placed under the grill, looks good, etc. The price has gone up recently, but it's still great value IMO!
[1] actually, like many high-end pans, it uses a 3-ply construction with an aluminium layer between two steel layers
I love my cast iron, stainless, and carbon steel pans, but calling them nonstick is a stretch. In fact, their stickiness is pretty much their valuable property in getting good browning on food.
You can definitely cook delicate fish and scrambled eggs on say, cast iron, but you will either be scraping hard during clean up or using an absurd amount of oil to cook. I don't mind it myself, but its clear why nonstick is popular.
I season my stainless steel pan with a few drops of oil, rubbed on with a paper towel. Very rarely do I have problems with anything sticking to it.
If I'm searing a steak or something at high heat, sure, it's going to leave some burnt-on marks, but if you add water and leave it simmering on minimum heat with a bit of baking soda for 15 minutes, pretty much anything will wipe off with no effort.
A high quality, well seasoned cast iron pan will allow you to fry an egg while said egg slides around the pan as if nonstick.
Not every pan is capable of this, and meticulous care is required to keep it in shape, but I became a believer in non stick cast iron when I first met a pan that could do it. I had used plenty of "stickier" cast iron pans before and my perspective shifted a bit.
Cast iron is useless for food with starch, eg. hash browns. The starch absorbs the seasoning and you end up with an unseasoned pan with burnt pieces stuck everywhere.
Nonstick pans are not meant for searing steaks. They're meant for making things like creamy scrambled eggs that are difficult to get right on cast iron.
Ceramic cookware is also PFA free, and while it isn’t 100% as good as Teflon for nonstick purposes, it’s about 95% as good for roughly the same price.
It’s not all that much convenience you give up anyway. My home is PFA free for cookware (indoors, at least) simply by virtue of owning birds because PFA is toxic to birds. I have to use the pressure cooker and air fryer outside but the ceramic pans I use indoors do just fine and aren’t too much harder to clean vs Teflon pans.
I think the only noticeable pain where my ceramic pans clearly lose to Teflon is eggs - eggs want to cling to basically anything and Teflon is just really good at not having things cling to it. Otherwise it’s almost always just as easy to clean the ceramic pans as it is to clean the Teflon ones.
Just to chime in about your use of the word "signaling" and when others use "virtue signaling".
I believe the traditional term is "setting a good example" and even if the motivation is selfish there's a positive outcome. "Virtue signaling" was invented to demonize this behavior by focusing on (the assumed) motive as selfish.
The use of the phrase "virtue signaling" tells me immediately that the rest of the comment has absolutely no value whatsoever and can be safely ignored.
The entire US benefits from rules only California makes for itself. The entire world benefits from rules only the EU makes for itself.
That very same globalization sometimes causes influence as a pure byproduct.
Regardless, it's not an all or nothing situation. If there are 6000 problems, it's perfectly fine to pick just one of them, and do something that only makes it 1% better. So what there are 5999 other problems? So what most of this one problem didn't even get better because there is some way around it? Tomorrow you just keep doing more of the same and make the current problem 2% better. Or make one of the other 5999 a little better.
It really only takes the EU and US agreeing that something is bad. Together they represent a huge chunk of the imports of nearly every sector of the global economy. In practice that is what globalization largely is - other countries producing stuff that the US and EU buy.
If you manufacture a chemical and the US and EU both decide that chemical is banned and can't be imported, your business may very well be toast, and you will have a large incentive to produce stuff that they want instead. This doesn't necessarily even take legislation as the relevant governments have a variety of ways they can apply tariffs, disincentives etc. to stuff they don't like.
It doesn’t even take both agreeing necessarily. In many cases just either one of the EU or the US legislating something is sufficient financial incentive to follow the same rule globally.
You establish agreements over a large enough market that it actually makes a different so that competitors doing the right thing aren’t penalized or aren’t penalized enough that they’re disincentivized.
