As lawmakers around the world weigh bans of 'forever chemicals,” many manufacturers are pushing back, saying there often is no substitute.
These are critical chemistries that enable modern day life
Then maybe we need to examine “modern day life” with a more critical eye. Some sacrifices may need to be made, because they are worth being made.
There are also measures that lie between “ban” and “use freely”. If we cannot eliminate the use of these chemicals in chipmaking, then we need to reconsider the disposability of these chips, or we can even consider if less effective processes result in less damaging chemical use, and accept a bit of regression as a trade-off.
One of the main uses for PFAS is electric vehicle batteries. So if “modern day life” means reducing CO2 emissions, then it will inevitably mean increased use of PFAS.
Four words: Investing in public transportation.
Public transportation depends on buses, and buses require either fossil fuels or batteries.
Orders of magnitude less than mass private vehicle usage.
Of course. But if we want to reduce CO2 emissions then buses will still need electrification - and therefore require PFAS.
Furthermore, public transportation will not be able replace all private vehicles. Or at least, it cannot replace them all quickly enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. By the time the necessary infrastructure was built, it would be too late. Therefore, electrification of private vehicles will be necessary, which will also require PFAS.
Basically, we are at a late enough stage of CO2 emission that the only realistic hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change requires mass production and adoption of EVs.
Very all-or-nothing response.
Of course. But if we want to reduce CO2 emissions then buses will still need electrification - and therefore require PFAS.
Okay. But again. My comment was that if elimination isn’t possible, reduction should be pursued.
So saying “we still require this” is completely irrelevant.
Furthermore, public transportation will not be able replace all private vehicles.
Nowhere has anyone even hinted that replacing all private vehicles is the goal.
Once again. Reduction is the goal.
So saying “we can’t replace all” is completely irrelevant.
Or at least, it cannot replace them all quickly enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. By the time the necessary infrastructure was built, it would be too late.
Buses require almost exactly the same infrastructure as private cars.
Basically, we are at a late enough stage of CO2 emission that the only realistic hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change requires mass production and adoption of EVs.
No. What the hell. Why would that be true?
Public transport is a better option for basically every major population centre. And for those centres, we should not be encouraging private vehicle ownership, but rather replacing that as much as possible with public transport. Hell, even if that public transport is on-demand low-occupancy shuttles and ride sharing, that’s still better.
Electric private vehicles are better than internal combustion, but they are still awful.
So saying “we can’t replace all” is completely irrelevant.
I think it’s relevant to the person you were replying to as well as the original point of the article.
PFAS are critical to some modern technologies. In some cases, they cannot be replaced. Any time we replace cars with buses, we will need PFAS to electrify the buses. And likely we will need more PFAS in the future than we are using today.
Who would have a problem with us returning to an average lifespan of 40 years?
Yeah, me I do, which is why I want to get rid of these forever chemicals because that’s how we’re going to end up with 40 year lifespans again.
We aren’t getting rid of our nutritious diets and vaccines which are the two biggest factors in history that have extended average lifespans. Not Teflon pans and firefighting materials.
I think you overestimate the toxicity of PTFEs. You know they are used in implants?
You underestimate the toxicity of PFAS chemicals and their manufacture. I work in a toxicology lab, I know a lot of people researching PFAS right now.
To make PTFE, they used to use a chemical called PFOA, which causes multiple types of cancer and other pathologies. Everyone has been exposed to it, especially since they have been found to just dump it in whatever river is convenient. They had to stop using it after getting sued, but now they just use a different chemical that had been show to have the same effects. And again, they’re just dumping it into rivers knowing the fines for polluting won’t be as bad as actually containing the chemical properly.
That is one PFAS chemical. There are so many others. Do not let corporations poison you for profit and then lick their boots for the privilege.
Seems like the problem is the lack of proper environmental protection and enforcement.
Love the closing personal attacks. Really drives your point home.
Your mamas so fat , oops I mean PHAT.
My comment was about how if elimination of these materials is impossible, then we should figure out how best to reduce their usage in an acceptable manner.
