Forever Chemicals

[spanky]

I’m willing to bet there are several executives at 3M that were eager to agree to this settlement amount.

https://apnews.com/article/pfas-fore...33796b1a1d2cdb

[AK47bp]

Hold onto that older rain gear, removal of PFAS is a good thing but makes for less effective “breathable” rain gear

Hopefully the article works.

https://www.backpacker.com/gear/appa...gn=onsiteshare

[Kenny Satch]

I wish it were as simple as Woody says. Easy for anyone with money to exercise their buying power but in the real world many can't afford to be this picky.

[Mazderati]

Maine leading the way on a lot of this given how bad it's affected the state. A first-of-its-kind law requires companies to report which of their products contain forever chemicals. The first product list was released. Hide your Kincos.

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documen...ts-summary.pdf

https://www.bangordailynews.com/2024...ver-chemicals/

https://www.pressherald.com/2024/01/...oducts-so-far/

[ötzi]

That's just so far, companies have another year to comply apparently. I have both Wells-Lamont and Kinco gloves and drive by a Saint-Gobain plastics factory at least weekly. I'm afraid to keep reading down the list.

[PB]

Seems like they need to rebrand; simpletons will think they help you live forever.

[LongShortLong]

I see the same problem as always. We've studied some chemicals and determined that in some situations they have negative effects. So, what I don't see is the analysis. Is chemical X bad, really bad, or not as good as we'd like? If we ban it, is the replacement going to be safer? Surely there are particular chemicals we should use less of, or dispose of more carefully. Others likely outweigh their alternatives.

And there is also a political problem in that polluters will unduly influence any process we use to characterize and regulate chemical use. Coal pollution seems a good example - everything from the mining to the burning causes widespread heavy metal, acid, and radioactive pollution (and CO2 emissions), yet there's a strong lobby to keep poisoning ourselves. OTOH, there's a bunch of plastic abolition folks, and that seems a step too far. Their concern is plastic in the ocean so the US should stop using plastic, yet almost all US plastic is in use, landfilled, or recycled. It's overwhelmingly third world plastic going in the ocean, so the solution ought to be better waste handling in those countries. Or perhaps something about plastic use is truly terrible and we really should ban it all. My intuition says a plastic car bumper is better for the environment than a steel one. And who wants to lug glass containers around?

A related political problem is that an advanced country will ban some process, e.g. US regulates some coal pollution. And the replacement is dirtier coal plants in China, and the export of US manufacturing to China where coal derived electricity is cheaper. Or the US plastic recycling was unprofitable. So the replacement exported our "recycled plastic," actually waste, to a third country where it was disposed improperly. Or we banned mercury use in gold mining, so "artisanal mining" now pollutes other countries. And it takes decades to recognize and resolve the issues from erroneously or improperly banning some process.


I like being green, but it sure isn't easy