Sometimes that market is the US and you only need a local bill to do that. Sometimes you do a bilateral or multilateral treaty. But these things happen all the time even today. Eg if not for trump there would probably have been a new pacific trade agreement and Biden has managed to rally multilateral cooperation around security issues around Russia (eg see new applications to NATO as one example as well as related economic agreements and sanctions) and climate change.
The main challenge is that Trump’s behavior of cancelling deals that were on the finish line as well as backing out of existing agreements (Paris accords + Iran) means that partners are now more wary of entering into agreements in the first place.
This has less to do with globalization and more to do with USA’s increasing instability as a reliable partner that can execute on agreed-upon commitments across political transitions. So now countries are less reliant on commitments from the USA. From one perspective, that’s good - local autonomy is a powerful tool. From a different perspective, the USA frequently (not always and maybe not even a majority of the time) lead the way and set a global direction through unilateral action (ie even without treaties). Again, that’s gone less because of globalization I think and more that the world has grown tired of USA’s political weight throwing and realpolitik behavior rather than sticking to common principles (democracy, rule of law, not torturing enemies no matter what they’ve done, human rights, raising up scientists and facts even when politically inconvenient or leaders applying pressure to move their voter base instead of playing tail wag the dog, having principles about who we count as our allies etc). One set of behaviors engenders trust while the other degrades it and leads to whatsboutisim politics. Agreements in low trust environments are rarer and harder to maintain. Agreements in high trust environments are much cheaper.
So, while I agree that the “governments around the world coordinating” is harder I disagree that it’s impossible or that it was caused by globalization Val multi-generational realpolitik weight throwing and underhanded behavior that killed a lot of the good will brought about as the “saviors of WWII” propaganda that was wide spread + “golden city” aura post WWII and during the Cold War + technological and economically outpacing Russia. We’ve been leveraging that good will more than our finances because the former is completely invisible and impossible to quantify and measure.
I'm curious - if companies knowingly continue to use PFAS for purely financial reasons, would they also risk liability? It's becoming increasingly clear from studies that PFAS are toxic to humans.
There was that huge settlement by tobacco companies, despite the fact that tobacco is still legal, because they ignored clear science for years in order to make a profit.
As a chemist I am not sure it's even possible to create matching alternatives. The stronger links inside molecules and outside, the more they are "alien" to life and environment. While reducing their usage is a good strategy, an outright ban strips technology of useful materials.
I have no experience or advanced education in chemistry or material sciences. Do you think it's possible that a ban would spur innovation? I imagine our modern world has use cases that can't just disappear or settle for something not as effective.
Unfortunately probably not much - the relevant properties come from the element itself (fluorine) where there literally doesn't exist an alternative. It is possible that some alternatives will come to light, but there is a limited design space and it's not as if people haven't been looking for cheaper[0] and better solutions.
I'm curious as to the scope of this, and what end products are effected. A lot of the best-in-class greases (krytox) and orings (FFKM aka kalrez) rely heavily on fluoro-components. FFKM orings in particular are head and shoulders above everything else by ~100C worth of working temperature range. FKM 'Viton' orings are also incredibly popular and are widely used in automotive applications for temperature and oil resistance in addition to having major industrial uses.
[0]Fluorine is a real PITA to produce and make derivatives from - environmental issues aside functionally equivalent non-fluorine compounds would almost always be cheaper.
For consumers goods there are already many alternatives though. Ceramic nonstick and nanotech based water repellents come to mind. They are good enough for average people who aren't avid hikers or foodies.
I wouldn't be surprised if they started using other plastics in frying pans one day, meant to be used with some fancy temperature control induction system. Lots of stuff is slippery enough for food applications, you just need one that's safe at the temperature oil gets to.
I doubt my life would be affected much at all without any fluoropolymers in goods I directly own.
A ban does stimulate innovation, as the banning of CFs shows (See Montreal protocol), It spurs innovation for alternatives as there is good money in it and it also spurs innovation by end-users. It is a long and slow process though.