Jumping straight to black-and-white “So you’d send us back to the dark ages?!?!?!” type of response is kinda wild.
not the people insisting on the chemicals, clearly.
Asbestos. You know how long they knew that was killing people? Lead, they knew that was toxic, kept using it. Business, under capitalism, is designed to find the cheapest path to pull in more money. Regardless of the consequences. Changing might not even mean all that much more, in cost. They would still act like they can’t at all, because any back slide looks bad on their charts. They have no financial obligation to the environment and or people. Change that and they’d become innovators overnight.
My favorite was white phosphorus, which caused Phossy Jaw in the employees making the matches. Switching to red phosphorus would mean a 1% increase in cost or reduction in profits (wasn’t sure which based on the article). Doing so would mean your employees’ bones wouldn’t dissolve. It took regulation to force them to switch.
Asbestos is genuinely a wonderful material. It’s heat-proof, it’s a wonderful insulator, it’s one of the best filters for gas masks, it’s wonderful for use in brake pads and clutches, etc.
It’s just a damn shame it causes cancer in living things.
No country claiming to be communist has banned asbestos btw
Criticizing capitalism doesn’t imply communism or socialism. You can just criticize capitalism without suggesting an alternative.
Your jump to communism It’s like saying “I guess I have to kill myself, because some parts of life are hard.” There are other directions one could take.
And yet somehow we survived thousands of Years without them.
I am so not understanding all the comments on this post that are literally defending their right to be given cancer by large corporations.
Wtf are the responses to this comment? “No, I like being poisoned for profit!” Jfc.
It’s the same stupid bullshit as the 2a nuts. There is no logical reason, they just like a manmade product, which is a great extension of any interesting person :)
No it’s not.
an Argument’s an intellectual process. Contradiction’s just the
automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.No it isnt.
Yeah, not everyone is worth arguing with.
We also survived thousands of years without any of the creature comforts our society has taken for granted. Unfortunately, all the scientific advances we’ve achieved for the betterment of mankind involved these forever chemicals in one way or another.
I’m not saying they’re not terrible, but at least some of the voices against these restrictions aren’t in bad faith. It just speaks to the importance of finding alternatives, and we have to accept the fact that some things might not be replaceable with biodegradable solutions.
I thought we were banning forever chemicals in manufacturing, not science.
These chemicals made the creature comforts cheaper, not the creature comforts you wish to claim require them.
If you want to return to a feudal experience, I’m afraid it’s not like your local renaissance faire. What was it actually like?
Well, let’s start with Yersinia Pestis, the little scoundrel…
Antibiotics? Never heard of em.
None of which require any of the chemicals involved, so…
For large scale manufacturing in the electronics to make them? Sure they do.
You like glass? Modern glass? Required.
Oh man, I love you Chema-kills people. You make me feel so intelligent.
Humans existed before these compounds were created. One of the ones mentioned in the article PFAS were first created in the 1940s.
So my question would be, what did we use in their place before that?
And what will happen if we stop using them.
If that means we’ll have to forfeit the use of, for example computer systems, or some actually vital modern infrastructure - I don’t think we’ll agree to the ban.
On the other hand if their use is unavoidable, for any valid reason - there should be sufficient effort in recycling them…
recycling, containment, disposal… i’m pretty sure forever chemicals aren’t actually forever: put enough energy into them and we can probably make them no longer forever chemicals… it’s only a problem because we don’t contain and process them
Use your brain for once and realise that there weren’t modern electronics in the 1940s, and without these compounds, we couldn’t have useful computer systems now.
Yes ideally they should just stop. However, there are things that have changed since the 1940s.
A lot of technology is based on plastics being available and will require a complete redesign to work without it.
Also ordinary stuff f.i. rain jackets, cookware and cleaning products. All of these could be replaced with whatever people used beforehand, but one reason why plastics has been used so widely is because it’s a cheap biproduct that could replace more expensive and more energy intensive productions. F.i. imagine if we had to replace all hard plastic casing with ceramics, glass or steel. That would require a lot of furnaces to run on coal. Multiply this with the increased population since the 1940s and it might very well just cause a different environmental disaster.
