I live in a city that was a hot zone for this type of contamination in the drinking water due to industrial waste from leather processing buried in the 60’s (shoe scraps treated with scotchgard.) We now have GAC filtering at the municipal supply level that is quite effective and not that expensive. The large beds of carbon last quite a while if I recall correctly. Despite regular testing, everyone I know RO filters their water regardless. For me, it’s because I have no idea what new previously “unknown” contamination will be next discovered, and would rather get out as much as is reasonable.
When the information began to surface I found it interesting the letters on public record going back to the 60’s with people warning that allowing this kind of dumping was a bad idea. Of course being the primary employer to the entire city, the economics won at the time. Since, the cost of cleanup and lawsuits to that company have been massive.
RO is cheap enough for middle class or above (order of magnitude is ~ what you might spend on uniforms and excursions for a kid in a state primary school). Assuming a self install. So it is a good option if you can afford it. Maybe RO becoming part of the standard set of things you buy (washing machine, vacuum cleaner etc.) is the way. You have to keep up to date with filter changes though.
RO typically needs a post filter. Hopefully that doesn’t add any bad chemicals. But you need it as pure water is desperate to bind, so you can either bind it to something you choose, or bind it to whatever pipe work / tanks are beyond the filter. Also you might want a higher ph.
Maybe some disruption to make a nice looking, compact and cheap and zero install RO unit would be good and some subsidy for people without the means to buy one who live in risk areas. Plus subsidy for maintenance.
If the design is like a printer where you pull out and push in new cartridges and have warning lights it will make maintenance easy.
A recent study (made it to HN) used a novel sensor to count microplastics in bottled water. The numbers were 10x higher than expected, but the real surprise was that 50% were shed from the plant filtration system.
I’m guessing RO is similarly bad (the membrane is made from one of the plastics in question).
I have been buying 5gal water jugs from a local Seattle company until recently, with the articles on all the microplastics shedding from the bottles into the water inside.
I did buy no-plastics Aarke glass/steel carbon filter pitcher for my drinking water.
It's hard to find water filtration without plastic involved, hopefully
other options will come to the market, but their offering is pretty good so far.
>It's hard to find water filtration without plastic involved, hopefully other options will come to the market, but their offering is pretty good so far.
What about distillation as a filtration method?
Are the micro/nano plastics filtered by distillation?
Interesting what method of filtration the chip factories use, as they need 100% pure water for the cpu making process.
Its not that interesting. Distillation works but its not healthy to consume. You could distill the water without plastics involved but then you need to add back minerals before drinking.
Debunked urban legend. Likely retcon from various mythology involving the chemistry lab's "deionized water" bottle which every chemistry teacher has to make up convincing reasons for the class not to drink from.
Maybe my thinking has been wrong. I always thought you would need to supplement for some of the minerals you might be getting from the water. I could be totally wrong here then, will need to do more reading.
Any water you drink is already very much hypotonic relative to your bodily fluids. Your minerals mostly come from your food, not your water.
I’m no expert on biology (I’m a chemist), but I drank quite a bit of DI water in grad school because the tap water was so gross.
Also, heavy water (D2O) tastes sweet. And it also won’t kill you when consumed, contrary to urban legend (at least not in quantities you can reasonably afford).
Deuterium oxide will kill you only after deuterium replaces a significant portion of all your body's hydrogen atoms, like maybe 50+%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyK6kPi8k78
Yes, and as another poster pointed out my thinking that the importance of those minerals might be incorrect. I always thought you needed to supplement on top of distilled water.
For RO, a lot of the systems include a mineral cartridge.
It’s for taste. Distilled water tastes like crap. I don’t know the science behind it, but “good” water (eg coming from hetch hetchy) tastes amazing in comparison.
Debunked urban legend. Likely retcon from various mythology involving the chemistry lab's "deionized water" bottle which every chemistry teacher has to make up convincing reasons for the class not to drink from.
Exercising in hot weather requires drinking electrolyte water to avoid hyponatremia. Drinking large amounts of soft or distilled water (around 6 liters) can lead to death.
Water is hardly the worst of it. Most people I know microwave food in plastic on a regular basis, and have been doing so for decades.
If you wonder about the crazy rise in colon cancer, I'd say doing that plus keeping a cellphone next to your ass 16 hours a day would definitely be more than enough in an animal model.
Cell phones use a variety of wavelengths to communicate, topping out in the gigahertz range for things like Wifi. It's impossible for light in that range cannot to cause cancer. It's literally less possible for it to cause cancer than visible light. (Which is in the terahertz range)
I think you’re underestimating the myriad biological pathways which can all contribute to cancer, and also the unusual chemistry that can be induced when you tickle molecules at the right vibrational modes. There’s a whole body of literature describing so-called “microwave chemistry”, and these methods can greatly accelerate certain reactions – far more than simple heating with the same amount of energy can do.
With that said, I still put my cellphone in the front pocket every day, for most of the day.
IDK about the cell phone radiation but given the trickle/torrent of bad indicators about our biology and plastic, my rule is no plastic near food, at least at home where I can control it. Definitely no freezing, heating, or microwaving plastic near food. Feels like one of the many accepted facets of space-age modern life that is too convenient to examine closely for most people, and I think it retrospect it will be viewed somewhat as we view lead in paint and fuel, asbestos in buildings, smoking in public, etc.
One thing I am sad about where I'm exposed to a lot of plastic but have little choice is that I wear a dental guard at night. This probably more than makes up for all the plastic food contamination I avoid in other ways. But after shattering three teeth from grinding in my sleep (waking up to a loud crack and an exposed nerve), I've decided it's the lesser of two evils.
Funny you say that because I have an appointment with my orthodontist this week to discuss whether or not I can have a permanent retainer so I can stop wearing the plastic one they gave me. If the answer is no, I’ll just forgo the retainer and deal with crooked teeth. I don’t want to sleep with plastic in my mouth every night.
We use a distiller now that is all stainless into a glass carafe. It has a small paper/charcoal filter that sits in a porcelain housing just before it drips. What is left over is gross. Not what it looks like, that is just minerals. But it smells like things I shouldn't be smelling. I'd like to build a glass only solar still to save all that power, and to avoid the high temps that I suspect are causing some reactions that release VOCs. Not all of which might be getting caught by the charcoal.
It's become impossible to find a coffee maker where water doesn't come into contact with plastic. There used to be a pretty decent one: Gourmia GCM4900. It had some subtle design flaws, and only lasted 5 years. (If I can buy another one, I probably can somewhat mitigate that and make it last longer)
There's a silicon gasket, and they offer a stainless steel plunger upgrade. There is some plastic in the portafilter that coffee will touch (unless you run in bottomless mode).
The bigger problem with most espresso makers (but not the model I linked) is that they use brass for the heating block / boiler and that leaches lead into the water.
This matters less in coffee shops (where they use up the water in the boiler in a few hours or maybe a day), but a lot more at home (where you might only refill the boiler once a week or even once a month).
What do you use for freezing food if not plastic containers? Heating and microwaving, okay, I can work around the plastic containers/plates, but the freezer I have no idea how I'd do that. Especially that the freezer's casing is still plastic
Glass containers work fine and come in the same shapes as plastic containers do. They are heavier and take a little more space due to being thicker, but it's a small difference.
They do have plastic lids most often, but the lid doesn't have to touch food.
Yup, the IKEA one’s are more than good enough. And they’re borosilicate so you can even use them in the oven.
The plastic issue is also why I think people doing sous-vide are insane. You’re vacuum sealing meat into plastic and then giving it a nice long leeching in hot water. Sometimes with acidic foodstuffs!
However RO is not water efficient, in the sense that only a fraction of water run over the RO membrane system is filtered, and otherwise inbound water goes on into the drain. You can hear this happening, and it's documented by GE, for example, as how the systems work. That makes me wonder if there are other systems with the characteristic that a higher % of ingested water ends up filtered as well as RO can.
A permeate pump can typically reduce water waste in reverse osmosis systems by up to 80%. In general, permeate pumps can achieve a waste water reduction of around 50% to 80%. This means that for every gallon of purified water produced, only around 20% to 50% is wasted as reject water. This is achieved by utilizing the energy from the brine flow to enhance the pressure applied to the feed water, leading to increased permeate production and reduced reject water volume. Typically, these pumps range from $50 to $200 and they do not use electricity.
The elevated pressure allows for more effective filtration and higher water recovery rates. By boosting the pressure, permeate pumps facilitate a greater volume of water passing through the semi-permeable membrane, resulting in increased production of purified water (permeate) and reduced reject water (brine). The heightened pressure helps overcome osmotic pressure and allows for a more thorough extraction of purified water from the feed stream.
The domestic RO systems put pressure on the clean water output and don't have recovery systems for brine pressure? What? My only experience with RO systems are on sailboats, where a brine pressure recovery system is the only way to get the power down, and the water trickles into the tank under low pressure from where it is pumped out.
The linked system above just sends the unfiltered tap water down the drain. I have had two iterations of the GE system and it says so in the manual, for instance. I am not sure about other brands and their systems.
They don't boost the feed pressure, just isolate the output permeate line from the back pressure of the storage tank. Instead of the membrane output pushing against the increasing pressure of tank as it fills (decreasing output) it produces into a void in pump body which the pump periodically pushes into the tank from spring mechanism wound by the output waste water.
They work pretty well to reduce waste but do add complexity to what is already a somewhat complicated device under the sink. They will also create bad TDS creep if used without an auto-shutoff valve installed in the RO.
It seems like it would be mostly irrelevant that it’s not efficient?
What percentage of residential water goes to drinking water? I think of all water use in aggregate, in many places it’s already 90% is agriculture and 10% residential. And of residential you probably waste more water in a single toilet flush than you drink in an entire day.
Premiere H2O has a system that dumped the water into the hot water line, similar to a hot water loop, but in reverse. There’s a lot of caveats with that arrangement (doesn’t really work with a tankless water heater, for example).
When you say brine is that in seawater desalination RO or are you using that to include non-seawater RO reject water?
You could definitely use it as gray water but if you are filtering for contaminants, that water would have a higher concentration and if you were pushing it out as gray water, would those areas of the yard have higher levels potentially of contaminants?
Yeah my dad has an RO system at their house but it goes to a special tap next to the main one that is used only for drinking water, due to the waste associated. Maybe it isn’t needed for hand washing, showers, etc as long as there are good standards at the water distribution facility.
Thats how I use it. In theory the waste could be used for irrigation or mixed into shower water but that requires more plumbing to deal with an external cost (in areas where water is limited).
Well, if you live somewhere with a municipal water supply, the water just gets recycled anyway. I suppose if you’re on septic it’s still going right back into the ground it came from.
Drinking water is probably such a small percent of overall water use that wasting even a multiple of it doesn’t amount to much anyway.
So filter away! I’ll worry about my r/o waste when people stop diverting rivers to grow almonds in the desert and not a second before.
