Exactly, they need to switch to a whitelisted approach.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.