Cast iron pans work great, you can even use them on your induction stove and they heat way better than any expensive non-stick. Waxed canvas is also excellent at waterproofing. We do have solutions already for many things. Your plastic argument as well. The types of plastics the complaint is about is for specific products, not all of them. I work in manufacturing and the availability of safe materials are plentiful as science keeps looking for new ways. People just have to stop buying new things to throw perfectly good and usable ones in the garbage. It would go a long way.
Yes absolutely. Reuse is the second best step of the" reduce, reuse, recycle, reclaim" cycle of materials.
All I’m saying is that if everyone needs durable quality products, then we’re facing a different material problem than what plastics are doing. Plastic is used because it’s a cheap biproduct. Cast iron is not, and we can’t replace all plastics with iron, glass or stone without also damaging the environment in other ways.
Personally I think plastic wrapping is better place to start. Why not use paper, cardboard or another biodegradable material for wrapping.
furnaces to run on coal
If only there was a way of avoiding coal furnaces! I have this freaky idea from this sparky rock I found. It might be related to those times when the sky gets angry and makes loud bangs and flashes.
It’s just more expensive to make a new substitute and stop selling the toxic shit you still have in storage with no way of getting rid of it. So regulation has to lead the way…otherwise there is no incentive to stop. How about letting THEM come up with a way of removing the chemicals they already put into the environment first, before giving them the next free ticket to pollute.
I support this approach. Any company manufacturing products which are not readily biodegradable must put in place a scheme to capture and render that product inert before they’re allowed to sell it.
New type of plastic that can’t be recycled? Better figure out a recycling process and sort out the logistics of implementing that process wherever you intend to sell it.
Chemicals in your cleaning agent that don’t break down harmlessly after a reasonable time frame? Either re-engineer your chemicals until they do, or develop a process to prevent them ending up in the waterways.
Can’t do that? You arent manufacturing it.
Steel is not biodegradable, so your plan means the end of nearly all manufacturing. I doubt it will be adopted.
But steel is recyclable.
Yeah, there was a point in time where none were used. To say there isn’t an alternative is to say this isn’t true. They might not like it, but we don’t require whatever they’re producing with it.
How did we ever survive without them?
It’s not about survival. Manufactures are just letting people know if we ban these chemicals they will need to stop producing some products.
So you’re OK with EV batteries no longer being made, along with numerous other things?
It’s kinda hard to tell. I would need to find a specific list of things that we could no longer produce with the specific laws.
If it’s just that we no longer get non-stick pans, I am fine with losing those if we get less cancer.
The list is so long you can’t fathom how much it impacts. Pretty much anything with anti- or resistant used to describe it has some sort of PFAS compound. We can live without PFAS, but we would need to do like people used to do and give up a lot of creature comforts.
One thing it’s commonly associated with is surfactants, so no fancy shampoo, but also probably no washing machine because it doesn’t scour your clothes well enough. Plumbing uses it to join pipes. Any sort of metal finishing/coating uses so no more chrome or nickel plating unless you want it to look like you dug it up at a 500 AD site. One of the higher containing things I’ve seen was women’s make up.
How much less cancer do you prefer from these vs internal combustion cars?
The point is being missed. We shouldn’t use pfas for convenience items like pans and such. If we keep them well contained in EV batteries, that’s probably ok.
I concur. Plastic makes great electrical insulation, but not great disposable cups. Petroleum is very versatile feedstock but not a good energy source.
I do wonder if cooking in nonstick pans without oil is less risky than cooking with oil in conventional pans.
I don’t know. We stop cars, cancer goes away pretty quickly. Forever chemicals are well… Forever.
That is why I need specifics. You deserve specifics too.
We stop all cars. Build nanomachines to cure cancer and enable cold fusion. Abolish capitalism . It’s all so easy.
There’s a great conversation going on under this comment that I totally agree with. There’s probably valid uses for which an exception could be made, but these largely do not belong in mass produced consumer goods.
To answer your direct question, though: In a rational world, EVs would not be a thing, or would be a very limited thing for special use cases like farm work or accessibility. They will not solve our problems, only mass transit and better planning can solve things.
We powered our cars with gasoline instead of batteries.