A big issue is returning it to the ground doesn't mean it reenters the aquafer you might be drawing from if you're on a well system. It happens all over the place and especially in California, the aquafers aren't replenished well by ground water (and the extreme pumping causes the aquafer to compress permanently losing water capacity).
But again that’s entirely because of agricultural and industrial use. There’s plenty of water for homes, there’s not plenty of water for homes and mass farming in a desert.
This is the exact line of thought the people who use the water want to encourage. They want you to worry about your water use so you don’t worry about theirs.
I think the point is that we should not as a general rule recommend people do RO for their entire house. Toilets, showers, and washing machines don’t need RO water and if a lot of people did a whole home RO system we would start to see waste add up.
We live in a water supply area with water one order of magnitude harder than anywhere else in our county.
I'm putting an RO unit in our kitchen to serve drinking and dishwasher needs. Our dishwasher needs descaling after a couple of months of normal use. Other uses (shower, toilets) aren't impacted by our super-hard water, so no RO for the whole house, mainly because of the water waste you note.
Oh. Sure. That will always be so cumbersome we don't have to worry about it. That would be a huge RO system. They don't have a lot of throughput so you'd need a big storage tank or a very large set of filters and a pump I'd think. I'm not at all concerned whole home RO will every be common.
Maybe RO becoming part of the standard set of things you buy (washing machine, vacuum cleaner etc.) is the way.
It just seems really sad that society is moving away from "let's fix it for everyone" toward just giving up and saying "the only solution is everyone for themselves." Like, surely it would be much more efficient and cost-effective to improve water filtration at the municipal level rather than expecting everyone to buy and maintain their own individual filtration systems....
It might be more efficient (and effective) for the filtering to happen closest to where the water is drank. If it happens at the treatment plant, then you end up filtering lots of water that is used to water lawns, shower, etc. Only a small percentage is used for drinking.
Agree, you also need chlorine in the water to treat the distribution system of pipes to your home. So you need to filter chlorine at point of use anyways.
I think this stems from the fact that the government takes years to do anything and mostly caters to special interests. If we could get them to actually take action on things then this kind of thing wouldn't be necessary but I feel like, more often than not, we're all left waiting on them to decide how to best make sure their industry/corporate friends aren't harmed before they decide to do what's best for the public.
Like the article says, Joe Biden is doing something about this, catering to all Americans. It's hard for me to see how you're offering a negative spin in light of this story. If you like this, vote in more people with the similar policies. Call your reps and potential reps and tell them you like this and you want to see more of this. Donate to their campaigns if you have the cash. This is how you give positive feedback. Don't vote for people who run on policies about deregulation.
This is the kind of annoying "more cynical than thou" comment which sounds insightful and meant to grasp at upvotes, but is really a self-fulfilling defeatist prophecy that leads us to a place nobody wants to be. We can and should expect better, but we also have to work for it instead of shrugging and giving up.
This is the kinf of annoying "holier than thou" comment which sounds insightful, but which is utterly divorced from the reality of our crumbling and dysfunctional government.
Just look at how Flint, MI was handled. It took years of nationwide outrage for the government to even admit that there was a problem.
Facts are that the US government is (now) intentionally and explicitly designed to remove all power from the people and give it to lobbyists and special interest groups. All levels of government explicitly ignore majority decisions and do whatever the fuck they want. Even votes barely matter when districts are gerrymandered so hard that all elections are predetermined. When that's not enough, we just go straight for bald faced voter suppression.
Things are not sunshine and roses. The US government is actively working against you.
Yes. If other readers are passionate about this, too, take note that a lot of issues like this, including water quality, are a policy choice. We should remember the politicians who are working to improve infrastructure that benefits us (in this case Joe Biden's administration) in the voting booth. We should not reward politicians who would have us fend for ourselves vs entities that already have every advantage.
Comparing to those things actually makes it sound quite expensive while also being a very vague amount. The point would be a lot better if it had a number.
Check out Waterdrop. The cartridges do just pop out and in, and it’s not zero install but it is very easy. If you can install a faucet you can install that.
I got over 99% reduction according to a cheap TDS meter at my condo in Phoenix with the 2 filter one. I can replace cartridges in seconds. I love that thing.
Zero install would probably suck as you’d have to fill tanks frequently (it rejects a good amount of water) and it would take up counter space but they do make em.
Honestly in most places you can buy the stuff for 25 cents a gallon from a machine, which is what I would do if I did not feel like installing
the unit I have has no storage tank. The water comes out a tube that needs to fill something. We have a regular daily pitcher that gets filled several times through the day. I also fill up larger storage emergency water camping tanks. I guess those are made out of some kind of plastic.
I heard some RO filters could pass microplastics. I think it would be cool to see if any of that pics up in a microscope. What size particles are people zeroing in on exactly?
Zero install to me means “a renter can use it”. It could hijack your faucet outlet with a valve but allow your faucet to work anyway. This would require usually no tools or at worse a screwdriver to tighten a clip.
Well, the only real change that’s not easily reversible one might make when installing most of these units is if you don’t already have a hole to mount the faucet in. A renter definitely shouldn’t drill a hole in a countertop and most r/o units would require one. Any house built in the last few decades would probably have a built in dish soap dispenser you could pop out, but if not, no luck.
Other than that just basic hand tools are involved. I would have no problem installing one in a rental but I’m also comfortable with plumbing. It’s definitely a job that seems a lot more intimidating than it is.
Not really sure why the informative sibling reply to my question is dead (and thus can't be replied to), but I wonder if that hole is what the air switch for my garbage disposal is mounted in...
RO doesn't really solve for filtering the water naturally inside of crops or meat. If you have a huge increase in groundwater pollution in a country, if your food supply isn't also in a closed system where only filtered water comes in, then you've only reduced your contaminant consumption not eliminated it.
I feel like safe, clean water is the job of the municipal system that we pay so much for. Even the poors should have the same cleanliness as the middle class, but that's rather beside the point.
> For me, it’s because I have no idea what new previously “unknown” contamination will be next discovered, and would rather get out as much as is reasonable.
This really resonates with where my thinking has gone. While I always try to be guided by science, my default these days is much closer to "assume it isn't safe" than "assume it is". I've got multiple chronic medical conditions that me both more susceptible to getting to sick, and more likely to have complications/have a slow recovery if I do. So for instance, I keep (medical grade) gloves at home and wear them when using any sort of cleaning chemicals. My skin is fragile anyway, and almost any sort of solvent (that isn't water) is at least somewhat bad for you, either short or long term.
Not surprsing. I'll also mask (N95, yeah something with a carbon filter would be even better) for the heavy stuff and always go fragrance-free if possible, which is something the article mentions.
There are smog masks from Asia where it's almost needed to be outside in many major metro areas; they use a cloth carrier with a laminated inlay of N95-like particle and activated carbon VOC filtering.
“RO” in this context, for anyone who doesn’t care about being known in a relatively obscure Internet forum as someone that knows water filtration jargon, presumably stands for “Reverse Osmosis”
I switched to a home water still, which I greatly prefer. No risk of additional microplastics from plastic filters.
The home distilled water tastes so good, much better than store bought that often sits in plastic jugs for weeks.
I do not add any additional minerals, the amount of magnesium, iron, and sodium in drinking water is only like ~5-10% of a person's daily requirement, and I get plenty of those from vegetables.
Wow, 4 ppt is much more aggressive than the previous limit.
My well water was contaminated by Wolverine/3M to 90 ppt, we got a settlement because it was greater than 70 ppt. They installed GAC filters in my home to limit the contamination to 10 ppt. Here are the old limits:
The Gelman plume near Ann Arbor had wells way over that limit and this is probably going to affect the city water supply since the plume is getting close to the Huron River where Ann Arbor draws water from. That's part of why I moved towards Detroit when I bought instead of west of town. Now I should get my water tested in Oakland County, since I'm still on a well and who knows what's going on this close to I-696. Do you know if there's testing resources?
If you don’t want ti deal with doing the testing yourself, the EPA has a list of certified labs that can test your water for you. If you follow the link, you’ll find Michigan’s cert program and a list of contact info for those labs.
I’ve never done it myself, so I don’t have a sense of how expensive it would be.
That EPA site more than obtuse. It's impossible to find a company that has a service that will mail you a container, have you add the water to it, then send it back to them to have them test it.
The closest I found was: https://www.meritlabs.com/sample-bottle-order but there are not even prices and it appears that you have to be more or less an industry expert to even fill out the order form.
Someone should make a startup like 23andMe but for water. Lots of us would pay $500 to have water accurately tested. Especially if the data could be aggregated and made pubic.
https://gosimplelab.com/ZM7S1O
is my report. I found their UI/UX quite good, and very comparable to a 23andMe experience. Pleasantly surprised to say there were zero attempts at ongoing subscription upsells, reengagement, virality etc.
Since my collection was based on a plastic bottle, I doubt microplastics would be part of the report. However the same lab offers other tests with different collection containers and different assays.
since the back end testing and reporting is done through gosimplelab you might wish to look at their offerings more directly
https://gosimplelab.com/solutions/pfas
Doesnt seem to have pfas in any of the standard city water test batteries. I'd also like to see microplastics and medicines (hormones, antibiotics etc) in a test.
I think PFAS is actually hard to test for because you'd have to remove any added fluoride salts etc, and then use spectrometry. And microplastics is expensive to test for because it requires human evaluation through a microscope
Maybe get a home still. It's basically just a big coffee pot that boils the water into a carafe. It takes about 3 hours to do gallon. Since it's all metal and glass there's no plastics in the output, unlike filters that often have a small plastic filter for the smallest particles that can end up introducing plastic in the output water.
I feel comfortable getting all my calcium, magnesium, and iron through my daily amount of vegetables. I don't think I'm lacking in any of those that the trace amounts added to drinking water will help me.
"Distillation removes all minerals from water. This results in demineralised water, which has not been proven to be healthier than drinking water. The World Health Organization investigated the health effects of demineralised water in 1982, and its experiments in humans found that demineralised water increased diuresis and the elimination of electrolytes, with decreased serum potassium concentration.[citation needed] Magnesium, calcium, and other nutrients in water can help to protect against nutritional deficiency. Recommendations for magnesium have been put at a minimum of 10 mg/L with 20–30 mg/L optimum; for calcium a 20 mg/L minimum and a 40–80 mg/L optimum, and a total water hardness (adding magnesium and calcium) of 2–4 mmol/L. At water hardness above 5 mmol/L, higher incidence of gallstones, kidney stones, urinary stones, arthrosis, and arthropathies have been observed.[citation needed] For fluoride the concentration recommended for dental health is 0.5–1.0 mg/L, with a maximum guideline value of 1.5 mg/L to avoid dental fluorosis.[17]"
I have gotten used to the taste of my Zerowater filter and so I got worried when I saw your comment. Maybe its better to drink the clean water and supplement with electrolytes and vitamins/minerals. That way you control all the parameters vs leaving it up to chance.
