The trick of contaminating the environment with such dangerous chemicals is that death is slow. That people die 10 or 20 years later of strange cancers or have children with odd birth defects, allows businesses wiggle room. It's not a clear immediate threat, so many minds are slow on grasping the extreme danger involved.
Only very strong consumer advocacy and voter pressure (where politicians demonstrably get kicked out of office) will have a chance of making a true difference.
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...generally a chemical that doesn't degrade is chemically inert so it has less chances than any other more degradable compounds to cause harm (btw, how much research did we put into the multiple pathways of degradation for the currently fashinable "biodegradable" stuff? how many of those possible intermediary degradation compounds are not in fact quite toxical). (Bio)degradable also means reactive, so things are more complicated than it seems.
But yeah, any non-degradable fluid is probably a very bad idea because it's gonna spill and get everywhere, so even minor probability of toxic effect could have insanely large consequences...
One of the least reactive metals, Platinum, is an excellent catalyst in numerous reactions, but often found entirely unreacted in nature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platinum
a stable chemical can have catastrophic consequences for various species, if it is a potent agonist/antagonist in a critical signalling pathway, or an enzyme/inhibitor of some process. Often these effects are clinically relevant in nanomolar concentrations.
The stable chemical DDT is so stable, it actually bioaccumulates, with biological half-life in decades. It's also a known carcinogen that elevates risks of cancer 4-5x simply from historical exposure decades ago.
As for "biodegradable", that's often basically fraud. PLA (polylactic acid), one of the most common greenwashing plastics, does not biodegrade at all under common conditions, outside of very specific composting process, not usually (maybe even never?) found in nature. Luckily PLA isn't very toxic.
There are also a lot of polymers and plastics we wouldn't call "forever chemicals" but still last quite a while.
So is it really the "forever-ness" of these chemicals that's so bad? Maybe it's how they seem to spread everywhere and potentially mess with certain biological systems (e.g. endocrine disruption)?
It is my understanding that currently you're allowed to manufacture a completely new chemical and put it into your product with essentially no testing of the long term effect of that compound. That doesn't seem very wise to me, but maybe I'm misinformed about this topic.
Plastic production is growing at 3.5% annually. This implies a doubling of annual plastic production about every 20 years (because 1.035^20 ≈ 2).
And because of how exponential functions work, this also means there has been about a doubling of the total amount of plastic in the world over the last 20 years.
So most of the problem has been created in the recent past. And it will get twice as bad in the next 20 years.
Pretty much. There's also a fairly long history of a compound being found to be harmful and banned, only for industry to come up with a very similar compound to replace it, but since it's not the same compound the previous ban doesn't affect it. Then after some time the new compound is found to be harmful as well, rinse and repeat.
The counter-argument is that requiring each chemical to be extensively studied before it can be taken into use would drastically slow down the rate of innovation.
So to an extent there's a conflict between safety and innovation. But of course it's not black and white, and I think there's good reasons to turn the lever more towards the safety end.
https://chemsec.org/eu-puts-200-pfas-out-of-business-but-tho...
It's not just endocrine disruptors. Those are just most salient to us because we are species with sexual reproduction.
You could also have forever carcinogens, forever mutagens, forever neurotoxins, anything you like.