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Comment by yes_man | Hacker News Reader

Banning substances one after another has proven to be quite useless or even damaging approach. Another, less studied and potentially worse chemical compound will always substitute the banned ones. It’s an endless game of whack a mole to keep banning a substance for next random one to spawn.

More correct approach might be that if you want to use a chemical in food packaging or children’s equipment, you must first do long-term studies that prove its relative safety to other studied compounds. In time the world would start accumulating safer products. I won’t hold my breath though.

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There was a time--not too long ago actually--when the standards were waxed paper, parchment paper, and glass. Paper being biodegradable, glass being highly inert, and neither causing as much ecological devastation or endocrine disruption as plastic.

So technically speaking, it's a solved problem. But from a market perspective, for the people who eat the glyphosate-dusted insulin resistance that's wrapped inside the plastic, i'm willing to bet the pseudoestrogens are the least of their worries.

The future will look unkindly at our present day pursuit of profits whilst ignoring negative externalities.

When those materials were the standard we also didn't have a lot of the medical and technological equipment today that arguably reduced both mortality and morbidity across large swaths of a much, much larger population. Plastics are used widely in electronics and all of the accompanying tech improvements too it isn't just simple as packaging, so it isn't a "solved problem" if you want to go back to those materials and replace everything plastic has become standard for in today's technologies.

What does "pthalates in food packaging" have to do with medicine or technology? For food it is a solved problem.

Also, #1 contribution to life expectancy has been public hygiene. Aside from antibiotics, all of the other medical interventions have been noise.

https://sjbpublichealth.org/200-years-public-health-doubled-...

> the largest gain in life expectancy occurred between 1880 and 1920 due to public health improvements such as control of infectious diseases, more abundant and safer foods, cleaner water, and other nonmedical social improvements

The plastics, which might as well be considered solidified gasoline, are also a tremendous hazard in home furnishings[0]. The flame-retardants slow the burn a little, but still highly combustible compared to traditional materials. The science is pointing the finger at the same flame retardants for raising cancer rates among firefighters around 10% higher than the general population[1,2].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87hAnxuh1g8

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8403436/

[2] https://www.sffcpf.org/news-post-2/

Food doesn’t last as long in those first two, so it results in more food waste and fuel usage. Glass is heavy and is energy intensive to process.

The EU has done tons of studies on pros and cons of different food packaging technology and their overall impact to these other factors.

Personally speaking, I would prefer to use a little more fuel, and "waste" a little more food, if that meant having fewer microplastics circulating in my blood stream.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

After all, if they're in my bloodstream, they're probably everywhere, and if we happen to discover anything more harmful about that than endocrine disruption, good luck pulling all of that plastic back out of the environment.

Glass uses very little energy, creates very little waste, when it is re-collected & washed--a common practice as recently as the early 1980s.

I quote the word "waste" because I remember how things were. In the glass & paper days, we didn't waste nearly as much food as people do today. No one did. The fast food / fast casual dining experiences--which have popped up everywhere--are monuments of food waste. If you don't believe me, ask any of the employees how much food they throw away on a daily basis.

Burning fuel creates waste because motion of vehicles, tires, etc. creates micro plastics…

You are arguing that the weight difference between the containers (not the contents, which usually--rationally!--far outweigh their container) is going to wear more rubber off the tires and into the environment than the truckload of plastic containers themselves. That is ridiculous.

It’s a fun calculation, glass is more than an order of magnitude heavier, multiply that by the $200B food packaging industry and you get some big numbers :)

Exactly, they need to switch to a whitelisted approach.

I've read that this is the EU's approach, altho I don't know how it works out in practice.

The downside is that novel technologies (eg. GMOs) take forever to get approved.

How is that a bad thing?

People starving to death in the mean time, perhaps?

As a result of GMOs the carrying capacity of the world increased. Isn’t it the case that the population tends toward the carrying capacity? If so then the delay of GMOs would only mean that the world’s population today would be lower and not that the amount of overall starvation would be higher. We still have episodes of starvation in the world even with GMOs.

>As a result of GMOs the carrying capacity of the world increased. Isn’t it the case that the population tends toward the carrying capacity?

This model assumes that human population will grow forever. Carrying capacity is one constraint on total population, but it's not the only constraint. Nowadays population growth is slowing down because demographic factors (ie. falling fertility), not because we've reached the earth's carrying capacity and famines are killing people off.