No need to panic. I also use a Zerowater filter. I'd be worried about drinking distilled water after exercising or in high heat because it can lead to hyponatremia -- low blood sodium levels (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise-associated_hyponatrem...). Because your body is sweating, you're losing a lot of salt that your body needs. Drinking distilled water will pull even more solute out of those cells as the solute chases water (i.e. the cells are hypertonic) until its in steady state, but of course it needs to replenish what has been
However, during normal daily activity and by eating, you're supplementing your body with enough salt (and other solutes) to compensate for what isn't in your distilled water.
Now it's a totally different question whether we're getting PFAs out of our water with the Zerowater filters. That should rightfully incite some panic.
I am an avid athlete and spend a lot of time sweating outdoors. I already have to supplement regular tap water with additional sodium and potassium, so it's no change for me to supplement my distilled water with slightly more. An earlier comment I said I don't add anything, which is usually true, but I do add those minerals when I'm bringing water for exercise.
I went with a still because I wanted to be sure it's "just water". I feel like even if it did filter out the microplastics there's some other things it won't, so the simplest thing was just to ensure it's only water. No lead, no plastics, no plastic filters, no mercury, etc.
>Now it's a totally different question whether we're getting PFAs out of our water with the Zerowater filters. That should rightfully incite some panic.
They recently sent me an email claiming that they remove 95% of PFOA and PFOS
I would be worried only if on some obscure long term diet of minimal food and excessive amounts of such water. Imagine how much stuff you are getting with all your regular meals into your stomach, it mixes immediately all up and makes that rather pure water much less pure.
Can you share your preferred tools for boiling the water? Seems simple enough but at this point I'm very skeptical of online claims, so always prefer something the HN crowd has examined in detail.
I'm in the process of getting rid of my beloved goerge foreman out out concern of the mon sticky surface as well...
I just fill it like a coffee maker at night and run it while I'm asleep. Fresh water in the morning, then I'll fill it again after breakfast and run it during the day.
It takes way more heat to change liquid water to a gas than to bring liquid water from 0 °C to 100 °C.
> the molecules in liquid water are held together by relatively strong hydrogen bonds, and its enthalpy of vaporization, 40.65 kJ/mol, is more than five times the energy required to heat the same quantity of water from 0 °C to 100 °C
I'm aware of that, but I didn't realize "boil out" (turning all to stream) means something different from "boil" (to just heat to reach boil point or rolling boil).
Beyond testing, I would recommend installing a reverse osmosis filter for your drinking water. I install RO filters for all my drinking water regardless if I am in the Bay Area (The Bay Area can have some pretty freaky hot zones of contamination), well, city water, other parts of the country.
Where in the Bay Area have you seen contamination?
Lots of cities in Alameda, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties get their water from San Francisco Public Utilities, which owns large water rights both in the Bay Area and large watersheds in the Sierra Nevadas such as Hetch Hetchy.
SFPUC water is so clean it is not legally required to be filtered though it does go through ozone treatment to eliminate microbes. Much of the Hetch Hechy watershed, especially the upper Tuolumne, is bare granite so the water doesn't even pick up sediment or surface contaminates. SFPUC enforced removal of all lead water lines in the 1980s so there shouldn't be that risk (which was a real one given some buildings date from the 1800s in SF).
In short if you live in SF or one of the cities that buys their water from SF you shouldn't need reverse osmosis or any other filtering.
Right, the source of the water is clean but the destinations are not. The Bay Area is dotted with a large number of super fund sites due to the historical chemical, semiconductor/circuit board industry. Even a larger number of sites that are not deemed superfund but are similar. All these electronic companies were more or less dumping their various solvents and de-greasers into the ground. Impacting both ground water and soil. Most of those chemicals penetrate both water pipes and in vapor form come up through the slab of the homes/offices built on top.
Often as these business shutdown they built offices and homes on top of the property, for the ones that happened in the 70s there was no remediation until much later. For the ones that happened in the 90s-00s there was a level of remediation but I am still not trustworthy of it 1) lasting and 2) the developers doing the best work.
So its not a "in short" story unless you are completely ignoring the large amounts of trichloroethylene contamination that is in still so much of the ground soil in the bay area. Sure if you live inside of SF proper you are probably fine in most of the residential areas as there was no manufacturing but areas like Bayview can be just as bad and you have the radioactive contamination on top of chemical. If you live anywhere in the south bay or east bay, you probably should at the very least get an idea of what was built near your office/home. Maybe test your water or just throw an RO on it. So many of these companies were dumping trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene in the south/east bay and we just built homes on top of them. They are indeed generally localized hot spots but when I realized how many were near me it opened my eyes. I remember years ago this was an issue at one of the google campus offices because it too had significant ground contamination.
I cannot find the map now but there are even a larger number of DTSC cleanup projects from the bay area. Kind of surprising someone would ask where is the contamination when it literally is dotting the whole bay area.
> Often as these business shutdown they built offices and homes on top of the property, for the ones that happened in the 70s there was no remediation until much later. For the ones that happened in the 90s-00s there was a level of remediation but I am still not trustworthy of it 1) lasting and 2) the developers doing the best work.
There was a investigative story some time back, about somebody that had bought a residence on one of those superfund sites.
It wasn't after his (or her? I don't remember) family started getting sick, and after investigation that he discovered the housing project was built on a superfund site. And even after paying for air measurements out-of-pocket, and with results off-the-chart, the promoter and the town were all saying everything was fine, with nothing to see. And I believe they were also trying to sue him for libel, as you normally do...
Concerns yes but the better of two evils. I have not tested this consistently but I have leaned towards rather having the plastic contaminants from the RO system than whatever was upstream of the RO. It might be the wrong choice but after living the Bay Area I became too aware of how easy it is for contaminated water to show up from local hot spots.
Edit: What I would add is I often ponder how much additional nanoplastics are getting added compared to what is being removed. I know some of the test suggest RO is adding more but I am not sure if it accounts for the complete life cycle in a bottling plant. For the near term I have just settled that nanoplastics are the lesser evil to me than PFAS and other chemicals within the water. It is scare mongering but I look at how that town in Oregon I believe had has wide spread PFAS contamination in ground water from the airport fire foam.
I'm not too worried. They were looking at bottled water. My home system isn't the same one they were testing. It's similar, it might have similar problems. But I also don't know how often those filters are changed. My filters last 6 months, I would imagine it sheds most of the plastic right away, and you are suppose to drain the first couple gallons. The other components are rarely switched out, only when they break.
Overall, I would think a home system sheds less. Also strung out through that entire article is the fact that all water has plastics. So at this point we are sorta screwed. Pick your poison, chemicals and plastic in your water, or mostly plastic...
iirc, it's not clear what filters were used commercially, based on this article and how exactly it translated to residential system where filters working under much lower pressures
Culligan Water installed and serviced our whole-home water filter system until a township-approved excavation contractor was able to connect us to municipal water, which was funded by a separate lawsuit against Wolverine/3M.
No idea what (if any) the consequences were for the executives in the 70s and 80s who dumped chemical waste and leather scraps in a swamp behind a friend's farm upstream from my house, or their successors in the 90s who covered it up.
> “Reducing PFAS in our drinking water is the most cost effective way to reduce our exposure,” said Scott Faber, a food and water expert at Environmental Working Group. “It’s much more challenging to reduce other exposures such as PFAS in food or clothing or carpets.”
This says nothing of how impactful the different types of exposures may be, or if a partial reduction is meaningful when we still have other known exposures that we think are just too hard to deal with.
Sunken costs can be a bitch, but I really don't get the argument that removing exposures that we are adding into food, for example, can be hard. Just stop using PFAS chemicals, period. Its not hard or expensive, just stop using them and companies will stop manufacturing them.
Removing PFAS chemicals that are already out there, like in our water supply, is the difficult and likely expensive change. Giving up any process or product that creates more PFAS contamination is the easy one, and would make a huge dent in the contamination problem as part of the issue is that we continue to add even more chemicals into the environment at a faster rate than nature can deal with.
Re: just stop using them and companies will stop manufacturing them
Why can't we have the government we pay for with taxes help all of us with this? I don't know what products have/don't have PFAS in them, as it's disclosed almost nowhere.
Why not just have them all banned and fined instead of me having to setup a laboratory to test every product I bring in to my house for lead, pfas, asbestos, radioactive isotopes, etc?
You are being helped. Given these requirements, it's pretty likely that your water utility will hike your rates to pay for the required upgrades. I feel badly for the rural utilities. This is likely to push the trend of regionalization.
I wasn't arguing for every person for themselves with regards to PFAS in city water. It seems totally reasonable for water utilities to be required to provide clean water, either through government or internal rules.
I was arguing that more consumers could step up to make similar decisions, in this case avoiding PFAS products.
We don't have direct control over what's in our water, especially in areas where collecting rain water or using a well isn't even allowed if you wanted to do it yourself. We do have control over what we buy though, we just rarely see consumers making decisions that match the values we often argue for (like we need to massively reduce oil/plastic use and chemical exposures).
Because governments are terrible at actually implementing such rules, and the whole point of free (or somewhat free) markets is for us to have the power to decide for ourselves.
With regards to labelling, I 100% agree companies should be making it clear what is in the stuff we buy. Again, though, that can be done by consumers if we actually care enough. Sticking with natural materials is a great start, whole foods instead of processed foods and wool or cotton instead of plastic/petroleum clothing, for example.
If governments are bad, people are much worse. How often do you test your food for lead? How often have you “done your own research” on whether your toaster will explode if you plug it into the wall? And what happens if your neighbor doesn’t do their own research and burns both of your houses down?
Unless consumers have the financial means to test everything, it’s not reasonable to expect the burden of consumer protections to fall on consumers. Consumers shouldn’t have to test all of their food for every possible contaminant.
Additionally, this doesn’t address harms which companies know they are creating but consumers don’t. Companies will lie and cover up the damage they cause, and pollute the information ecosystem with propaganda which confuses the issue. People used to think cigarettes were good for them.
Yeah we need a government takeover of the Better Business Bureau. Only government bureaucrats are qualified to test things. Credit scores, too. Has to be government. Let's throw in a social credit score too so that consumers know who to trust on an individual basis
What you're describing is a fundamental problem of centralization at scale. Consumers shouldn't need to test their food for lead because their food is grown locally and isn't highly processed. Consumers shouldn't be tricked by companies lying about and hiding damages causes by them because consumers should be dealing with companies at a scale they can actually understand.
We don't need big governments to save us from cigarette companies because people don't know better. We need consumers saying to hell with cigarettes because they just need to roll a bit of dried tobacco leaves if that's what they're going for.
We lost the scale of our lives in favor of convenience, marketing, and greed. Governments can't fix that.