It's a question of priorities. Do you put human (and non-human) lifeforms' health and safety above technology, or not? If all you value is money and efficiency, then you end viewing things through the lens of what technology needs or wants, which is really just an extension of the economic policy of growth, growth, growth.
Before Teflon, people had pans, and they cleaned them. After teflon, people will have pans, and they will clean them.
It's not even a case like lithium batteries where my lifestyle would be significantly impacted if I had to go without.
To some degree prioritizing tech makes sense, if the tech is replacing some other thing that harms living beings more. I doubt an LED factory is environmentally perfect, but the alternative would probably be people using oil lamps in many places.
And some things are just too convenient to give up for 1 in a million possible risks, like WiFi.
But things that only benefit a small enthusiast community in nonessential ways with large costs to everyone else are just too much.
Can you name one essential application where PFAS is really necessary? Something where society would actually be substantially worse without it. I’m not talking about ski wax here.
Only reasonable example is AFFF fire fighting foam. But realistically the amount of liquid fuel fires that you have to fight in this world probably pale in comparison with the production volumes of unnecessary anti-stick cookware and gore-tex fabrics.
It will need an international effort, like the Montreal Protocol for banning CFCs and HFCs. Legislation need to ban the end-use as well as the production of these chemicals. I was involved with a study in the late 80s early 90s about the economic impact of the Montreal protocol in southern Africa and there was huge resistance against it from major car manufacturers (the biggest consumption were car air conditioners at the time, more that the use of CFC-11 in foam packaging). Dealers stock piled stocks and rogue manufactures continued producing for many years. It takes 5-10 years for alternatives to be developed and 20-30 years for wide adoption before they disappear all together.
Honestly, I try to buy 3M stuff more then existing alternatives, even with the higher price, largely cause 3M stuff tends to work a lot better and my time not dealing with crappy stuff is worth the cost. That won't change with the increased cost of safer alternatives. If anything, I'll buy more 3M products.
A few years back, 3M entered a near-$1 billion settlement with Minnesota for PFAS groundwater contamination. I suspect they have been working on a replacement since 2010 or not long after (when the legal action first started up) and, given the two year timeline to phase them out, I'm thinking they've got the replacement already and just need to get it to market.
I feel like in 10 years we will be reading panicky articles asking why the important production of PFAS and other synthetic organofluorines was offshored to an increasingly belligerent China.
No my argument is that just like America decided that rare earths mining was gross and messy, therefore offshoring all of these strategic material production to their geopolitical foe, the same thing is liable to happen to other components and chemicals. Note that PFAS has a lot of military applications.
Out of sight, out of mind right? Until you really need it.
"No my argument is that just like America decided that rare earths mining was gross and messy"
By saying "just like that" you are implying the decision was sudden and without reason. That's false.
You also are basically saying "I'll be sorry" because the military needs them but are there alternatives and is it essential?
Finally you used "gross" and "messy" as a manipulation technique. Messy is also used to describe anything from clothes left on the floor to in toys left out. Similar with "gross". You are trying to lump pollution with other benign activities to imply it isn't important.
And china can put them on products and send them to the USA anyways and mis-label them because almost nothing that is imported is actually checked for toxic chemicals/paints/etc.
some will continue to buy the old stuff elsewhere.
some, however few and small, will choose to buy the new, more expensive, less convenient, less performant stuff for a variety of reasons, once it exists at all.
And as time goes on, pressures and variables change.
Nothing happens without starting somewhere, and the first step of ecery change that ever happened can always be characterized as impractical, ineffective, irrational. And yet, countless such changes have happened anyway despite those perfectly reasonable sounding arguments.
The market signal on that using PFAS is imposes serious liabilities on a company is crystal clear. Even a giant like 3M is in rough waters because it cannot bear the liabilities.
It is common that large public companies deinvest some part of their business that cause bad PR. They usually sell a part of their business to a smaller/more anonymous/non-public company that is prepared to take the liabilities. In this case there is no indication of a possible sale of the 3M plants and a complete closure is the most likely scenario.