Because without PFAS, we can’t make EV batteries.
The point of transportation reform isnt to get a new type of car, its to eliminate the need for cars
Many parts of the world currently depend on cars, and that cannot easily be changed. While it’s not impossible, eliminating cars will require a long time. Much longer than the amount of time we have left to avert catastrophic climate change.
Unless those electric cars are running on entirely renewable energy, it’s a non-positive
Electric vehicles add demand to the power grid. These days, increased demand is met by increasing renewable energy production (mostly wind turbines). Nobody is building coal plants any more.
If you think personal forms of transportation will ever disappear you are straight up delusional. That’s not “reform” that’s ignorance.
Agreed, but social media has become an echo chamber for fuckcars and good luck reasoning with them.
Necessity is the mother of all inventions. When you take away their forever chemicals they will come up with new replacements quickly.
Often, the replacement will just be a derivative that isn’t necessarily better. The narrative that will then go out through the media is: “We’re no longer using this evil thing. Full stop.” The replacement ends up just being something similar with similar problems. People stop paying attention because they assume the problem is solved, when it really isn’t.
Example: there was that whole BPA plastic stink years back, now most bottles and food containers are “BPA Free”…but if you look into the chemical they used to replace BPA, it has the same synthetic estrogen problem BPA did. (Arbitrarily searched source: https://www.plasticstoday.com/study-says-bpa-free-plastics-still-show-estrogenic-activity )
In the case of replacement for water bottle or food container plastics, the best answer is to just not using them anymore, although glass and metal have their own difficulties, namely fragility and weight.
Enough countries use glass instead of plastic containers that I’m sure it isn’t nearly as difficult as they’d make us think
I remember the horrible transition period of the terrible “energy saving” lightbulbs back when EU banned incandescent bulbs. Expensive, took minutes to warm up, had terrible colour rendition, filled with mercury and saved barely any energy. It felt like such a moronic decision.
Now with over 50 LED bulbs all using like a tenth of the energy they used to with lifespans so long I can’t even remember when I last had to replace one, it feels totally worth it. Sometimes someone has to make you suffer before it gets better.
Though with chemicals in contact with food, hopefully they take it just a bit slower to make sure they are safe first.
Led was obviously on the horizon when those bans were passed, it was bad legislation to ban at that point when fluorescent was the only real option.
Yet I guarantee you that in their R&D labs they’re already looking for alternatives at this point, all the while claiming to the public that it will be impossible to replace or result in inferior products (maybe it will, but hopefully it won’t be super noticeable - leaded gasoline’s octane numbers haven’t been matched cheaply but we can still drive just fine).
Exactly what I thought as soon as i read the title: “These chemicals can’t be replaced” “But did you look for substitues?” “Well… no.”
All it took to find a replacement for CFCs was to ban and discontinue them.Remember your high school chemistry class? What do you think they are going to use instead of fluorine? The thing that makes these compounds useful is exactly the thing that makes them “forever.”
Remember your high school chemistry class
Yes I do. I also remember my college chemistry classes. And my work in an industry R&D lab evaluating potential replacements for a fluorinated compound.
What do you think they are going to use instead of fluorine?
Something that’s not as good, but good enough. See leaded vs unleaded gasoline for a historical example of industry reacting to regulation. It’ll of course take time and money, and there may be limited use cases where there aren’t any conceivable replacements, but in a lot of cases these compounds are used as a catch-all because they work so well.
Which one would be your first choice?
PFAS are used in so many forms (solvents, polymers, etc.) that I think the replacement will be very dependent on the specific use case (and potentially other regulations on alternatives, particularly for solvents). I’m not knowledgeable about every field these compounds are used in and for privacy/NDA purposes I can’t talk about the specifics of the ones I worked with.
You are certainly much more knowledgeable about this than I.
In broad general terms:
Doesn’t the fluorine make them both effective and forever? Isn’t it difficult to create a lower energy state molecule than a compound of fluorine.
Is “forever” the problem?
The points you have brought up seem to be an issue with responsibile manufacturing more than the nature of the chemicals themselves. Seems like that should be addressed on a much wider discussion than just these particular compounds.