That doesn’t solve the problem. Even if you’re dealing with a local farmer, are you testing their food for all of the dozens of contaminants which could be there? No.
And more importantly, you can’t deal on a local level for the most part. It’s not possible. You mostly purchase products from national or multinational brands, so good luck getting any consumer protection from them. If poisoning customers lets the CEO buy a longer yacht for his house in Cyprus, he will do that.
You're still imposing industrial agriculture problems on smaller scale local ag.
The contaminants used in industrial farming generally come down to two main areas, poisons and fertilizers for the growing period and preservatives for the shipping/warehousing process.
Local farmers wouldn't be at the same scale and may very well not need to spray their fields with the same chemicals during the growing cycle. At a minimum, they're local and anyone buying their food that cares can come right out and see how the farm operates, meet the farmer, etc.
All of the preservatives and packaging could be skipped entirely if you as buying local. When the food doesn't need to handle weeks or months of storage and shipping you simply don't need all of that.
> You mostly purchase products from national or multinational brands
My while point is they if consumers cared we could just story doing this. Sure, it'd be less convenient and we wouldn't have products like iPhones or modern cars, but in the context of getting rid of the use of plastics and PFAS those kinds of products go away anyway. It boils down to the fact that we care about the idea of PFAS but we aren't actually willing to give up the novelty and convenience of all the products those chemicals allow for.
And we're supposed to regularly drive out to farms to monitor their use of chemicals? You'd have to spell that scenario out to me because it sounds ridiculous and rather naive. For example, all of us who eat food also have our own jobs and lives to worry about, and we can't spy on every producer of every good we consume, though I'm not even sure what the spying accomplishes.
Tell me what this stakeout looks like and what kind of info it's going to gather.
Sounds like something we'd offload to a representative, authoritative body...
You'd have to really stretch the definition of chemicals here to find any used on my own farm. Same goes for the farm we have a CSA membership with while we get our own produce setup built out.
I have visited the farm we get our CSA from a few times, but not often at all. Its much easier than you might think to meet the person growing your food and have a feel for them as people, their farm, etc. They do also often update on their own website and email newsletter, though again I don't really feel the need to watch them like hawks.
I don't think its much of an investment to actually meet the people making one's food if that really matters to them. Granted finding local farms isn't always easy and I'd love to see more people start, but would you really rather blindly trust a massive public corporation driven entirely by profits and almost certainly buying off the regulators meant to keep up safe in such a system?
So the best alternative to government regulations is to go back on hundreds of years of economic development and only purchase products you have personally vetted every part of the supply chain for. No one has time for that. Other than Amish people, I don’t know of anyone who lives like that.
And again, this ignores the other two glaring issues I mentioned previously: that individuals are not equipped to properly assess the supply chain; and regulations also protect you from your neighbors’ use of dangerous products.
> So the best alternative to government regulations is to go back on hundreds of years of economic development and only purchase products you have personally vetted every part of the supply chain for
You don't have to go back hundreds of years or vet every part of the supply chain to recognize when a product is wrapped in plastic. Hell, you can effectively assume that all produce in a chain store was sprayed heavily with chemicals and that all meat approved by the USDA was sprayed with bleach and is full of stress hormones due to the way animals are processed.
All I have been arguing for the whole thread is for individual consumers to make decisions that can have a direct impact on what products are produced and what aren't. Are you arguing that consumers should just buy whatever is there and wait for the government to fix it from the top down?
> regulations also protect you from your neighbors’ use of dangerous products.
There's nothing wrong with that when your neighbor's choice is infringing on your rights. I agree that's a reasonable use of government regulation if the damage caused is clear.
Its ridiculous to have a free market decide whether we want to have PFAS or not. Free markets are premised on rational agents making decisions for themselves. But I can't decide to live in a PFAS-free world by myself. I can't de-risk my son from autism, cancer and whatnot by just not buying PFAS products even if I would have a reasonable choice to do so. PFAS is everywhere, its in the rain, in our food, in the soil, in the air we breathe, and it will be there for thousands of years. From next to 3M's factories to Antarctica, there is no spot on earth that isn't polluted by PFAS.
I'd say lets have a vote. Do you want to risk autism, cancer, infertility and whatnot for nonstick pans and all the other wonders of PFAS? If the majority doesn't, it will get a global ban.
You absolutely can chose to not add any if those chemicals into your life. Of course you can't control the rain, though you can control your food to a great extent.
If people care enough to decide not to use products that contain PFAS, the environmental exposures would disappear pretty quickly. More importantly, if its even possible for governments to effectively coordinate a cleanup process that job would be much easier if consumers pitched in by first using their individual power to drastically reduce the contaminants being added into the system.
> I'd say lets have a vote. Do you want to risk autism, cancer, infertility and whatnot for nonstick pans and all the other wonders of PFAS? If the majority doesn't, it will get a global ban.
That doesn't require a vote at all. Bans are only useful when we have to leverage the power of the state to force people to do something they don't want to do. If consumers agree that nonstick pans have all those risks and they aren't worth it, they stop buying nonstick pans and companies stop making them.
Even if we wanted the ban route, who enforces it? The UN? Some new global government? Or a unanimous agreement by every government in the world, including those who's economies are partly supported by producing the nonstick pans?
They literally use these chemicals to grease the wheels of food packaging plants, everything you have ever owned that is waterproof is covered them. They fluorinate plastic containers that hold our food so that the food doesn’t taste funny. They are never going away.
Why are they never going away? Every use you list there is specific to centralized, industrial agriculture. That's a modern invention that could absolutely be rolled back if people grow more of their own food and buy locally what they can't do themselves.
Humans made it very, very long without plastics and PFAS. Are we really to assume that a few decades with them and we'll never go back, by choice or otherwise?
Centralized, industrial agriculture is more-or-less necessary to feed as many people as we have.
Like I'm growing potatoes but I'm not under the impression that I'm going to be able to feed myself to an acceptable caloric and nutritional level off of what I can grow on a third of an acre or whatever my yard is.
If we agree that centralized, industrial agriculture has fundamental problems that can't be avoided, its a moot point whether its the only way to feed today's population. We can't kick the can down the road and throw more control at a problem hoping the system never cracks, given enough time that will *always* fail.
Local food doesn't have to mean growing it for yourself in your own yard. Buying local food is a huge improvement. When the food is grown in your area and doesn't have to be processed or packaged to handle national infrastructure challenges the plastics and PFAS aren't necessary.
When buying locally you can also have the ability to actually see where and how the food is grown, an option that is never possible when the food is grown across the country, shipped overseas for processing/packaging, and shipped back before eventually hitting shelves at your local chain store.
People like that never know. They don’t know how the system works, they’re just pretty sure it’s bad. You can argue with them but there’s no point.
We have 8 billion humans alive, who mostly all want to stay alive and keep eating food. We got to 8 billion entirely because of modern agriculture. But, they are sure, we really don’t need it, we can all just eat local joe farmer’s tomatoes. Nevermind that it’s seasonal and more expensive (and who doesn’t want to can all their food in summer, and who doesn’t have unlimited time and money to devote to food?) we’ll all be just fine.
It’s the same with PFAs. They think they just do nothing that can’t be easily replaced, but if you ask them what those PFAs do (must do something if there are that many of them) or how else you’d accomplish those tasks, they’re not quite sure other than they know we should just ban them all tomorrow and everything will be ok.
It’s easy to criticize a system you don’t understand and assume it’s all just rigged against us.
Its probably best that you don't speak on my behalf when you don't know me at all.
I do in fact know how industrial ag works. I have a small farm that I'm still in the process of building up, but have meat in the freezer and produce on the shelves that we grew and processed here. We work with farmers in the regenerative movement and go to events by our local extension office that usually cater much more to the industrial ag process.
I spent two summers interning with one of the big oil companies working on software for their upstream research department. I obviously don't know everything about the industry after two internships, but have seen how the companies operate including how proud they are of all the random products they jam petroleum byproducts into (they were particularly proud of having petroleum wax in Hershey's bars).
We're simply coming at the problem from different angles. I look at many of the issues raised like PFAS, plastics in the ocean, water contamination, etc and see unsustainable systems. I totally get that we have built societies around those systems, but that doesn't make them functional or sustainable long term.
We're going to have to deal with the consequences and limitations eventually. Would you propose that we wait for the damages to pile so high that we can't avoid it anymore? Or peg our hopes on some massive government intervention to find a top-down solution that manages to avoid all the pitfalls of political and economic considerations that likely run against the solutions needed for these unsustainable systems?
I'm simply pointing out that consumers can make choices that help push solutions in the right direction. Companies only produce PFAS because we either don't know or don't care, and we collectively prefer the convenience and novelty of the products. If that's the case, why would a government push a solution down our throats? If we'd support a ban on PFAS, why wouldn't we just do that ourselves by avoiding those products?
Oh, I do avoid the obvious PFAs. I make my girlfriend use my carbon steel pans instead of her grody old Teflon ones that she puts in the dishwasher. I’ve not used Teflon in like 20 years because these issues aren’t new. A lot of people have been getting wise to that for quite some time. Every year more of the non-stick pans I see at the store use ceramic coatings instead of Teflon.
The problem is, there are a whole lot of PFAs that do a whole lot of things, and most of them aren’t food-related. You probably interact with them many times a day without knowing. We can’t solve that problem ourselves because we don’t know they’re there. If the path of entry to my body goes firefighting foam > ground water > me I can’t avoid that short of filtration. My water provider can though. I’ve traveled a lot to third world countries that have unsafe drinking water and I really don’t want that here, nor do I want to have to research everything I buy (ain’t nobody got time for that) knowing that even if I do, industrial uses I know nothing about are still causing it to end up in my water.
When we expect common people to solve a problem, we’re expecting everyone to know everything about everything. Again, ain't nobody got time for that.
I have the same criticism about a lot of environmental issues. Just yesterday someone in here was talking about their water use due to r/o filters and how we’d all have to be careful because if we all did whole home r/o we’d double our water use. Which may be true, but right now there’s one almond farm in a drought area in California somewhere that’s used more water this year than the entire HN audience could in several lifetimes.
The petroleum industry really figured this out when they promoted plastic recycling, knowing it wasn’t real, to make us feel like we could solve the problem personally rather than legislatively.
We can't and it is the same here. Your choices don’t amount to anything of significance compared to the large industrial choices you have no control over so the only answer is regulation.
A huge portion of our exposure to these chemicals really are through products we choose to buy and use though. The answer there for consumers really is simple, stick to simple products and I'd you don't know what's in it just don't buy/use it.
Firefighting foam is a great example of when a government intervention could be needed though. I don't directly interact with that product at all, I don't buy or use it. If its getting into my water then its effectively infringing on my rights. If a majority of people are willing to ban those chemicals knowing that it will make fighting fires more difficult, or impossible in some cases, then a ban makes sense as consumers are powerless there.
