3M Cuts Output of PFAS Used in Chip Production
eetimes.com
eetimes.com
PFAS are known as "forever chemicals" because they do not break down in nature. They are also quite bad for most animals, including of course humans. The 3M plant has been illegally dumping significant amounts of PFAS in the environment, both in the air and by dumping it in a river.
During a test, over 90% of the 800ish people living within a 2-mile radius of the plant had amounts of PFAS in their body exceeding safe limits, with 60% reaching levels which could have health effects. An area of about 3 square mile around the plant is contaminated significantly enough that 3M has been made liable for sanitation.
The government has of course ordered 3M to cease dumping PFAS, which I guess is the reason they are now cutting output. The story is made even more complicated because it's happening a few miles upstream from the Belgium - The Netherlands border so it is cross-border pollution - and The Netherlands is currently working to turn some land near the border into a wetlands nature reserve.
Here is one of the few English local news items I know about:
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2022/03/28/pfos-pfas-inquiry-co...
PFAS is the broadest subset of materials that contain a F-C bond and this includes teflon pan coatings, high-temperature o-rings (all vehicles/industrial equipment), fire-fighting materials for explosive environments (fertilizer, pyro, weapons, storage, etc.), and in this example, solvents that allow the semiconductor industry to function (because the periodic table has no replacement for the properties of a F-C bond).
There is a smaller subset PFAS materials that bioaccumulate: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19759456/
We know about the bioaccumulation effects because of new sensor technologies, and we are also only now learning how to break the F-C bond effectively for remediation (i.e. nothing is truly ‘forever’): https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181002082417.h...
(I.e. “PFAS are known as "forever chemicals" because they do not break down in nature.” might better be stated that they do not break down quickly in nature; forever chemicals is technically a misnomer).
tl;dr humanity is in the slow learning process of how to best deal with new materials technology.
I find this topic analogous to the topic of ‘nuclear’ which has oscillated between ‘this will solve everything’ to ‘it’s all bad’ in the last century (and is now slowly changing as society is educated and can understand a bit more nuance).
That said, until shit had been hitting the fan a lot of facts about PFAS had been kept in secrecy with active manipulation going on. Even today there isn't much authorative and practical information available.
Also the practical benefit of Teflon pans over say Emaille or iron pans is more than questionable. Are professional cooks really using Teflon pans?
A lot (most?) of the usage of these in semiconductors is not as solvents--they are thermal transfer fluids being used like refrigerants. This usage of them is for keeping equipment at exactly some specific temperature. As such, the usage is mostly closed-cycle.
One of the reasons for using these is that they replaced earlier chemicals that were chlorofluorocarbons--a Cl-C bond destroys ozone when it gets loose while an F-C bond simply doesn't come apart.
While the end chemicals tend to be incredibly stable, the byproducts of manufacturing--not so much.
There can’t be that many factories pumping out these chemicals in that area.
"It's not us", "we have no idea", "our tests show we're clean" works for a shockingly long time in modern Western societies - the government has to prove that it is indeed 3M or whoever else who causes the pollution, and government agencies usually tend to take time until an investigation is complete. And even then, offenders can file a lawsuit... and until that lawsuit is finished and unappealable, it can take many years if not decades. And during that time, everyone claiming that a specific company is an offender is under severe risk of a defamation lawsuit.
We definitely need reforms both in staffing of regulatory agencies as well as in defamation lawsuits in cases of environment or labor offenses.
> J&J, which also makes products such as Tylenol and Band-Aid, assigned legal liability for the complaints to the spinoff company, which immediately filed for bankruptcy — a maneuver dubbed the "Texas two-step."
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/25/1083061992/johnson-johnson-wi...
It's not surprising or even noteworthy for 3M to deny culpability until they can't. Not that it's good or right or ethical, but corporations are rule based non human entities that shouldn't be viewed as equivalent to or extensions of humans. They often behave inhumanely and despicably because the rules allow them to do so. That's a failure of the rules and system in which they operate. Bad actors, like the Sackler family, can direct a corporation down a legitimately evil path, but usually the negative externalities aren't the fault of companies.
If 3M takes responsibility and cleans it up, or puts resources into figuring out how, I would see that as a good thing. If they shuffle things around, draw out the resolution, screw people over, then they'd be joining Nestlé and their ilk.
We need better corporate models and incentives. "What we can get away with" is not a great lower limit on behavior, but since it's what we have, we should assume that and account for it when regulating business.
Thanks for this phrasing. Any books, essays or videos that you would recommend on this perspective? How about the Citizens United ruling in the U.S.?
