You always hear about how innovative the US is but the moment there is any talk about requiring industry to find an alternative to something youd think this place was as economically crippled as north korea. An economy so flimsy and industry so devoid of flexibility that it will collapse if required to find an alternative to x y and z but simultaneously supposedly the strongest and most resilient economy in the world.
It's all a ruse to maximise profits and minimise expenses. They'll do anything to protect the status quo — they've used the tragedy of the commons to manufacture dangerous chemicals on an industrial scale for decades, and banning them now would impact entire industries and product segments; probably to the tune of tens or hundreds of billions.
No multinational corporation is ever going to voluntarily support a change that will kill its profits.
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.
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.
Then there's the Radium Girls.
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.
And yet somehow we survived thousands of Years without them.
Also back then, we didn't have massive populations. Most of the world struggled to survive. Finding food was a all-day activity. Should we go back to that?
Without the haber process modern civilization could not be sustained. We cannot go back without massive population losses. Dunno about you but I'm not picking which of my friends and family aren't important.
So, but we don't need cancerous materials to do so. If you missed it, that was the point
Cancer causing materials are not a necessity to support global scale populations.
Also, I frankly wouldn't mind returning to a world where almost half my time was my own and not my employer's.
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.
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.
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.
One of their uses is in firefighting chemical fires.
When an electric car is on fire, you need PFAS to stop the lithium fire. Water just can't stop it.
Of course, before batteries we used gasoline.
I imagine their might be more of these cases where modern technology relies on unsustainable practices.
Another factor that makes lithium-ion battery fires challenging to handle is oxygen generation. When the metal oxides in a battery’s cathode, or positively charged electrode, are heated, they decompose and release oxygen gas. Fires need oxygen to burn, so a battery that can create oxygen can sustain a fire.
Because of the electrolyte’s nature, a 20% increase in a lithium-ion battery’s temperature causes some unwanted chemical reactions to occur much faster, which releases excessive heat. This excess heat increases the battery temperature, which in turn speeds up the reactions. The increased battery temperature increases the reaction rate, creating a process called thermal runaway. When this happens, the temperature in a battery can rise from 212 F (100 C) to 1,800 F (1000 C) in a second.
Just because PFAS is one way doesn't mean there aren't other things that would work.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 retardant 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 retardant 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?"
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.
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.
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.
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