Totally not the point, but I learned how to make pasta and now I never buy it. Of course, for all I know, my pasta roller was given a good spray of Teflon lube before it left the factory. And the water came from municipal supply. Etc.
Make pasta! You can get all the ingredients without plastic bags, and you will know you're eating pasta that isn't full of preservatives to make it shelf stable for years.
I just don't think it's tenable to tell people to stick to what they know, because most people don't know much and don't have time to. I'll wager you interact with things all day every day that you don't know what's in or how it was made. We can't expect everyone to know everything. Do you know what's in the wrapper of some food you buy? Can you? Do you know if they lubricated their machine parts with PFAs? Can you? PFAs are used in so many things. There are over 15,000 unique ones manufactured, and most of them presumably have multiple uses.
I do packaged food/beverages professionally, so I know what almost every ingredient I read on the label is there for and what it does, but I don't know the health ramifications of all of them (nobody does), how they're produced, etc. And I could not expect 99% of people to know 10% of what I do. They'd never have time to.
I also don't think we know exactly how it's getting into people. The EPA says the most common source is drinking water, and it's probably getting there through pollution, waste, etc. I'm not even sure they know that really though. That's the thing about large, complex de-centralized systems, especially ones that intereact with environmental factors: there's nobody who knows how the whole thing works.
And even if it's getting into water entirely through people cleaning their non-stick pans, which I'm sure isn't the case, I can't rely on everyone else in my water supply area (literally hundreds of thousands of people) to curtail their use. Probably tens of thousands of people in my area put a Teflon pan in the dishwasher today. I can, however, rely on the water plant to filter it if they're made to do so and there's testing done.
And, also, I'm very much of the "this hysteria is overblown" mindset. When you look into actual evidence of harms caused by the levels of PFAs most people are exposed to, all you find are very weak correlations. Outside of people exposed to very high levels of the stuff, there's no solid evidence of any harm at all.
You can't do any sort of controlled test since it's so pervasive and also geographical in nature due to the drinking water issue. (Everyone in a target area is either exposed to it or not exposed, so to compare people who are exposed to those who aren't, you have to compare people in different regions, thus making your study not controlled as any observable effects could be due to some other regional factors.)
That said, absence of proof is not proof of absence, and I feel fairly sure they aren't good for us or 3M would be marketing them as a pharmaceutical. I think there's some chance they're bad, and they can be affordably filtered out with the money manufacturers are going to have to pay in settlements. I'm far from a big government kinda guy (quite the opposite usually) but tragedies of the commons, which this totally is, are very much the thing we need government for.
Oh I absolutely interact with products that I'm not 100% aware of how they're made or packaged. I do try to limit this heavily though, especially when it comes to food and chemicals I put on my body like soaps and detergents.
I don't see it as a process of people having to know everything so they can opt out. As you said, that will never happen in such a complex society. Instead, people can focus much more on opting in when they do reasonably know they trust a product. That can't always be done for sure, but touching the door handle at a store is much less likely to have serious consequences than the food I eat every day.
Sure. But if the contamination is largely from water sources, as the EPA says, your food choices are fairly meaningless in this particular instance. I don’t want a society in which the rich people have fine drinking water and the poor don’t, and that’s the only alternative to this exact government intervention.
I totally agree that it seems reasonable for the government to have to step in for mitigation of PFAS already in the water. This whole thread I was only talking about the part of the system that is adding those chemicals to the water to begin with.
I may not have much say in what is already in my water but I absolutely have a say in what I spend my money on.
I think the expectation that the entire consumer market (or even just a majority) is going to collectively become universally informed about all their purchases and shift the market for the better is far less likely then a government intervention being successful.
If you go to countries where there was never any government intervention relating to cigarettes do you know what you'll find? A lot more people smoking cigarettes.
I don't think it has to mean everyone becomes informed and makes educated decisions. We can get to the same end by people simply choosing not to buy products that they don't know much about how they were made.
In other words, the solution can be additive where we only bring in products we're confident in rather than having to learn everything and remove items from there.
As someone else mentioned in this thread, it is not possible to understand how everything you purchase works. That is also incredibly infeasible. What you are asking is to effectively revert back two hundred years of technological progress (a rough estimate for the last time people were actually self sufficient at a local level).
I can't count how many studies I've seen referenced that claim the environment is effectively doomed by 2030 if we don't change course. The same goes for other areas, whether its concerns raised over the risk of chemical exposure or the fragility of our toilet paper and baby formula infrastructure when a pandemic is declared.
If you think that many of the inventions over the last couple centuries are the culprit and would have to be rolled back, that sounds miserable but it also sounds like we at least would have a better chance being proactive rather then waiting for everything to come crumbling down.
I don't personally expect climate change or chemical exposure to destroy us all, life finds a way. But if we can't expect consumers to make purchasing decisions that generally align with what they think is important, why do we even bother with markets or capitalism at all?
Well I'm definitely not advocating for a totalitarian state, I was specifically talking about consumer markets driving change if we collectively care enough.
I'm advocating for the fact that consumers could make many of the changes we often hear about happen if we actually cared. We have a habit if many people, even majorities of people, yelling about problems like climate change, deforestation, chemical contamination, etc. But we all still choose to use products that contribute to those exact problems.
We have no idea what the exact outcomes would be if, for example, consumers stopped buying any products that use PFAS and forced the industry to go away. There would certainly be ripple effects, but I'd argue that those effects will always be better handled when consumers decide to enact change rather than waiting for governments to force it on us all at once or for the environmental damages cause to grow so large that we run into real, devastating outcomes.
If we know we're supporting products and companies that are making things worse, we're choosing to kick the can down the road and hope its long enough that its the next person's problem when the pile of damage has gotten too big.
That's totally reasonable, though I assume that means you also accept, and don't complain about, environmental damage, global warming, or any of the health conditions related to environmental contaminants from plastics and their manufacturing.
I'd also assume that you don't see EVs as a practical solution, or any non-petroleum engine, since plastics can't be made without oil and it'd be crazy to drill enough oil to keep our post-industrial lives without using the refined gas and diesel that we'd be creating anyway.
What would that look like, fixing downsides of plastics? Are you thinking about a top-down government fix, or a more bottom-up fix driven by consumers unwilling to use plastics?
> any chemical with at least a perfluorinated methyl group (–CF3) or a perfluorinated methylene group (–CF2–) is a PFAS
I don’t think that includes any of those, and Xanax is not fluorinated at all. You might have been thinking of Prozac, which I believe does meet those criteria.
It is a broad category with competing definitions, some of which are even broader, though, yes.
PFAS is a broad family of chemical substances, and the new rule sets strict limits on two common types — called PFOA and PFOS — at 4 parts per trillion.
Three other types that include GenEx Chemicals that are a major problem in North Carolina are limited to 10 parts per trillion. Water providers will have to test for these PFAS chemicals and tell the public when levels are too high. Combinations of some PFAS types will be limited, too.
From a 2024 Guardian article:
Australia among hotspots for toxic ‘forever chemicals’, study of PFAS levels finds
Australia’s PFOA limit is 560 nanograms per litre, while PFOS and PFHxS is limited to 70n/gl. Canada limits all PFAS to 30 ng/l, and the US limits PFOS and PFOA to four ng/l.
“Australia has much higher limits than the US, but the question is why,” O’Carroll said. “Both health bodies would have different reasoning for that, and there’s not a really strong consensus here.”
Does that mean that they just have to tell people that the levels are too high but don't have to do anything about it? Basically just "sorry, your drinking water isn't safe; oh well"?
If by "that" you refer to "Three other types that include GenEx Chemicals that are a major problem in North Carolina are limited to 10 parts per trillion. Water providers will have to test for these PFAS chemicals and tell the public when levels are too high."
then "they" (the water providers that detect high levels of any of the three sub types that are not strictly limited) will be obliged to advise customers.
> Basically just "sorry, your drinking water isn't safe; oh well"?
that the water supplied has levels of not strictly limited inclusion exceeding notification level, yes.
Whether the customers are drinking that water and whether the level past notification is unsafe is unknown to myself.
This interpretation is, of course, based on my reading of The Guardian reporting, the actual obligations, precise chemical variations, toxicologies, etc, can probably be found as an exercise for concerned readers by looking up the actual rulings and referenced papers.
Why should I have to pay money to a avoid incuring an incurable disease?
I can understand, possibly, possibly, fronting the cost. But, only while they sort out the details with the installers. The first contaminant to make it through on a federally recognized level...9 billion dollars in funding. Holy shit. And this is just getting started.
That's in addition to the up to 12.5 billion that 3M has agreed to pay directly to water providers through 2036. I didn't know there was a tort case, either. It finished last year.
33.5 billion dollars. I can't wrap my head around this. Seems like a significant amount for an equally significant problem that most people have never heard about.
And this is likely not nearly enough. This is shaping up to be a 100 billion dollar public health crisis / 3M offset.
Surely, I am missing several more broad funding allotments, this is just just getting started.
When I can't understand the scale of something, I tend to look at the size of the response. It's not perfect, but it's a start
> Given the US population of just over 333 million, its a but over $100 per person.
That's true but not everyone lives in their own complex.
A family of 3 will benefit from 1 installation.
An apartment complex with 500 people could benefit from 1 installation assuming the benefit comes from something installed at the base of the unit and then applies to all inner-building plumbing.
"First ever" has been used very leniently here. Maybe it's the first ever for any state in America but the rest of the world definitely already has limits on it.
The EU limits are 500 ng/L for the sum of all PFAS in drinking water. Canada has an "objective" of 30 ng/L but I don't know how well it's enforced. The US proposal is for 4 ng/L for each PFAS but I'm not sure how they calculate the combined amounts. If it's simple addition, then it's 38 ng/L according to the article.
Can be read as "U.S. imposes its first-ever national drinking water limits" or "U.S. imposes world's first-ever national drinking water limits". There's a missing word and it's not clear from context what it's meant to be.
Using emphasis doesn't help bring clarity since the problem is the headline has multiple valid interpretations regardless if said words are emphasized or not. Adding something like "imposes its" helps highlight the intended interpretation.
The EPA did try to curtail their usage but was blocked by the 5th Circuit[0]. They will hopefully either appeal or try to issue another rule using a different authority.
> A unanimous three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday agreed with Inhance Technologies that the EPA overstepped its authority by issuing the orders, since they were rooted in a section of the federal toxic chemical law reserved for regulating "new" chemicals.
That's pretty ridiculous. It would be nice if Congress did the obvious "right thing to do" and amended the law that defines the EPA's power, but we all know that they won't do anything of the kind, and it will be left to a higher court to reinterpret existing law and reverse the decision.
Pushing the cost upstream (e.g. as opposed to everyone installing water filters at home) does help with attribution and accountability. My local water authority has significantly more power than I do.
The EPA is imposing a limit on PFAS in tap water. How do you infer that bottled water companies will start voluntarily to limit PFAS in their bottled water without government action?