> We need better corporate models and incentives. "What we can get away with" is not a great lower limit on behavior, but since it's what we have, we should assume that and account for it when regulating business.
What are some best practices or successful case studies for this approach? Could smart contracts and DAOs be regulated?
They already are: contracts and companies have legal definitions and processes. If you shoehorn a blockchain in the middle it doesn't change that.
The law generally doesn't get involved in informal agreements, like smart contracts and DAOs usually are, but then you don't get much recourse if you get screwed over (unless it's outright fraudulent or otherwise illegal). Which, a lot of the time is the point of making it a DAO only and not having any actual legal entity.
NFTs have some particularly egregious examples of scams and schemes by A-list famous people, and nothing gets done because everyone involved in the transactions are frothing at the mouth crazy over "web 3, omg."
As far as smart contracts go, basic control logic has to be built and a library of modules made available and a system cultivated by which users and developers can test and validate everything. Reversible transactions and failsafe mechanisms have to be the foundation of any investment so that when errors inevitably occur, someone in charge can unfuck things. A board of directors could be given individual keys in a multi-signature scheme, or so on.
Once or twice a month we're seeing crypto thefts in the 7+ figures and it's always because of obscure flaws in the code that could be avoided by developing on tested, verifiable, and validated code. That means a level of rigor only currently seen in international banking, nasa missions, and so on.
The big problem with crypto investing right now is "I wrote this smart contract last weekend at a hackathon, let's invest millions of dollars!"
Decentralization doesn't mean everything has to or should be decentralized - sometimes its enough that the overarching system is not under the thumb of an arbitrary authority. Centralized entities within the bitcoin or ethereun ecosystem will be the first crypto banks and exchanges, and you'll eventually be able to code legal requirements directly into contracts (and vice versa, once the ruling class starts to include people educated in cryptocurrency.)
Of course, few people actually use crypto as an adjunct to legal system: some specifically don't want the legal processes (and protections) to kick in, and some just want to have used pure crypto for it's own sake even when a existing systems would have sufficed.
Intro (PDF), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247150
They ask the government to prove that it's all because of them, and nobody but them.
Then challenge and obstruct every step of that process.
We don't have magical Stark Trek tricorders, which beep when you stand next to the poisoned river, and beep louder when you point them at the PFAS factory. We have tests that take time to run, that can infer facts about the world - but we need to justify performing them, and then need to reason and argue that their results mean what they mean.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2022/mar/18/cdc-study-show...
Edit: I just realized the question was about a different comment. Leaving this here because I still think it's somewhat relevant and interesting. Apologies.
[0] https://www.brusselstimes.com/175561/3m-zwijndrecht-oosterwe...
The EU should start a program to get their nations to put national parks on their borders. This would be generally nice, and also it would improve unity by preventing this sort of thing. Plus, if the EU ever broke up and European countries returned to their combative roots, it would set the stage for some nice woodland battles to break up the monotony (ok the last one might not be a serious reason).
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...
For most people, that makes filtering only marginally effective. There will always be parts of your diet from a farm within a few miles of a building where they tested a PFAS fire extinguisher.
My long term plan is to rip the giant pressure tank out of the underground well room and put in stainless steel tanks and many fine filters, charcoal, UV, etc... and one drill pump and small pressure tank per house so that I have reserve water when the underground pump fails and a way to fill the reserve tanks from a truck.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pfas+in+fast+food+wrappers&t=fpas&...
The thing is, there's always a solution available to the waste problem that doesn't involve dumping the gunk into the water, air and soil. Those solutions are typically expensive, i.e. you have to build a whole backend processing plant to deal with the waste. I'd guess high-intensity UV can be used to break strong C-F bonds, for example.
The article states 3M (an ex-employer of mine incidentally, though in a completely unrelated area) will now do this:
> "We have also put in place new controls in Zwijndrecht, including technology to control air emissions, and capture, dispose, and treat PFAS in water. These investments, along with appropriate collaboration with the relevant authorities, help us bring idled processes back online enabling European production of essential products for our customers around the world."
What's ridiculous is that flourinated hydrocarbon waste has been a known serious pollution issue for decades, and yet chemical manufacturers have been allowed to keep dumping without being forced to build such back-end processing plants to deal with it.
Spoiler: They leaked
When IBM and others did this in the past, the decision basically outsourced the environmental pain to other countries, because those chemicals were going to be made by someone somewhere.
A more advanced discussion on the topic might be along the lines of:
“if we know that this material will be produced somewhere in the world, is it not best to put our brightest minds on how to most effectively deal with the waste stream? The added costs of mitigation should equal additional tariffs on the same product in countries that ignore environmental impact.”
