EU considers banning use of up to 12,000 toxic chemicals
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In the EU new products need to follow the precautionary principle [0] and proof that their product is safe for consumers, before being allowed to be sold on the market.
While in the US the product is assumed to be benign until evidence to the contrary surfaces, which is then usually solved trough civil law suits suing the company using something that is discovered to be nasty.
> To make it harder for chemical firms to avoid having individual chemicals banned, the European Chemicals Agency prefers dealing with chemicals in groups.
> Otherwise, firms can use a tactic called "regrettable substitution -- altering the composition of chemicals to create sister chemicals that could be just as dangerous, The Guardian reported.
> The toxins will be part of a regularly reviewed rolling list, according to the European Commission.
Get access to government retreats meant for diplomats, nice pay and create prestige.
But along with that comes a complete ban of gainful employment from industry after you get the top job with jail as punishment.
If you aren’t fired for colluding with industry then get a lifelong pension.
Expensive sure, but less expensive than letting industry control the regulators.
The alternative you’re suggesting ( if it even works at eliminating the collusion in the first place), is to staff such with lower qualified people, which has its own pitfalls.
No you can’t take politics out of a political institution, so it’s actually questionable how good this will end up being, and will it place the EU further behind other parts of the globe, especially if an alternative chemical can not be found for some necessary process.
Top of industry -> top of regulation is fine as long as one divests all relevant assets simultaneously.
I started to till the soil and noticed there was a lot of plastics. I dug deeper and soon realized that our yard was once an area where the previous owners incinerated their rubbish as I started to dig up very old and rusted steel drums which was the incinerator. I spoke to neighbours and they told me everyone used to do this in the area. We excavated the top soil and disposed a lot of it, I still didn't trust it. but it looked nicer.
I decided to pave the area and make raised garden beds and fill them with new soil. It's basically impossible to build them out of wood without lining them with something which may have negative health effects to humans or plants.
In the end I found an old stone / concrete planter, there's probably something in there bad for me too, but I just couldn't believe that even glazed pots contain lead?
In the US, even pottery intended for use with food may contain lead, to this day apparently:
"..there are no U.S. regulations (to my knowledge/correct me if I am wrong!) that specifically regulate the overall content of lead in pottery—even for pottery pieces intended for use with food and beverages."
https://tamararubin.com/topics/does-vintage-and-new-function...
https://tamararubin.com/2021/09/yellow-vintage-fiesta-plate-...
..which is mad of approximately 50% lead, and certainly no accident of nature.
And even if it were to occur naturally, that wouldn't make it any less hazardous.
There are plenty of known-safe materials to line garden beds with. Even unlined treated timber has been shown to be safe with only tiny trace amount of treatment making it into the plant. You might be being too paranoid for your own good.
And if that's not enough, choose one of the many other treatment options, or line your bed with a proven-safe polythene liner, or use untreated timbers that are resistant to rot like cedar/macrocarpa. If you have any real research to show that any of these options are unsafe I would love to read it.
The article contains some lists of know hyperaccumulators.
For example, sunflowers are known excellent heavy metals sponges.
Not so! Many types of wood (cedar is a big one) can withstand direct weather/soil exposure for extended periods of time (multiple years at minimum). Yes you'll need to maintain them every so often, but surely you aren't going into gardening not expecting to maintain equipment.
RoHS = Restriction of Hazardous Substances, a directive that restricts the materials that can be used in electronic devices, forbidding manufacturers from using many known toxic materials. Initially adopted in the EU but then globally due to the necessity of exporting to the EU.
It would throw me off a bit at first but I got used to it quickly. Same as with driving on the other side when I moved over from Ireland :)
It's kinda hard to notice because it's so short and similar, I hadn't noticed myself until I read your comment.
ROHS is the acronym for a 2002 EU law called "Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...
- Lead-free solders don't wet/flow as well as leaded, which causes lower manufacturing yields.
- Lead-free solders are generally more brittle and subject to earlier fatigue failures than leaded solders, so the lead-free units often fail prematurely (compared to leaded ones).
[1] https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/reference/tech_papers/2005-dad...
I’ve personally experienced tin whiskers growing between adjacent TQFP pins (resulting in product failures).
We successfully mitigated this with (1) electronic redesign so the whisker was likely to fuse (self-destruct melting via resistive heating) if it made contact with the adjacent pin in question, and (2) urethane conformal coating.