Hi. Welcome to the conversation. The title of the article being discussed is "EPA Says 'Forever Chemicals' Must Be Removed from Tap Water (nytimes.com)"
Does California specify which water mains are old asbestos cement pipes? That famously caused ecological disasters in the Bay Area 20+ years ago, but they didn't (in newspaper articles i saw) show the extent of such.
I'm not aware of that. I doubt asbestos cement water mains are a significant health risk to the end user. I think any asbestos that could become airborne is a risk. To the workers who installed those pipes, certainly.
A few years ago, the PPM in my town's water was over 850 PPM, well above the recommended guidelines. Worse than that, it had a distinct sulfur-like smell.
So naturally we got a reverse osmosis water filter system and while the tap water has improved since then, I'm always reminded of the occasional accidents that can occur (e.g., lead, excessive chlorination, plain old entropy).
Plus it makes the water taste significantly better. Even if tap water was always perfectly safe to drink, I'd get one just for the taste alone.
Brondell Circle RO systems are my favorite because the filters are the easiest to change and when you have the same system for years, that ends up being the labor you repeat the most.
The funny thing about most of these systems is that they are all made of plastic. For towns with bad water quality I understand it but for most towns with limited or no PFAS I feel like there is the risk that you could be making the water worse
If the president and his cabinet set such a rule, and water companies' reply is "people will complain it's expensive", it makes me think something seriously bad was happening with these PFAS and the industry is running from accountability for deaths from cancer and the like.
Never outsource your personal health to others. Filter your drinking water.
I'm confused because many water supply companies and municipal governments already use filter media that clean PFAS. My city for instance, upon looking tonight I see they use GAC filter media which is biologically active. Activated carbon filters are the industry standard for removing PFAS from the water supply.
Looks like most of the people saying it's too expensive are talking about filtering the stuff out of water at or near the point of use. What's the cost to reduce the amount of these chemicals getting into the water in the first place?
For nonstick/waterproof/hydrophobic coatings to not slowly shed from whatever they're applied to and end up in the water, they'd need to not be applied in the first place. Not having them is cheaper than having them, but we'll be wet (which occasionally leads to hypothermia) and we'll need to revert back to pans seasoned the old fashioned way (less convenient, careful washing).
The many among us who already avoid those products, or who haven't gotten practical access to them, may be surprised by the tradeoffs you describe.
Just because a technology has become pervasive in some lives doesn't mean that it does a lot that matters. Like any other tradition, its value is often incidental and its popularity is mostly an accident of history (marketing, curiosity, fashion, ephemeral supply/industry shocks, etc).
Nonstick pans and synthetic fabrics are very much in that group.
It's just a learning issue, how to use a steel pan or similar safer alternatives. There are cultural memes about what to use and why and what's easier and harder.
The stainless steel frying pan I use was purchased about 30 years ago as part of a set that included a couple saucepans and lids. I paid less than $50 for it new. That was a lot when I was a student, but not an out of reach luxury.
If it helped me avoid eating 20 meals out it easily paid for itself.
>> You think people wouldn't be asking for non-stick pans?
Of course some would, but in a world where they never existed yet it would be a sort of fantasy wish. As an example where we are on the other side right now, people are trying to figure out how to make beverage containers out of paper. Not coffee cups, but longer term storage so you might buy a 6-pack of carbonated drink in a paper "can" vs metal or plastic. Never mind if you or I think that's a good idea, there are people working on it and some day it might come to be and people might think it's great for whatever reasons. My point is that the masses are not clamoring for paper cans today because they don't exist yet. Likewise, before the advent of non-stick pans, people weren't demanding them because they didn't know it was possible. That's all I meant. So no, I don't think people were seriously asking for non-stick pans prior to their invention, they simply lived with what was available.
> carbonated drink in a paper "can" vs metal or plastic.
The thing that gets me is that if something is so caustic or reactive that it is causing issues with the metal in the can, WHY is it a good idea for human consumption. I've seen concrete at one of those gives you wings beverage makers where the concrete at the shipping dock had to be replaced after enough spills weakened the concrete. Yet people still continue to put that in their bodies.
The thing that makes them "caustic or acidic" is that they are acidic (~3pH), by virtue of having dissolved carbon dioxide (ie carbonic acid) + acidic preservatives in them. You are putting them into your stomach (with your gastric acid, ~2pH). If you spilled your stomach contents on the concrete shipping dock repeatedly, it would weaken the concrete much faster. Now, I don't drink soda and they are objectively bad for your teeth, but the fact that they eat away at concrete does not seem like the right reason to avoid them.
Yeah, also every day we ingest large quantities of an industrial polar solvent while inhaling 21% corrosive oxidizing gas.
This is in addition to the constant state of chemically-mediated algorithmic war with swarms or hive-minds of rogue nanotechnology from an ancient Gray Goo apocalypse, but that's another story.
They can and should. But the cost of creating these pans sustainably should be born by the companies that make them, and not externalizing costs to the people who happen to live near their factories.
what an even more myopic view. if only unicorns were real and pots of gold were at the ends of rainbows. if only wishing made it so. You can't put the genie back in the bottle.
I love my stainless steel pans but there is a reason non stick pans are by far the most popular. It requires planning (ie. food cannot come straight from the refridgerator) and technique (get pan hot _before_ adding oil/fat) to not leave half your meal stuck to the pan. Most people who don't get joy out of cooking don't want to deal with this.
People are cooking at home for themselves less and less, and this has its own healthcare cost. Anything that reduces the number of people cooking at home is almost certainly a net loss for public health.
This is true, but maintaining the seasoning is annoying. If you want to scrub your pan out and get it really clean, or leave it soaking, you will likely need to repeat the seasoning process. It gets frustrating to have to coat it in oil and fire up the oven and all of that. You also cannot cook certain foods in cast iron pans due to this. For example, if you want to make a tomato-based sauce, you will risk leeching metal into your food due to the acidity.
Personally I think each type of material has its place in the kitchen (nonstick, stainless steel, cast iron, enameled cast iron, etc)
> If you want to scrub your pan out and get it really clean,
You can scrub just fine with a chain scrubber or metal scraper. You shouldn't use Scotch-Brite pads, sandpaper, or other highly abrasive methods, but scrubbing is not an issue.
You shouldn't soak.
You can use most dish soaps. Some detergents are still caustic, but anything you can get on your hands without issue is fine. Don't use Ajax or similar highly alkaline and/or abrasive compounds. No lye.
Re-seasoning after cleaning shouldn't need the oven. Get it hot on medium-low heat, wipe it with a thin layer of a reasonably unsaturated oil (refined olive oil, rapeseed AKA Canola oil, etc.) on a rag. Let it cool. If you really screwed it up repeat the process a once or twice. If you've totally stripped the pan and are putting on a totally new seasoning, 6-10 times is enough.
All that said, I agree about acidic foods. Much like highly alkaline cleaners, they can degrade the seasoning. I use stainless steel for those.
I likewise agree that each type of material has its place. I don't use nonstick because I have pet birds, and even tiny amounts of overheating can cause enough fumes to kill them. The rest are all useful to me.
If it's seasoned properly, it really is non-stick and that makes it trivial to clean without soaking or excessive scrubbing.
I've cooked with the same cast iron pan, daily, for years, and it only gave me trouble when I had a habit of soaking it. At some point I stopped doing that, re-seasoned it, and stuck to just soaping, scrubbing, rinsing, and drying. It's never given me problems since. I only had to be careful what I was using it for while I was still re-seasoning it, and I also haven't needed to re-season it since. (I use enough oil just from my normal cooking.)
As far as cooking things like tomato sauce in it, I agree that should be avoided if possible, but the main concern there is damage to the pan, not health. It would take a lot of leaching to get iron poisoning, assuming you don't have hemochromatosis.
As long as one doesn't mistake carcinogenic leftovers from previous cooking for seasoning. It's somehow common to think that seasoning means some deep umami flavor from food bits that get baked into it over time, when it only means the initial seasoning of the metal as a chemical process and still means you should wash your dishes like anything else after it's seasoned. and regular seasoning isn't stripped by washing with dish soap
>we'll need to revert back to pans seasoned the old fashioned way (less convenient, careful washing).
There are plenty of non-nonstick (stick?) options besides cast iron. Most of my cookware is stainless steel (with a thick disk of copper under the pan for thermal inertia) and I've never felt it's an inconvenience or difficult to clean - in fact, its durable nature allows for the use of coarse scrubbers or acid-based cleaning products that would quickly ruin a non-stick pan.
So we can get cancer from all the aldehydes and PAHs caused by overheating oil till in forms a polymer from oxidation. Even worse if you season the pan in your oven or stove top since now your breathing all that carcinogenic smoke in.
Once the fluorocarbons are made into PTFE, they no longer pose a threat. Teflon is so biologically inert that it gets used in medical devices implanted into humans. It isn't soluble in water or much of anything else.
The problem is with PFOA and related compounds, which are used to make PTFE and friends.
PFOA specifically is no longer in wide use. Most prominent manufacturers stopped using it as part of the PTFE manufacturing process 10+ years ago. And yes, I agree the science thus far shows that PTFE is basically inert. And to the extent a PTFE coating can separate from a pan, it requires high heat beyond the advertised temperature limits of nonstick pans anyways.
Asbestos is super inert, which made it a very nice material for many applications. However, mechanical interactions of small particles with cellular matter can still cause health issues if I understand correctly. And this is, what the whole fuzz of micro plastics is about, not? Even without biological/chemical reaction, if particle size is small enough, ...
The reasons why asbestos is harmful do not apply to PTFE.
As for micro-plastics, if your claim is that PTFE is no better, but no worse, than, say, polyethylene, well. I suspect you're wrong, and that it's better, but no matter: at that point there's no reason to single it out.
honestly it's way easier for me to wash my high carbon lodge pan (and i can put that sucker directly into the oven) because i use steel wire ball, maybe a little soap, and hot water briefly and it's done. reseasoning up to the level needed is trivial with each use but one doesnt really worry about a proper season unless one cleans the pan with some insane pressure and soap. and pans dont really need to be seasoned to be used. the season helps avoid rust a little but then again you can simply store it with a finish of oil on if youre concerned about that.
to be frank cleaning a teflon etc pan is way more finicky because we need, hey, wait, more microplastics in the form of slowly degrading acrylic sponge pads or brushes etc.. but i guess you could use alternatives.
but anyway, there are also many other ways to keep dry lol it's not like teflon is the only solution
Nonstick pans require less fat to cook food. Is the health benefit of avoiding shedding greater than the benefit of being healthier in terms of fat percentage or weight? I am not so sure.
Also as I recall PTFE coatings (Teflon is an example brand name) are no longer made with PFOA in the US or Europe. Yes, PTFE itself is a PFAS as well, but as far as I know it does not delaminate or shed as long as the pan is used at lower temperatures (less than 450F).