A second aspect is that many 3m-customers will be forced to reevaluate the decision to use PFAS. A good example is the usage in firefighting foam. Any producer of firefighting-foam is now fully aware that selling foam which is guaranteed to be released into the environment is a major liability.
There are even proposals to ban end-products that contain PFAS at the EU-level. Lobbying is not fully transparent, but I suspect 3M was one of the last strongholds that lobbied against such regulation.
Today, in many emerging markets environment law is weak or the enforcement is absent today. However, we see that all emerging markets are catching-up. In 5 to 10 years PFAS-producers will face a similar regulatory risk in some emerging markets.
The last element is that the market-share of 3M was huge. It is unlikely that competitors in emerging markets can fill that gap in 3 years.
In the short term, we will see some PFAS-producing companies in emerging markets making record profits because of this decision. However, I think it is unlikely that growth in emerging markets will come even close to filling this gap.
Overheating teflon pans will kill any pet birds in the house. It's also not great for humans (but details have been suppressed by large corporate campaigns)
But try to find a pan without teflon?
impossible to determine (almost)
I remember finding that hexclad alledgedly doesn't use teflon...
until I found out they do ... and they put it on the OUTSIDE of the pan too. ugh.
I've been to events/cafeterias with made-to-order omelettes and they all use small nonstick frying pans. (not refuting that most kitchens use stainless/etc, just a data point)
I don't agree with your reasoning. Most bad things aren't driven by supply and demand. If you jail a rapist, you aren't creating incentive for someone else to commit more rapes.
Also, performing a dirty industrial process in a country with strong environmental and workplace safety regulations is better than moving that process to a country with no protections.
This is just not true.
For many of the products there are no quick and dirty replacements from China and even if they would field a product it’s not just a 1:1 replacement. Qualification is complicated.
Corp.'s make good money by engineering replacements. For established profits, revenue increases are only marginal improvements. If they can get governments to go a long with a mandate to replace something with an alternative, the profit increases are much greater. It's like a substitute for coming up with a new product. Not saying it's not beneficial, but I've seen this corporate grift too many times. They did this in the late 1980s with the need to replace CFC's with HCFC's to protect the hole in the ozone layer. Then they discovered HCFC emitted thousands of times more carbon. The cycle just keeps repeating.
Again, I'm not saying these aren't necessary, but there's little in the way of cost/benefit analysis. Harmful effects are in some sense inevitable, but they should be weighed relative to the benefits added.
Ideally, before mass producing alternatives, they "close the loop" on replacements life cycles. Otherwise we'll just be reading a new variant of this article in 20 years.
Corp.'s make good money by engineering replacements. For established profits, revenue increases are only marginal improvements. If they can get governments to go a long with a mandate to replace something with an alternative, the profit increases are much greater. It's like a substitute for coming up with a new product. Not saying it's not beneficial, but I've seen this corporate grift too many times. They did this in the late 1980s with the need to replace CFC's with HCFC's to protect the hole in the ozone layer. Then they discovered HCFC emitted thousands of times more carbon. The cycle just keeps repeating.
Again, I'm not saying these aren't necessary, but there's little in the way of cost/benefit analysis. Harmful effects are in some sense inevitable, but they should be weighed relative to the benefits added.
About a quarter of new pharmaceuticals are PFAS, and we can’t make modern chips, autos, or airplanes without them. Once politicians learn that the half life for “forever” chemicals varies by 7 orders of magnitude, we will have more nuance about the issue.
Huh, TIL. I was going to rebut this but I looked into it. I didn't realize simply the presence of a -CF3 group is enough to classify the whole molecule as a PFAS according to new definitions.
> More recently (2021) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) expanded the definition, stating that "PFASs are defined as fluorinated substances that contain at least one fully fluorinated methyl or methylene carbon atom (without any H/Cl/Br/I atom attached to it), i.e. with a few noted exceptions, any chemical with at least a perfluorinated methyl group (–CF3) or a perfluorinated methylene group (–CF2–) is a PFAS."[3][4]
That's a super popular moeity in medchem for whatever reason, so yeah, RIP all thing trifluoromethyl.