Doesn’t the fluorine make them both effective and forever? Isn’t it difficult to create a lower energy state molecule than a compound of fluorine.
For many applications, yes. Fluorinated compounds tend to be quite inert. There are definitely some applications where the compounds don’t need to be resistant to every type of chemical attack and you could use a more specialized compound that is generally less inert but performs similarly in whatever conditions you put it under.
Is “forever” the problem?
Forever is a big part of the problem, but it’s worth noting that if a compound is completely nontoxic then bioaccumulation doesn’t matter as much (though some nontoxic chemicals can increase the potency of other, toxic chemicals and cause problems that way: see this article)
The points you have brought up seem to be an issue with responsibile manufacturing more than the nature of the chemicals themselves. Seems like that should be addressed on a much wider discussion than just these particular compounds.
Yes. We need increased strictness on regulations and enforcement for these compounds and others because that’s the only way to make companies comply.
Nanomachines, son.
And big sheets of graphene and cold fusion and curing cancer.
It’s still nanomachines. How can you get sheets of graphene? Nanomachines. How do you solve cold fusion? Nanomachines. How do you cure cancer? Believe it or not, nanomachines.
“Just put the eggs in this pan and they flip themselves.”
You could replace most of this shit with glass, ceramic, cardboard, and some cooking oil to replace those non stick cooking appliances
It feels to me like a missing piece in this conversation is any consideration at all for balancing private profits against public costs when weighing whether or not a particular chemical or technology ought to be sold or used.
Yes, they’re better for solving the narrow use case of being a fire removedant now and that’ll save someone a little bit of money while it’s in use vs. using more water or soaps, but what of the costs thereby put on everyone whose drinking water now has that stuff in it and their increased cancer risks over time? Or what if instead of non-stick aluminum cookware, we used seasoned steel and iron cookware and nobody has to die of cancer because DuPont dumps its manufacturing waste in nearby waterways?
I remember having this conversation about fracking fluids and how “economically important” fracking was to the economy at the time, but those wells are tapped in a matter of a year or two and if the neighbor’s water is rendered undrinkable, that’s a spoiled resource that will remain spoiled for a long, long time- long after the profit is all gone and the well operators have abandoned those wells. If the mess costs more in externalities to others than it creates in profit and value for the people doing it, the thing has net negative value and probably ought not to be done.
The situation is much more nuanced than that. PFAS chemicals are in (almost literally) everything. Your nonslip shoes, your water proof jacket, your stain resistant table cloth, and your fire removedant mattress. On top of that the list of PFAS chemicals that the EPA is looking at is around 70 compounds long and only scratches the surface of all the compounds. The test to detect PFAS is in its 4th draft and can’t reliably detect low enough to reach the levels of concern, except in nearly pristine waters, so you can’t even detect if you have it in most water. The levels of concern that are being discussed are in the single digit PPT for individual compounds or 70 PPT total PFAS for some health advisory levels. Detection levels on normal waste water are generally somewhere between 50 and 4000 because the test is so sensitive other compounds fry the machine and it has to be diluted.
Another problem is that the thresholds are so low that it’s hard to draw any conclusions definitively. It’s associated with so many things you could write a novel: altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, cancer, decreased birth weight for infants, infertility, and more. The thing is that the only way to make a more conclusive connection is observing high exposure areas where people were drinking it at thousand times higher than the risk levels, so interpolating down smaller values has a lot of theoretical connections, but few smoking guns.
In general industries are trying to move away from PFAS, but the areas where they can’t include things like AFFF foam used for fighting jet fires. Some areas, particularly the military, are unlikely to make concessions as they want the best option available even if a close substitute is available. Your average PFAS using company; however, is moving away from PFAS in general.
EDIT: also the quantity of PFAS in most items is so small that it actually is below the threshold on an SDS for requiring it be reported, so trying to find out if a product you use has PFAS means you have to call the manufacturer. Maybe they can tell you, maybe they don’t want to tell you, or maybe they don’t know because it’s not listed on the SDS for the raw ingredients they use. In the industry it’s gotten into a near legal situation where companies are telling their suppliers and vendors to look for PFAS and certify that their products don’t have it, only for the vendor to turn around and do the same for their vendors and suppliers. The portion at the end of the article captures this well, an example would be, “Well we don’t use PFAS, but our machine has gaskets which probably have PFAS. This doesn’t touch the final product so are we able to use it?”