I think this is a misinterpretation of what has been debunked. Low fat diets are definitely healthier for more people because they almost always correlate with lower calorie intake. It’s not the quality of it being a fat that makes it bad (this is what recent studies revisiting fats are saying). It’s other qualities of fats that are problematic. For example, consider equal calorie intake between a protein source (like a steak) and a fat. Which do you think is going to fill you up more? Which do you think is healthier?
Fat is calorically dense. If you're trying to lose weight, you need to be careful about eating calorically dense foods. And if you want to eat more protein to maintain muscle while losing weight, there is a zero-sum trade-off between fat and protein.
Interesting archaic theory, as me and my wife just lost 40lbs each by eating a ton of fat and protein, haha. If you want to lose weight, stay away from sugar, for example carbs
High fat high protein (with low carbs) can definitely be successful, as long as you’re mindful of your approach and manage net calorie intake. But for lots of people it is easier to just eat what they do, but make minor tweaks to reduce the amount of fat as a way of reducing calories while still being satisfied by what they’re eating. Different ways for different people.
Weight gain/loss depends on calories, so you can eat anything to either gain or lose weight as long as it's the proper quantity (although if you want to gain muscle then you also need enough proteins).
Steaming, grilling, baking, air frying (convection baking), roasting, boiling, stewing, frying in seasoned cast iron, etc all "require less fat to cook food"
If avoiding extra fat is one's highest priority, it's not like you're out of luck without nonstick pans.
You’re proposing eating different foods with different recipes and flavors when you suggest that steaming, grilling, etc are alternatives. If I want to prepare similar food to what I can make in a stainless steel or cast iron pan, but with less fat, a nonstick pan is the best tool. Also since you listed frying in a seasoned cast iron pan in your list of alternatives - that requires use of additional fat. Yes, even if it is fully properly seasoned.
Either the fat retained in the dish was negligble in the first place, in which case nonstick doesn't matter, or a nutritionally or aesthetically appreciable amount was retained, in which case you've already changed the recipe and dish.
It’s a minor change to me. Something fried in a nonstick pan may not have the same sear as a steel or iron pan, but it’s a lot closer than steaming, which is a totally different thing.
I mean I guess but are people out there really optimizing their diets at the level of a drizzle/spray of oil or butter? The health difference can't possibly be worth it and barely moves the needle it's so little.
I know it's my French heritage talking but life without butter isn't.
> are people out there really optimizing their diets at the level of a drizzle/spray of oil or butter
Lots of people do this, and it’s not because they’re somehow ignorant and against all fats. It’s more that people trying to be healthy make small tweaks they can live with that add up. It’s not about being an extremist but just moderating things where you are willing to. Everyone’s metabolism, dietary preferences, and lifestyle is different. If you live an active lifestyle with enough exercise or just have a higher metabolism, then it might make no difference to optimize at that level. But for lots of people it can make a big difference without making them feel like they can’t eat what they want.
Three meals a day prepared without added fat means savings of around 3-500 calories a day depending on how much fat you’re using and your portion sizes. Keep in mind as well that not all calories are equal and calories from protein sources tend to be more filling (compare eating 3 tablespoons of butter versus a chicken breast).
It just doesn’t, which is one of many reasons why low fat public health policy has failed to reduce obesity.
When people don’t eat fat, they eat more. If you have the self control around food to eat a low fat diet and reliably stick to your macros, you’re probably not at a place where you’re overweight to begin with.
Giving your stomach something complex to break down while actually giving your body what it needs to add to vitamin stores results in less food consumed. You can’t treat diet like a Lego set of what to eat while ignoring physiology.
Absolutely yes people are. I'm active in weight loss communities to support my own weight loss, and yes we are careful about our fat consumption.
The health difference is large for someone trying to lose weight. A tablespoon of butter isn't that filling, but contains about 150 calories. That's equivalent to a whole pot of non-fat yogurt or two eggs, both of which are more filling and give you more protein.
When making eggs, I try to use about a teaspoon of butter, which still gives some butter flavor, but lets me save more calories for eggs.
I think you’re misinterpreting the reevaluation of fats in recent years. I’m not demonizing fats and saying they need to be avoided entirely. But I am saying people (especially in America) need to moderate their intake of calories in general and fats specifically as well (as they’re a vehicle for calories). There are also different varieties of fats with different health effects. Using nonstick cookware is an easy way to reduce the intake of fats (and therefore calories) even if you are not banning them from your diet entirely.
Let’s take a simple example: have you tried to make a fried egg in a cast iron pan and compared it to a nonstick pan? In a cast iron, you’ll need to use a pat of butter to get the egg to slide easily (around 100 calories). In nonstick you can get away with zero butter. It adds up.
A) A pat of butter is around 35 calories, and B) if you're putting a ton of butter in there it isn't exactly getting absorbed into the egg, most of it is left in the pan.
But your latter point is fair. I haven’t measured it. I just know that my experience of cooking in my cast iron requires a lot more fat than my other pans.
What's the cost of even identifying all the ways these chemicals are getting out, or what all these chemicals are?
I heard recently that but and seed butters often have elevated amounts of this crap... One hypothesis floated was that machinery used in the processing of this food is being coated in the stuff.
We know where a lot of it came from. Emphasis because it's an
historical problem:
Military and civil air fire-fighting foam.
About a million tons of perfluoroalkyl was put into the environment
between 1970 and 2000. It's very mobile, so it quickly got into
groundwater and rivers.
By comparison the leach from Teflon pans is probably a small
percentage.
Oh I definitely agree that Teflon pans are low on the list of pollution sources. But firefighting foam doesn't explain wtf happened (is happening?) to Cape Fear.
To the machinery example - the dies used to make pasta are teflon coated because that means you can push the dough through the dies faster. Likewise dental floss often has PFAS coatings to make it easier to slide between your teeth. This stuff is literally everywhere and cannot be avoided.
Food packaging is full of this stuff. Think about how a greasy sandwich or stick of butter is wrapped in a magic piece of paper that somehow doesn't get completely saturated with grease/sauce... that's PFAS.
Suppose i believe that- what is the point of preserving resources, if you are not going to use them to keep yourself healthy and alive? What are you saving them for?
But also, that's a very poor proxy - some intangible things like songs cost a lot of money but represent zero resources.
Some resources, like a piece of land, quadruple in price, once a fictional planning permission for construction is attached to them, etc.
And then you can run an economy like Britain does where you use all economic surplus to inflate value of already existing housing resources, therefore destroying any surplus you could have.
In my own research, I found that home testing was not always great. If you wanted an accurate and broad test, you had to send samples out to a lab. It wasn't massively expensive ($50-100), but it was close enough to the cost of a filtration system that it's probably not worth it for an individual.
If you want to do it for your town, that's great! Perhaps your local news station would be interested, too.
> Health advocates praised the Environmental Protection Agency
which ones? which ones didn't? just 2 days ago i heard PFAS is still in the rumor stage.
> Water providers are entering a new era with significant additional health standards that the EPA says will make tap water safer
i thought you already said it's safe?
i have plenty of health issues caused by just about everything, everything has 10 billion perfumes for no reason, and new kinds of experimental plastics in every single possible thing you can buy, that smell terrible and unsurprisingly make you feel awful, just walking in a city and coming in fills my face with irritants and can ruin my day. this is a small difference in comparison. i doubt the PFAS thing is any more than a typical fad and way for gov to make money as usual. nobody actually cares about this stuff, they just pretend.
Can anyone recommend a good reverse osmosis filtration that is actually certified and made by a company you can actually trust? I have one now, but not sure that it filters some of the PFOS/PFAS chemicals. There are so many clearly scammy companies claiming different types of certifications.
> not sure that it filters some of the PFOS/PFAS chemicals
Just to clarify the terminology: PFOA, PFOS, PTFE, and thousands of other chemicals are all examples that are part of a larger group of (mostly) problematic chemicals called PFAS.
That PDF has links to products certified by various certification bodies, and suggests looking for products certified against NSF 53, NSF 58, or both. but the EPA also notes the following:
> It's important to note that the current certification standards for PFAS filters (as of April 2024) do not yet indicate that a filter will remove PFAS down to the levels EPA has now set for a drinking water standard. EPA is working with standard-setting bodies to update their filter certifications to match EPA’s new requirements. In the meantime, remember that reducing levels of PFAS in your water is an effective way to limit your exposure.
In particular the permeate pump makes it more usable and less prone to clogging and the 'insta-hot' option is great for tea/coffee. I'm not a fan of their branding and vague NSF certifications but likewise see fewer red flags with them than their competitors. Eg it's made in the USA, they've been around for a while, they have a few patents to their name, and their based out of Phoenix where the water tastes like garbage so they probably dog food their product.
I use Coway, a Korean brand for my water filtration needs. They are a good brand and actually certified but looking closely at the product manual, they do not make the claim that they filter PFAS (defined as having a fully fluoridated methyl or methylene group): indeed they only claim to filter several chlorinated substances including tetrachloroethene.
I have built and sold RO systems for 20+ years. It's a weird industry and there are some competing desires in place. In general it's kind of a mess and it's difficult for consumers to navigate.
You can build your own system for less than $150 from cheap parts on ebay.
You can buy a branded unit at a big box or amazon for $150-250.
Or a "health" branded version for $300-800.
Or have an installer put whatever they sell in for $500-1500.
My experience is that you will get nearly identical water quality from each of those systems. There are different options and some fine details but the fundamentals haven't changed in decades and you are paying for some collection of service, parts quality, future replacement costs, marketing and snake oil.
NSF certification is good, it will rule out products that are flat out harmful. I have seen lots of cheap filters with fake certifications and there are many great filters that it don't carry certification. NSF material and safety cert (51) is a good one to look for, beyond that is has more to do with how the product will be sold and marketed than a real measure of performance.
$250-500 is probably the right price range for a diy install unit. Check for replacement part costs, buy something with standard components and cartridge sizes. Learn how it works, change the filters on time and expect to replace components every now and then.
The RO industry is such a snake oil mess that instead I went for a high quality activated charcoal filter that can easily be changed after half a year for 30$, and combine it with water distillation.
I switched to a home water still, and the distilled water it produces is amazing. It tastes so silky, nothing like the gross distilled water from the store (probably because I store it in glass bottles only).
I highly recommend it.
After each batch, all the residue that remains in the boiling chamber is revolting. It smells absolutely vile. I can't believe I used to drink that.
I went with this instead of a filter after finding out most filters use plastic mesh screens, that actually increase the amount of plastic in the output water.
I use a timer to stop the distiller before the water boils dry. I recommend you do the same.
> I went with [distillation] instead of a filter after finding out most filters use plastic mesh screens, that actually increase the amount of plastic in the output water.
Same here. Brita and RO use plastic cartridges and housings. My distiller is nothing but stainless steel and glass. You can't beat that level of reassurance about the complete lack of microplastic contamination.
