I guess the compounds in landfill effluent can be coming from things manufactured overseas, but collecting and destroying them is a good way to avoid releasing them into the environment or having to deal with them later.
But this is wasting electricity and other resources for a somewhat pointless cause as PFAS production will outpace this. To me, that's a net negative to the environment without any real gain?
As long as spending electricity and other resources on PFAS destruction doesn't inadvertently cause even more PFAS production than it prevents, then this concept seems to make sense at some level. That doesn't mean it's ideal, but we're going to need this anyways even if PFAS winds up being fully phased out.
> But this is wasting electricity and other resources for a somewhat pointless cause as PFAS production will outpace this. To me, that's a net negative to the environment without any real gain?
Insufficient != pointless. What if we made a bunch more of these and offset the electrical consumption by banning utterly useless and wasteful cryptocurrencies? That sounds like an environmental win/win.
There are other creatures that live in/on/near the water or require water for survival, and they don't have filters. Vegetables grown with contaminated water don't have filters either. There are numerous ways you can ingest that contaminated water besides drinking it directly.
You are part of an ecosystem, and you need that ecosystem to function in order to stay alive. This applies to all humans, not just you.
>well, if the filters are 100% effective, then my water is clean
The problem is, we started putting pfas in drink straws because the old normal plastic (PET?) Straws got banned in Europe. The new paper ones have to be coated in pfas to stop them from soaking.
Of course banning straws would work too but they are extremely useful especially if you have sensitive teeth.
It's always seemed unfortunate that they're going after high-volume but mostly inert and harmless plastics like PE/PP/PET in bans, causing them to be replaced by alternative materials which need to be augmented with much worse substances.
What was wrong with the old method of using waxed paper? Non-toxic and waterproof. They did of course eventually go soggy at the ends but it's somewhat incredible that we go for known toxic coatings instead of previously-used non-toxic alternatives.
Probably, but even if we do that it's still good to have technology to deal with the PFAS already out there.
Apparently 3M has announced that they're going to stop making PFAS by the end of 2025. So, that's progress I guess even if it's happening a lot slower than it probably should.
That actually sounds pretty fast. Not to be a downer or anything, but I have a nagging feeling that maybe they will stop making PFAS but the replacement will be a very similar, substitute compound that may or may not have the same effects. We just don’t know because it hasn’t been studied. In other words, a very similar situation to the BPA-free reusable water bottles, which sound nice, but might still have a harmful substitute.
This already happened with C8 -> C6 which bioaccumulates in water rather than in the physical form. Fundamentally, making something immune to water requires also making it immune to the normal way that things break down in the environment. So the performance qualities are really the thing we may need to phase out, but there are applications (e.g. in surgery instruments) that are more or less essential.