PFAS chemicals are in (almost literally) everything.
Yes, this is more or less the circumstance we arrive at when the burden of proof for consumer safety is on injured parties to prove the particular thing unsafe, or its use negligent after the fact, in courts against often powerful corporations with lots of money to spend defending themselves, as opposed to the burden being on would-be sellers to prove its use safe and environmentally responsible before bringing it to market.
I appreciate your post, it really is informative, and it explains how problematic it will be to connect injured parties with the people that harmed them, how now that some people depend on those things and will accept no substitute and will continue emitting more of it into the environment, that the rules as they are don’t provide real remedy or solutions for problems that were perfectly legal to create and everyone involved did nothing wrong.
That right there, really, prompts the question- would we really be that much worse off if we had consumer safety rules that put the burden of proving a product or technology’s safety and sustainability on the seller, or on some sort of product safety testing system?
If that were to mean industrial chemicals had to undergo trials or studies in the way that pharmaceuticals do, sure there probably would be fewer new things. OTOH if there had to be even the most-rudimentary plan for the lifecycle of a product up front, maybe we wouldn’t have millions of tons of discarded plastics or forever chemicals in the environment that everyone knows there’s no money to clean up (because our system protects those that profit by externalizing costs).
Great post, but just throwing this out there. Teflon was invented in 1938 and brought to the commercial market in 1948. PFOA is one of the top 2 legacy PFAS chemicals under scrutiny and is a chief ingredient in the manufacture of PTFE (Teflon). PFOA wasn’t noticed at all until 1968 and links to health impacts weren’t noticed until 1999.
This specific chemical existed before many of the consumer protection laws we have today, but even if those laws had been in place it would have likely been decades before we had made the connection. 20 - 60 years to test a new chemical is a long long time.
can’t be replaced… By something that works as well, is as cheap and most importantly : makes them as much money.
Were without these chemicals before, we can so again.
Yes, if you want technological regression.
Yes, if you want technological regression.
You know, when I learned about the problems associated with non-stick cookware, I stopped buying that shit and replaced mine with cast iron, steel, and ceramic-coated cast iron. That might be regression in someone’s book but really the cookware I’m using now isn’t going to wear out in a couple of years, these things will last the better part of forever- and keeping them seasoned is not difficult once you know how to do it.
I also don’t miss the lead in gas or paint, the asbestos in construction material, industrial coolants based on CFCs, or DDT-based insecticides, or thalidomide-based anti-emetics.
What would that be, exactly?
Because from where I’m sitting it mostly looks like we’d end up paying a little more for things, having things that might stick a little more, that sort of thing.
Between that and having pfas in my body, I’ll go for being slightly inconvenienced
The article opens by saying something totally different than the above summary. The point is that it’s difficult to replace a lot of these chemicals, not that there isn’t any substitute.
Expensive more like. Profit at all cost.
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These terrible chemicals are just not worth it at all.
The only people suffering from forever chemicals being banned are the people producing these poisons.
You can’t even drink rainwater anymore. This is killing us.
No, everyone on the planet will be suffering, because PFAS are vital for the manufacturing of integrated circuits, without them, we wouldn’t have computers, and by extension, all the products the latter made possible.
Quiz question : when electric vehicle catches on fire what do you use to put the fire out?
Hint : you can’t use water
Smother it with the corpses of billionaires
Sand. You use sand.
Nor anything else as the fire creates its own oxygen and thus must be allowed to burn itself out.
What about a 20’ x 20’ smother blanket?
Since lithium-ion fires can produce its own oxygen supply it wouldn’t work as an extinguishing method but, it could be used to contain the toxic and flammable fumes the fire would create
You put it in a box and set that box on fire. You have to fight fire with fire.
Use the idiot who’s
driving itsleeping in the driver’s seat.
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