Difluromethylene can be degraded much more quickly as long as the molecule can be "unzipped" (needs a break point where nucleophilic attack can occur), so it's possible we may be able to sub in -CHF2 or -CH2F to "cap" molecules and render them less persistent.
I don't know what you're talking about. I'm like 95% sure we could choose to chemically break down PFEs instead of dumping them into rivers, it might double the cost of some plastic, there must be dozens or hundreds of ways to prevent it.
>Once politicians learn that the half life for “forever” chemicals varies by 7 orders of magnitude, we will have more nuance about the issue.
So long as they can use an issue to lead the line of lemmings into the polling place you will never see nuanced opinion from politicians on an issue.
Politicians in Texas know full well how rare and irrelevant late term abortions that aren't medically necessary are. Politicians in California know full well how rare and irrelevant murders by people wielding military style arms are. But they still spew falsehoods because that is what is politically useful.
I hope this means my dentist will stop giving me free samples of Oral-B dental floss that contains forever chemicals, as recently as last month, I wanted to say something about what kind of doctor suggests putting PFAS products in our mouths but I didn’t want to be a Wikipedia patient https://www.classaction.org/news/oral-b-glide-dental-floss-l...
> "We here distinguish between fluoropolymer substances, fluoropolymer products, and fluoropolymers in finished articles. A fluoropolymer substance such as PTFE, FEP, and PFA is a material of known chemical structure. A fluoropolymer product is the actual material produced and sold by a chemical manufacturer (e.g., Chemours, Solvay, Daikin, Asahi Glass, etc.), it comes in different grades (e.g., Teflon-granulate, Teflon-fine powder, etc.), and may contain impurities from the production process. These fluoropolymer products are sold to manufacturers of finished articles (e.g., PTFE tape, waterproof clothing with a PTFE membrane, PTFE-coated cookware, etc.) who incorporate the fluoropolymer products in their finished articles. The distinction is important, as there are many different processes of making fluoropolymer products..."
TLDR: The authors generally conclude consumer products made with fluoropolymers are going to leach PFAS & similar eventually via waste disposal, and suggest restricting use to closed-loop industrial processes (where fluoropolymer plastics are often used to contain highly corrosive substances in chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing processes).
We should really come up with a better less chemical fear based name than “forever chemicals”.
Even “forever contaminants” would be a major improvement.
Just being a chemical that hangs around isn’t a bad thing. By that definition water is a “forever chemical”. I am well aware this isn’t what’s meant by forever chemical but the naming should involve something implying the negativity other than the ignorant use of chemical as a negative.
“Forever chemicals“ have half-lives that range from a millisecond to 10,000 years, but this level of communication accuracy is expected from our media.
"Forever chemicals" is clearly a scary term devoid of context. Please help me ground it. Is this a health or environmental risk? Is it potential or realized? What's the nearest comparison?
Dec 20 (Reuters) - U.S. industrial conglomerate 3M Co (MMM.N) on Tuesday set a 2025 deadline to stop producing PFAS, the "forever chemicals" used in anything from cell phones to semiconductors that have been linked to cancers, heart problems and low birth weights.
Perfluoralkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) do not break down quickly and have in recent years been found in dangerous concentrations in drinking water, soils and foods.
Those words need context, otherwise this reads a lot like scaremongering. Dangerous as in close to an LD50? A minimum measured effect? Or in layman: how much worse/better are exposure to those concentrations than say time-equivalent exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke? Or first-hand.
>in drinking water, soils and foods.
Routes of introduction to people and environment are also important to understand to eliminate hazards while minimizing damage. Is the contamination a production 'sloppiness' issue? Resulting from correct or incorrect application of non-durable goods (e.g. lubricants, firefighting foam). A wear of durable goods issue (rubbers, PTFE, etc.)?