Sure, those factors come into play and are dominant. It seems to me that one can’t assume there would have been more starvation had GMOs not been invented. And the factors you mentioned haven’t yet had an effect in India and Africa. The population of there has greatly increased alongside the rise of GMO. I’m not saying GMOs are the cause of sad increase but I am suggesting that the population in India and Africa might have been lower today without GMOs without being the result of starvation.

People in the EU aren't starving to death though.

Appropriate laws for appropriate circumstances. Given high standard of living in EU they can afford to take the long road with many improvements to food security favoring safety over reduced cost or expediency.

The problem is not a shortage of food. The problem is its distribution. Like many things.

Which makes sense. New technologies should be approached using a precautionary principle.

>New technologies should be approached using a precautionary principle.

But what happens in reality is:

When we apply the precautionary principle, it's because technology is dangerous and The Responsible Thing to Do is to be careful. When our opponents apply the precautionary principle, they're luddites who hate change and just want an excuse to drag their feet. Here are some examples to illustrate that effect

* nuclear power

* vaccines

* self-driving cars/AI

* gmo

Nuclear power was plenty dangerous in its first iterations and there was in fact too little precaution. Chernobyl and three mile Island really shouldn't have happened. Fukushima was much later in the game but was also bad design.

I think the tech is safer now but the nuclear industry really has itself to blame. It's no wonder anti-nuclear sentiments increased after each disaster.

With the other ones I agree more.

> Chernobyl and three mile Island really shouldn't have happened. Fukushima was much later in the game but was also bad design.

Fukushima was an older reactor then Chernobyl, by 6 years (commissioned 1971 vs 1977).

Very old nuclear reactors are common partly because it's been politically untenable to build new ones, even if the new ones are safer.

Ok I did not know that, but I thought Chernobyl was already an old design when it was commissioned?

Leningrad 1, in 1974, was the first RBMK reactor ever (though, like most reactors, the general principles date back further). Chernobyl 1 was 1977, so the design was only 3 years from first online. Chernobyl 4, the one that exploded, was actually built in 1983, 12 years after Fukushima 1 (one of the 3 that melted down).

Fukushima 1 was a GE BWR-3, 2 and 3 were BWR-4. These were introduced in 1965 and 1966 respectively. Both RBMK and BWR have they origins in the 50s.

So, in terms of newness of the specific model, the RBMK was a little under 10 years newer than the BWR-3/4. That said, the RBMK failed due to an internal reactor design issue, the Fukushima BWRs due to reactor support system failure.

What's your plan to ensure the whitelist is responsibly curated?

My guess: it'll either have everything on it, or every N years we'll get a new brand of government mandated Asbestos Free Cereal. No thanks.

Same plan we use for drugs. Test if it's safe, if it's safe we allow it's use, if not we don't.

Initially it will probably need to grandfather stuff in but having a whitelist will make it easier to ensure unsafe things aren't replaced by even worse things.

The problem is you can't practically do that for many compounds either because of ethical reasons or because it would take far too long and would in the mean time impede progress significantly.

Take plastics for example, they're as acutely non-toxic as you can get you're not having any readily measurable adverse health outcomes from handling it, touching it, and even consuming foods directly in contact with it. And yet there are still things we would have missed even if we adopted this whitelisting approach. We would have never captured the problem of microplastics that we see today, the mechanical and chemical breakdown of plastics in the environment leading to far higher consumption and presence of it in our bodies could not have realistically been studied or predicted even if we took a whitelisting approach.

Now you have to consider what the effects of whitelisting everything would mean for productivity and progress. Imagine how much more everyday things would cost if plastics had to be whitelisted before being allowed in any products. Even now knowing about the existence of microplastics, it isn't clear that the effects they have decisively outweigh the benefits of plastics.

First of all I am mostly talking about plastics in the context of food packaging.

I would be more inclined to agree with your argument regarding progress/innovation if there were more novel plastics coming to the market for food packaging but that isn't really the case and there hasn't been anything ground-breaking since PET.

Whitelisting at this stage of maturity isn't just the right thing to do, it's also easy and beats playing whackamole if you decide something needs to get phased out.

>I would be more inclined to agree with your argument regarding progress/innovation if there were more novel plastics coming to the market for food packaging but that isn't really the case and there hasn't been anything ground-breaking since PET.

disagree. there are new plastics constantly , and using bio-degradable plastics in packaging is getting a huge push within the industry for the past few years.