No I don't, the studies I've seen indicate the missing magnesium, calcium, and sodium are pretty trace and I'm eating tons of vegetables, so I'm not worried about missing those.
Thanks I was waiting for someone to bring up distillers. I really dont want to keep buying expensive filters. I guess they use power but hoping it costs less?
Removing it from tap water seems like a great first step for mitigation. But what about preventing them in water in the first place?
We shouldn't be using these chemicals. Period. Sure we're hooked on them now, but sunken cost is a terrible reason to continue down a bad path.
We use these chemicals largely because industry kept finding more and more ways to use manufacturing byproducts. In theory that's great and all, but we avoid questioning if we should change that manufacturing process instead. A little pain now can avoid a mountain of pain later if we're actually willing to think ahead and question what we have today rather than focusing on what the next step forward is without ant context of how or why we got here.
"Tap water is perfectly fine" people threw a lot of shade at people who only drink bottled water, but both should be using Reverse Osmosis filtration right now. Think of it as verifying the response you got from the API is correct...
It really does depend on what your water source is and the pipes from there to your tap. For example, the Hetch Hetchy water that supplies San Francisco and some other parts of the Bay Area is very pure. Reverse osmosis is not going to remove much of anything. Davis water, or San Jose water, well, that's a little different.
The other thing about RO water systems is that they are not very efficient. For every gallon of pure(-ish) water that a home system generates, it typically has to throw away 5 gallons of salty water.
Contains Carbon Tetrachloride, Hexavalent Chromium (PG&E v. Erin Brockovich anyone?), Haloacetic acids, and Trihalomethanes, all carcinogens. All are reduced by reverse osmosis use.
You say "not efficient" when it's more like an extra 1-2 gallons waste, and yet the outcome is much cleaner water that makes up a large portion of your biology. I'd say that's a pretty efficient way to be healthier, especially when drinking water is a very tiny sliver of water consumption. The average person uses 3,000 gallons of water a month and you're sweating an extra 5 gallons for drinking?
For example, a typical point-of-use RO system will generate five gallons or more of reject water for every gallon of permeate produced. Some inefficient units will generate up to 10 gallons of reject water for every gallon of permeate produced. In recent years, membrane technology has improved and some point-of-use RO systems have been designed to operate more efficiently, with some manufacturers advertising a 1:1 ratio of permeate to concentrate production, meaning only one gallon of reject water is generated for each gallon of treated water.
That's an extra 5 gallons only if it is done at the point of consumption.
To do it for all water- showers, washing dishes, laundry, etc- would require RO for all potable water for the city water supply.
Depending on where in California you are, that much extra water consumption (since the waste will have an even higher concentration of harmful chemicals) isn't exactly an option.
This isn't common or as much of a concern at all. I'm talking about drinking water for consumption. It's a $200 expense, an extra 20 gallons of water a month at most (out of 3000).
RO systems vary by efficiency, but 1:5 seems way out of whack. My tankless system claims 2:1 output:waste, and while I haven't measured it directly, I'd say that's probably pretty close to right.
This is outdated as most of the mfgs have gotten better at it. Mine is 1:1 drinking:waste and my monthly water consumption is barely affected as it's indiscernible in the noisy variation. First 4 links on Amazon I'm seeing 2:1, 2:1, 3:1, 3:1
I looked into this a while ago and didn't understand why the efficiency claims were so different, but here's a video of a RO system running https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r_T7Bgi3hQ
The biological need for "water" is tuned to expect "water" to involve all sorts of trace minerals and compounds, some desired and some undesired, as well as some kind of stream of gut flora contributors and immune system challenges.
Thinking of RO and other forms of heavily or industrially purified H20 as the same thing is a technologist's mistaken idealization, and to a cynical eye reads a lot more like ancient Hellenic ideas about simple essential fluids than anything either scientific or sustainable.
It may be a necessary compromise because of modern contamination or because modern demand forces us to rely on increasingly worse supplies, but it's a long way from "verifying the response". It's more like an ugly last resort hack.
I've done it a few times, never got sick. I've known people to not be so lucky, but that's pretty rare. Sure does "taste" good, but I'm not sure how much of that is circumstance based.
Sorry I was not meaning to be as snarky as that came off. I’m an avid backpacker and have been in situations where I had to drink unfiltered stream water - while I know it’s possible to do so and not suffer ill effects, there are also a ton of super bad effects, and our bodies are far removed from the environment we evolved in 100k+ years ago. I don’t know the research on this but I’d wager our gut biome is much different than it was a million years ago as well.
Probably higher skill and cost throughout the full integration that there's no business/market incentive toward it and we can't rely on the state to check and curb every business toward radical ecological change
It's easy to dream up rules and government mandates or budget items, which would be more directly interesting if we lived in an actual democracy (no matter what country on earth today) but rather we have to understand why state and business as we've enabled them to operate structurally would ever work toward those directives, and not just to an appeasingly greenwashed extent. And then think what other tools are available to us besides voting and waiting, given all that. Don't we all know devops here? Where's the structural analysis and systemically-impacting follow-up discussion? Instead people talk about the quality of individual masters and operators
"Stop allowing" says a lot. An authority that dictates and enforces it? Sounds like something that loves to use its power to collude with business in every country with this society
The papers I've read generally indicate the average drinking water consumption is roughly only about 4%-10% RDA calcium, magnesium, and potassium. Most people should already be supplementing magnesium anyway since it's deficient in half of developed countries populations.
I remember first reading as a kid about DDT and thinking, wow, we really dodged a bullet with that one. Never could have imagined we wouldn't learn but go on to make and under-regulate hundreds of toxic substances in its place.
> Roughly 16% of utilities found at least one of the two strictly limited PFAS chemicals at or above the new limits. These utilities serve tens of millions of people. The Biden administration, however, expects about 6-10% of water systems to exceed the new limits.
Wow. Seems like a small but meaningful step toward better health, which seems like one of the best uses of technology.
Curious if people on wells can get their water tested somehow.
That's not true. Teflon is not a PFAS because it's missing the "tail" that makes it active.
Teflon's predecessor PFOA is a PFAS, but there's not normally any remaining in the final produce. There is a valid concern with manufacturing of course, but not with use.
> Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) is a synthetic fluoropolymer of tetrafluoroethylene. It belongs to the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)) and has numerous applications. The commonly known brand name of PTFE-based composition is Teflon by Chemours, a spin-off from DuPont, which originally discovered the compound in 1938.
Isn't Flint's water still all messed up? When is the US government going to realize that nobody believes anything they say because they in fact do nothing. Just a bunch of blah blah blah with no action items or results of their meaningless words. Uncle Sam is like a drunk uncle at at Thanksgiving, it talks day in and day out each word more meaningless than the one it follows.
“After $400 million in state and federal spending, Flint has secured a clean water source, distributed filters to all who want them, and laid modern, safe, copper pipes to nearly every home in the city.”
> The drinking water of 14 communities, over 170,000 individuals, and over 150 square miles was contaminated through 3M's improper disposal of chemicals
If you look at your bottled water, a whole lot of it has labels on it that say something like "comes from a municipal source". It's tap water sold at a 5000% markup.
Many years ago I knew someone who managed a bottled water plant. They didn’t use tap water, they had a very deep well pulling from an aquifer. They then filtered the heck out of it, and then added back in a very small, proprietary mix of minerals.
It also doesn't mean that it isn't way better than the local tap water in many, many places.
People don't buy bottled water that tastes bad, and it's pretty likely to taste worse than your local water if it's worse for you than your local water.
The processes often include extra filtration and cleaning methods that the individual corporate groups dictate.
I'm not trying to suggest that bottled water is some tremendous value compared to municipal water, but let's not pretend that the markup comes with nothing.
Which to me means "Tap water is safe and effective" is a broad statement that doesn't consider pollutants outside of PFAS, which vary depending on the regional water treatment system and how they are operated from region to region.
"safe" and "effective" means different things between different regulating bodies.
I'm sure it is depending on the intended use. It's perfectly safe and effective to wash my car, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's safe for me to consume.
Acid rain "scare" went away because people were rightfully scared, they told the government to fix it, and the government told the industry to fix it (or else!), and the industry did fix it.
It would be GREAT ACHIEVEMENT if PFAS went the same way.
DDT is another example of bad things going on for decades that had severe repercussions. There's definitely something going on with wheat from America too, though I don't think it's been discovered/publicized.
The reason is that industrial scale filtering to 0 is virtually impossible. This move by the Biden admin has been coming for 15-20 years. Multiple other presidents have wanted to do this but it's just not practical.
This implies they have figured out a solution(ideal) or they are very worried about november.
The "Obesity pandemic" is almost directly attributable to increases in corn subsidies and processes to turn it into cheap sugar. Processed foods, which is the majority, have consistently removed more expensive fats/proteins and replaced them with less expensive sugar.
Sugar has low satiation, so you can consume a lot of it before feeling full (unlike, again, fats/proteins). This was of course worsened by the anti-fat/pro-sugar movement in the 1990s (which is a whole topic itself).
Unfortunately there is no mystery to obesity. We've being systematically poisoned by our own food supply. If they either removed the corn-subsidies OR added a corn-sugar tax to offset the subsidies, food prices would increase, but obesity would decrease.
It isn't politically realistic though to make food taste less good (i.e. less sweet) and increase prices, nor is it politically realistic to remove corn subsidies or create sugar taxes. So we're stuck here for the foreseeable.
As we had discovered since Leptin research, things that seemed simple and dumb and claimed with loud firm voices were more complex and smart that it seemed in retrospective.
Europe has not the same ratio of extreme obesity, while eating basically the same products, How would you explain that?
Some cities in US have much more overweight people than other similar cities, both eat basically the same corn subsidized and distributed by the entire territory. why?
It seems that low places down the river have more overweight people than high places up the river, why?
> It isn't politically realistic though to make food taste less good (i.e. less sweet) and increase prices, nor is it politically realistic to remove corn subsidies or create sugar taxes.
Other countries did it all the time. It was a more realistic goal for them (or they just didn't knew that it can't be done and did it anyway)?
> Europe has not the same ratio of extreme obesity, while eating basically the same products, How would you explain that?
They aren't the same products, since sugar is more expensive in Europe, they add less of it to the products. Add aggressive labeling laws on top of that and sugar taxes on top of that.
You can directly corroborate population sugar consumption with population BMI. You can also track the increase in BMI against the cost of sugar (i.e. lower it goes, the higher BMI goes) from 1970 to today.
Probably not immediately, but yeah. The EPA is about to be completely neutered. Every corporation out there is going to challenge it's authority when they get busted polluting.
When the information began to surface I found it interesting the letters on public record going back to the 60’s with people warning that allowing this kind of dumping was a bad idea. Of course being the primary employer to the entire city, the economics won at the time. Since, the cost of cleanup and lawsuits to that company have been massive.