Forever chemicals, also known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), are a group of man-made chemicals that are used in a variety of products because of their ability to repel oil, water, and stains. They are called "forever chemicals" because they do not break down in the environment and can accumulate in the body over time.
There are a number of dangers associated with exposure to forever chemicals. Some of the potential health effects of PFAS include:
- Increased risk of cancer: Some studies have suggested that exposure to PFAS may increase the risk of certain types of cancer, including testicular, kidney, and pancreatic cancer.
- Harm to the immune system: PFAS have been shown to impair the immune system and interfere with the body's ability to produce antibodies.
- Developmental and reproductive problems: PFAS have been linked to developmental problems in infants and children, including low birth weight and reduced fertility in women.
- Thyroid hormone disruption: PFAS have been shown to disrupt the normal functioning of the thyroid gland, which can lead to problems with metabolism and energy levels.
- Other health effects: Other potential health effects of PFAS exposure include liver damage, high cholesterol, and decreased effectiveness of vaccines.
It is important to note that the extent of the health risks associated with PFAS exposure is still being studied, and more research is needed to understand the full range of potential effects on human health.
My personal prediction is that this will be like leaded gasoline all over again, but much much worse. We're already seeing these chemicals in drinking water all over the globel, in concentrations above limits deemed "safe".
Even very very small amounts of these pose a risk to our health. And because they never break down, they keep building up in the environment. They are everywhere, in your drinking water, in the soil where you plant your vegetables, …
Yep, it’s water plus various non-polymer perfluoro compounds.
I get why fluoropolymers are extremely useful (and probably fairly safe for their end users). I get why PFCs are useful in industrial processes. But why on Earth is it acceptable to intentionally use PFCs as the primary ingredients in a spray bottle intended to be used near people’s faces?
There are nine thousand known PFAS. They are essential to many products and processes. Many don't have a clear alternative. Other countries will continue to produce them. But 3M is going to ban them all without any discernment. Am I missing something?
Are you overlooking the fact that PFAS made the rain water of the entire planet unfit for consumption§?! In my book that is several orders of magnitudes more important than "many products and processes".
--
§ PFAS: Rainwater contains unsafe levels of 'forever chemicals'
A few years back, 3M entered a near-$1 billion settlement with Minnesota for PFAS groundwater contamination. I suspect they have been working on a replacement since 2010 or not long after (when the legal action first started up) and, given the two year timeline to phase them out, I'm thinking they've got the replacement already and just need to get it to market.
No, thats it. What should be the next logical step for any government that actually values lives and health of its population is to gradually/immediately ban products containing them too. If china or india want to drown (and kill) themselves in pfas we unfortunately can't stop them but we should certainly not support it.
I hope 3M will be fined to hell (possible) and responsible managers will rot in jail (unprobable as always). I mean that's sole role of any manager - being responsible for all the crap happening under their command, good or bad. 'I didn't know' is not an excuse when we know 3M knew damn too well and dumped superbad waste anyway.
Can you one product or process where it’s indispensable?
I’m not being argumentative, just curious, as I’m not a chemist. I know it’s already being replaced in ski waxes and I’m pretty sure they have alternatives for firefighting foams?
In a typical consumer home, there are very few, if any, uses where fluoropolymers are indispensable.
On the other hand, for most kinds of chemical manufacturing and of chemical analyses fluoropolymers are truly indispensable.
Before the invention of the fluoropolymers, some of the chemical reactions that are done now in vessels made of fluoropolymers could not be done at all, while the others were done in platinum vessels. Even the platinum was slowly dissolved, so the cost of the equipment was huge and such chemical reactions could not be used in mass manufacturing.
Even the simplest transistor or integrated circuit cannot be made without fluoropolymers. Without them there cannot be any semiconductor industry.
Besides the containment of corrosive substances, other applications for which there are no good alternatives to fluoropolymers are in vacuum equipment (also indispensable for the semiconductor industry) and in insulators with low dielectric constant and with low losses at high frequencies.