One example would be bovine-gelatin-films which are a new replacement for 'saran-wrap' style wrapping plastics.

a push for biodegradable plastics has been active since the U.N. listed it as a goal.

one imagines it would be hard to fully vet every proposed idea, there are thousands. Time will tell which will be human-kind.

https://sdgs.un.org/goals

Bovine gelatin is another Creutzfeld—Jakob’s prion disaster waiting to happen.

You think there are prions in the gelatin? What makes you say that?

Bovine gelatin is made from the animal’s brain tissues and it was a major transmission vector in the UK CJD disaster. At least that was the story then, apparently the truth is not so.

Why are illegal drugs illegal when they would be much safer if legal?

Because someone makes a lot of money when they are illegal.

Same goes for the legal drugs. Someone makes a lot of money when they are legal.

This balance is key to solving many of our societal problems, but we tend to completely black-and-white ignore it.

First, do the mother of all grandfathers. Start with a very big list of allowed things, so that every product currently on the shelves can be sold without any issue. And then plan to both add and remove things as time goes on.

Then what you end up with is Prop 65 - everything causes cancer.

The right response is a risk-based approach. Nothing is every 100% safe, so it's not a reasonable filter.

Basically each new product should be judged for the risk versus the benefit. If it can be easily substituted with a known safer product, then it's forced to go through testing.

If there is no known substitute and the benefit is high, then it can tentatively be approved with follow up tests later.

I guess we should never have outlawed the addition of lead to gasoline?

That's an element. These are compounds. There are a lot more compounds than elements, and it's a lot easier to find one you can sub in to do the same thing.

(yes, the lead in gasoline was part of a particular molecule, too—which just proves my point, if we'd outlawed the specific molecule/compound that would have opened the door to finding other technically-different ones that still included lead—but you can't exactly outlaw carbon, so that approach won't work this time)

That's really moving the goal posts. Who's to say the fuel industry couldn't have chosen a different substance that's poisonous in some other way? It's fundamentally the same argument. Lead being a universally poisonous element just made the decision easy. I agree that bans can and probably often do backfire, but it's not as simple as either never banning things or instead whitelisting things to be allowed.

It's not moving the goalposts, the two actions are meaningfully different. Lead is basically always dangerous, so "no lead" is an easy call and has the desired effect. The lead, specifically, was causing the entire problem, and it'll keep doing so pretty much no matter how you arrange other elements around it. Some other compounds to replace it might be dangerous, but essentially every lead compound is going to be dangerous.

Carbon compounds, meanwhile, are practically endless and there's no one quality you can point to and say "that, that right there is the problem, ban that part". Piecemeal bans won't work.

They did actually, it's called MTBE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_tert-butyl_ether#Regula....

Tetraethyllead is an element?

> (yes, the lead in gasoline was part of a particular molecule, too—which just proves my point, if we'd outlawed the specific molecule/compound that would have opened the door to finding other technically-different ones that still included lead—but you can't exactly outlaw carbon, so that approach won't work this time)

And that wasn't an edit, it was there from the beginning.

They didn't ban lead, they banned Tetraethyllead, an anti-knock compound used in gasoline.

>... if we'd outlawed the specific molecule/compound that would have opened the door to finding other technically-different ones that still included lead

I'm not sure what to make of that. The point of the ban was to keep lead out of the environment and people's blood levels which we did successfully. Lead isn't some sentient being looking to find it's way into our systems regardless of the actions of man.

> I'm not sure what to make of that. The point of the ban was to keep lead out of the environment and people's blood levels which we did successfully. Lead isn't some sentient being looking to find it's way into our systems regardless of the actions of man.

Yes—the "actions of man" might have been to create a different, also-useful-for-that-purpose lead compound, if they thought they could get away with it without someone putting a stop to it more or less immediately, just for the fact that it had lead in it. The trouble with many of these compounds is we can't point to a single easy-to-prove thing they have in common, like the presence of lead, as the cause of the harm—so you're left either testing for harm before the novel compound is included in products, or endless piecemeal bans with harm occurring at every step until, if we're fortunate, industries luck into compounds that are both the most economical and least-harmful of the remaining non-banned options.

No, rather long term and large scale peer reviewed studies would have to show that lead in gasoline does not cause harm in humans.

Real world is not black and white and we definitely should ban clearly poisonous or otherwise harmful (e.g. hormone mimicking) chemicals from food products and children’s utilities.

Point is if we keep going like this we might not ever arrive in a situation where everyday life is mostly free from dangerous compounds

It's almost as if you want to remove externalities from the food supply chain...

They could ban all additives except approved ones...

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