This is one of the observed failures of globalization: the government incentivized manufacturing to make other places suffer forgetting that we all share the same planets, and that the wealthy/educated countries should be leading the way on how to ‘best’ manufacture and deal with waste streams.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/silic...
These days though a big driver for the cost savings of globalized products are things like lax environmental regulations or ability to mistreat and exploit workforces.
This is akin to writing about pollution in Union City, while conveniently forgetting to mention that NYC is on the other side of the river.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/25/health/pfas-chemicals-fast-fo...
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/waste/pfas-investigation-and-cle...
Am I supposed to treat it like toxic waste?
PTFE landfilled though is as far as I know pretty inert. The manufacturing process involves chemistry which is harmful if not properly done, but the finished product not so much unless burned.
https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/data-center-us/applications/imme...
https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/c/b/novec/i/electronics/ (Specifically, the "engineered fluids").
What was desirable about these chemicals in the first place? Looking at a specific Novec product page:
https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/p/d/b40044867/
This liquid:
- Is non-flammable
- Is electrically non-conductive
- Is compatible with plastics
- Has zero ozone depletion potential
- Has low acute toxicity
- Has low global warming potential
- Is a VOC-exempt solvent [1]
Here's what 3M says about Fluorinert for semiconductor manufacturing:
Semiconductor manufacturing requires precision. Very small temperature variations may have big impact on yield. Compared to aqueous coolants like deionized water, Fluorinert electronic liquids offer wider operating temperatures, require less maintenance and will not damage electronic equipment or wafers if a leak occurs.
These products offered lower environmental and health hazards on the then-known dimensions of risk when they were introduced to the market. But the risk assessment has changed as the chronic endocrine disrupting effects of these chemicals (and/or their manufacturing byproducts) has become better understood and regulated. In the long term I don't know whether semiconductor manufacturing processes will substitute deionized water for Fluorinert (with the downsides mentioned above, but zero environmental/health risk) or if Fluorinert use will continue with heightened emphasis on preventing releases into the environment. Semiconductor manufacturing already uses some very toxic materials like hydrofluoric acid and phosphine, but with correspondingly stringent guards against worker exposure.
I don't have much experience with ceramic, but most people that dislike cast iron are using it wrong:
1) put all non cast iron frying pans, skillets, etc in storage, and make the cast iron the default (so the cast iron is used at least every few months and the patina is maintained over time).
2) put a small amount of oil in the pan each time you cook (unless the food is fatty, like ground beef)
3) to clean, scrape with a small rectangular plastic scraper (such as the brown one pampered chef makes for $3), and finish with a stainless steel pot scrubber. Do not use soap. Use hot water and dry immediately (perhaps by heating it briefly on the range and storing it there). Optionally recoat with oil once dry. This should be easier than maintaining Teflon, or you are doing something wrong. Look for more advice.
If you've ruined the seasoning already (or got a "ruined" one for free, hint, hint,...), give it a thorough cleaning, coat in a very thin layer of cheap oil (canola/vegetable is fine, exotic oils often have exotic problems, like flaking) and bake for a few hours at 20-50 degrees below the smoke point of the oil you chose.
When cooking, the first step should always be to start preheating the cast iron.
If you still really dislike cast iron, consider stainless, optionally with a copper core. You might want a stainless sauce pan anyway, since simmering tomatos in cast iron strips the seasoning over time.
Stainless is harder to clean, but is otherwise fine. Make sure the stainless is induction compatible, since a mid-priced stainless set will outlive you (be sure to get metal handles with solid rivets). Induction is the future, and you don't want to toss the set in a few decades.
Using modern dish soap on cast iron is entirely fine, the detergents used are much softer than the sorts of lye-based soap that this advice stems from, and will not remove the baked-on (polymerized) seasoning. (It will slightly slow down the rate of seasoning accumulation by removing the thin layer of unpolymerized oil, but this can be fixed by just wiping on a thin coat of oil after washing and drying the pan. I usually don't even bother doing that much though.)
In general I think that most guidance for using cast iron is overly cautious and makes it sound like more of a hassle than it needs to be. At the end of the day it's a large hunk of metal, and there's very little you can do in the kitchen that will permanently mess it up.
edit: One piece of advice I do have: don't use a plastic spatula, they're a suboptimal choice people are forced into by easily-damaged cookware. Since that's not a concern with cast iron, you should get a thin metal spatula (example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0015R7P6O). The tip will always be exceedingly thin and never deform/melt/get torn up like a plastic spatula, and as a bonus it doubles as a very effective scraper for easy cleanup.