None of the industrial uses of fluoropolymers can cause significant pollution. However using them in things like kitchenware, or worse, in packaging, makes no sense.
> None of the industrial uses of fluoropolymers can cause significant pollution. However using them in things like kitchenware, or worse, in packaging, makes no sense.
I presume it is possible for these industrial uses to cause significant pollution, but you mean that it is not difficult to prevent pollution from these processes because they happen in controlled locations?
Contrasting that against PFAS in kitchenware, packaging, or rain-coats where pollution is incredibly difficult to prevent because low-level leakage occurs everywhere?
I believe a lot of PFAS contamination comes from the production process itself. Especially looking at the 3M plant in Belgium. To what degree can the production process be made contamination free?
> I presume it is possible for these industrial uses to cause significant pollution, but you mean that it is not difficult to prevent pollution from these processes because they happen in controlled locations?
Fluoropolymers don't really leach in significant quantities on commercial timescales. That would sort of defeat their purpose of being inert. So there is a huge difference between "these teflon o-rings in this chemical plant leach 0.1 ppb of small molecule PFAS per day" and "millions of teflon pans go into the landfill each year". And further still to "we produce railcars worth of volatile fluoropolymer monomers for producing teflon and viton".
> I believe a lot of PFAS contamination comes from the production process itself.
This exactly. Low-molecular-weight PFAS are much more mobile than high weight, thus more polluting. Once "bound" in a polymer, the leaching is minimal. The problem is the production process, where you have primarily the small molecules, which inevitably get into the environment.
In other words: Competition is shrinking our margins on these, liability exposure is increasing, market growth is forecast to stagnate as customers move to alternatives, and the PR is bad. Good time to make a strategic withdrawal and spin it as environmental stewardship. (Not to say that wasn't a legit factor).
Could such chemicals be subjected to a special type of regulation where they can still be made, but only for very specialised uses that seem worth the risk somehow? Is there a precedent for that?
Why are they waiting until 2025? "We know this stuff is bad, but just give us a couple more years to realize a full ROI before we stop" vs "Holy crap this stuff is bad, we're pulling the plug now"
I mean, it's not a ship at sea running at flank speed where the ship keeps moving once power has been cut. Just stop making them. Now.
It kinda is. Not a literal ship, of course, but industry still has immense momentum behind it. If you catch your prop on a rock, the rest of your ship is going to strain to absorb the impact.
According to the article, PFAS are used in semiconductor manufacturing process. These are insanely sensitive processes, and replacements will need to be found and qualified. That takes time. (Note: I'd hope they've seen the writing on the wall and have already started this process.)
It’s probably good to get away from these things for single use consumer items, etc, but I fear we’re undermining our manufacturing base, chasing it away overseas. I also wonder if how bad this stuff is is exaggerated (in part because we don’t KNOW how bad it is). Oh well.
Why is this downvoted? Literally the next breath of air you breathe will be contaminated with PFAs. Every fetus will have measurable PFA in its bloodstream before it's even born.
I understood leach also cannot be transformed when I reaches the environment, and that water treatment plants --- when effective --- are in constant trouble because of it. Can someone clarify?
"Legal pressure over the damage caused by PFAS has increased. Last month, 3M and DuPont de Nemours Inc (DD.N) were among several companies sued by California's attorney general to recover clean-up costs." This sentence very clearly explains the main problem with late-stage capitalism. It externalizes real costs to humanity unless governments enforce dollar costs for the societal harms of corporate actions. Neither of these companies would've done anything about this issue on their own.
Forever chemicals is an informal term that collectively refers to the class of synthetic chemicals known as perfluoroalkyl substances and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.
I'm calling it, if you want GoreTex or similar clothing, get it now, in five years it will start to get banned, and in 10 years you won't find it anywhere.
Tbh unless you seriously need your duds to be totally closed breathable and waterproof, silpoly with pit zips etc is a cheaper / more eco alternative that is lighter / stronger and does the same job in most scenarios.
https://archive.ph/s50uH