NASA studies such as https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/reference/tech_papers/2010-Pan... show that urethane conformal coating is effective against tin whiskers. But that does add another chemical and processing step and its own hazards.
The EU is doing the right thing though. Lead is bad for us and cumulative. And RoHS was about a lot more than just solder.
If you're worried about lead used in electronics and electrical systems, the focus should be lead-acid batteries, which use >10x more lead than circuit assemblies ever did. Lead-acid batteries were, however exempted from RoHS, while circuit assemblies were not.
Also at the time there was no alternative for these. Now that even UPSes are starting to use lithium, I think these will be banned sooner rather than later too.
But it's a tradeoff, because without the lead or the antimony, tin whiskers will eventually form. There is no known way to stop them, on a long enough timescale they will 100% certainly grow whiskers and eventually that will cause a failure.
Conformal coatings can reduce the rate of growth, but they don't stop it, and the conformal coating can itself cause failure as the tin whisker still grows and will exert mechanical pressure as it does.
Dealing with lead safely is much harder, and in a hobby setup can be assumed to be infeasible to be done correctly for nearly all people
- Spouse, Child or anyone sharing your apartment
- Technicians or similar which might enter your apartment
- Anyone living in your apartment after you
- Anyone to which you might sell the desk, used tool and similar
- In case of gross negligence you might also contaminate public transportation or e.g. a desk at a restaurant
- Police/Firefighters (in case they have to enter your apartment)
- ...
also many young people which start soldering as a hobby are not really aware about the health risk of solder, in which case lead free solder is still a better choice.
So no it's not just your problem.
And it doesn't matter if you specifically handle it correctly, most hobby soldering people do not and this is a general decision which is mainly about lead in hobby use cases (there are a bunch exceptions for companies).
Well and it's also about sold devices, because that also matter, children get there hand on them and there are various (sometimes surprising) ways how lead from soldering can get into the life of people using the product, instead of producing it.
Fire retardants which are known to cause cancer or birth defects, I'm not so sure. Then there's the fact that Oxyten is literally everwhere, do you want those retardants to be everywhere too, in your lungs?
On the other hand, they’re very good at stopping you from burning to death. Even the ones we have banned (or will ban) and replaced with others are very good at preventing a really really bad way to die.
Also, quite a lot of toxic things are also organic, regardless of if you’re using that word in the chemical sense or the “it’s natural” sense.
Flame retardants only really give you a slight edge vs a burning cigarette on a couch.
We coated our couches, clothes, carpets etc in cancerous chemicals to save a few smokers that passed out drunk
We literally coated everything in carcinogenic chemicals for the dumbest of reasons.
They also save the families of those smokers, and people like my sister who knocked over a candle and had enough time to put it out despite not having a fire extinguisher, and people like me who forgot food on the stove one time, or people like my dad who missed when pouring burning brandy onto a Christmas puddings.
If you still find this unconvincing, ask yourself why life expectancy has gone up rather than down since the invention and mandated use of fire retardants.
CO would be a better comparison, and we have actual detectors for it in houses.
That shouldn’t matter. My point is the standard being called for is ridiculous because it would also ban oxygen for being (1) toxic and (2) accumulating in the environment.
I'm sure the actual standard surely takes accumulation levels into account otherwise it wouldn't make any sense at all, as you say. Unlike in the US, EU laws aren't usually written by idiots.
(Oxygen toxicity is really the one thing in recreational scuba diving training where they tell you "do this and you will positively die").
Ubiquity increases the changes of high dose. There are now plastics in human blood for example:
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/microplastics-dete...
Farmers, just like any other industry, is very good at reading rules and finding very creative ways in between them how to maximize profits regardless of human costs. I don't blame them per se, but let's not be naive about farmers being some sort of saints doing whatever possible to feed the needy with as-healthy-as-possible healthy food.
Banning makes things much easier to actually govern and enforce, and doesn't leave endless amounts of backdoors for serious catastrophes 20-50 years down the road. We already had plenty of them to take lesson or two, most started with good intentions but lack of deep scientific understanding which we still don't have in such scale to clear any of these substances to be actually safe.
Also, some of us have kids and actually want to leave an OK world for them, if not better, not a scorched wasteland just to have marginally better retirement financial situation.
But it looks serious, peer reviewed papers and all that. The main reason seems to be that at a low dose, the chemical doesn't trigger "defense" reactions and can do its thing unimpeded (high effect), on a medium dose, our body starts to notice and dampen the effect (low effect). High doses are simply overwhelming and the effect becomes high again.
I still think there is a lot of pseudoscience around that effect that helps selling a lot of "natural", "detox", etc..., but I don't think all of it is bullshit anymore.
A classic example is endocrine disruptors (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4036398/), a small dose induces a hormonal response, a medium dose the body fights due to detecting it as foreign and a high dose is just regular toxic. Please note this is somewhat simplified but used as an example.
An example of this type of selective poisoning is cashiers handling receipts laced with BPA all day.
(By ban I mean consumer exposure, not ban for use without exposure.)
In case anyone is wondering it's because of acrylamide.
So a bag of potato chips should come with a Safety Data Sheet? Maybe a big red tag attached to persimmons in the produce department warning you they can cause bezoars? I prefer a world where that's considered insane. The human race has made it this far without this degree of coddling. And no, I'm not suggesting we go back to the days of steak and cigarette sandwiches but people should be entrusted to make reasonable decisions without the need for scare tactics.
Or a QR code w/ link to SDS for those who care.
> Maybe a big red tag attached to persimmons in the produce department warning you they can cause bezoars?
Great idea! I have not known about unripened persimmons causing bezoars, thank you!
> The human race has made it this far without this degree of coddling. And no, I'm not suggesting we go back to the days of steak and cigarette sandwiches but people should be entrusted to make reasonable decisions without the need for scare tactics.
Why put warnings on cigarettes / alcohol at all then? Why isn't that "too much coddling"? Human race will survive even if we go back to using leaded gasoline and asbestos (after all, it survived a period when that was common), so if that's the only goal you have, I think we're already there and the warnings are not reducing our chances.
> (...) people should be entrusted to make reasonable decisions without the need for scare tactics.
And how do you make sure that they do? What's reasonable for you is not the same as what's reasonable for me. What you think may be common knowledge may not be as common for others (TIL about persimmons).
Out of curiosity I’ve locked up the list. It includes: “alcoholic beverages”, “bitumen”, “leather dust”, “testosterone”, “unleaded gasoline”, “wood dust”, and I can also recognise several medicines on the list.
I wonder if it’s even possible to avoid all these things?
Good job California!
And that is why California is an object of mockery by the rest of the world.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide#Occurrence_in_food_...
"On April 24, 2002, the Swedish National Food Administration announced that acrylamide can be found in baked and fried starchy foods, such as potato chips, breads, and cookies. Concern was raised mainly because of the probable carcinogenic effects of acrylamide."
"In 2016, the UK Food Standards Agency launched a campaign called "Go for Gold", warning of the possible cancer risk associated with cooking potatoes and other starchy foods at high temperatures."
"From this, they [WHO & FAO of UN] concluded acrylamide levels in food were safe in terms of neuropathy, but raised concerns over human carcinogenicity based on known carcinogenicity in laboratory animals."
The summary report for FAO/WHO consultations on acrylamide is available at http://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/67372:
"Risk communication The Consultation would encourage transparent and open risk assessment and risk management processes and recognises the importance of involving interested parties (consumer, industry, retail etc.) in this process at some stages. Risk communication policy could facilitate the crucial communication process between risk assessor and risk manager and among all parties involved."
https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredie...
"""It is highly toxic, likely to be carcinogenic,[6] but its main derivative polyacrylamide is nontoxic. The possibility that this innocuous bulk chemical contains traces of its hazardous precursor has long attracted attention.""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide
I note another comment saying this has indeed been found in various foods, typically when heated for long periods over 120 C. I don’t think bread gets that hot (when it does it’s called toast).
It does when they bake it. Bread is baked at an average of 200C. How do you think the crust forms?!
People all over the world now have PFAS in their bodies as a result of the capitalist rot in the US. We didn't ask for this, and yet we're all subjected to it. PFAS are forever chemicals that will last centuries.
https://massivesci.com/articles/dark-waters-pfas-focus-featu...
When govt bans, its the people who pay the price.
> Chemical category groups like PVC plastics, flame retardants and bisphenols are included in the EU's plan.
So... building houses are going to get a lot more expensive? (I'm assuming this means you now have to use copper piping for new houses instead of PVC since it would be banned).
[0] https://www.state.nj.us/humanservices/opmrdd/health/pvc.html
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/10/phthala...
[2] https://themicrogardener.com/is-pvc-plastic-safe-to-use-in-a...
The leech rates are absolutely crazy. Copper is the only way, ideally pro-press