Rainwater everywhere on Earth unsafe to drink due to ‘forever chemicals’
euronews.com
euronews.com
We have failed all future generations
Just today I learned that all commercial beverage bottles and cans in the US are treated with fluorinated gases and then leach these same forever chemicals to whatever beverage they contain.
Looking at the past, profits are more important that human or animal life. For example: https://qz.com/1630348/dupont-and-3m-face-a-growing-list-of-...
What do you mean “proven safe”?
Water is unlikely to be consumed in the toxic doses. The few cases where water overdoses happened were drinking competitions where participants forced themselves to drink many liters of water as fast as possible, leading to fatal electrolyte imbalances.
You're basically describing the challenge itself - how do you balance risk vs. benefit? The FDA does it every day, all day and still makes the wrong call sometimes.
Right now, I'd argue to be wary of _any_ novel polymers and substances (yes, it already happens for medicine and food), and to critically re-examine whatever was introduced before. The issue of microplastics and their impact on the ecosystem is clearly something we didn't think about before (more likely, we straightaway dismissed it).
Hormones excreted in the urine are measurable in waterways. Hormones have an impact on all sorts of organisms, even at low concentrations.
Would it have been better to ban birth control pills until we figured out a way to avoid contaminating waterways? What if we never figured it out?
Would the world be a better place without birth control pills but hormone-free waterways?
Edit: the point is quite valid for other drugs though.
Honestly, yes. The copper IUD was invented in the 1960s, not long after birth-control pills; besides, condoms had existed for a long time by that point. As far as contraception goes, the pill shouldn't be the first choice - many women experience significant mood changes from the hormones, and it's quite possible that the hormones circulating in the water have deleterious effects on both male and female fertility. I'm aware that the pill was a significant contributor to the sexual revolution, but the effects of that, 60 years later, are not uniformly positive.
It's mainly a change of mindset - leaded fuel is such a good example, it was known to be toxic right from its invention (almost killed its inventor), yet it took us decades of arguing before we were ready to act on that knowledge - because said inventor and his cronies always managed to cast a shadow of doubt, and we seemed to act like as long as we weren't 100% sure we couldn't ban anything (so basically 'safe-until-proven-otherwise').
Things haven't really changed, not even in the EU that purportedly already acts under this principle, if you look at the current debates like on glyphosate.
You mean the thing that makes up the extreme majority of every living being is unsafe? Do you legitimately believe it is necessary to study and prove that?
What will you say if we discover another element that should be checked for in the water otherwise health risks occur? Was our proactive search to prove water safe insufficient? I guess so, but how could we possibly have done better ahead of time?
The point isn't that you have to provide a comprehensive proof of safety, which is arguably a philosophical impossibility, the point is that if you have a cool product idea like putting lead into fuel, you have to apply before you're allowed to market it. What exact tests they are going to run then will be subject to scientific debate and changes over time (so your product might get pulled if it's found to be toxic later). Some posters informed me that that's how it actually works already, in the EU at least. But in that case I guess we have to demand that they apply stricter standards if they miss chemicals that poison our rain water or kill the bee population.
> For water you test for known contaminants like these forever chemicals and a host of others. Your question is insinuating that we don't know how to test for water safety, which is dishonest
Then don't call it 'unsafe until proven otherwise'. Safety standards are a great idea. They're not this and calling it this is just a recipe for failure when new information makes it look like the original research was insufficient and that its a policy failure.
And yet the title of the research paper, the journal in which it was published, or even the vaguest description of the experiment that was performed are not mentioned. I've given up ever getting a direct link to a paper, but this takes laziness and cynicism to new extremes.
Abysmal science reporting.
It would seem environmental science wishes to call everything an environment, and discuss the status of the PFAS chemosphere, which would be confusing if you weren't paying close attention.
Edit: The abstract was also, maybe geared towards SEO? Discoverability? Here's maybe a clearer rendition
"ABSTRACT: It is hypothesized that environmental contamination by [PFAS] [is spreading globally, by clouds and rain in the atmosphere]. This hypothesis is tested by comparing the levels of four selected [PFAS substances] in [rainwater, soils, and surface waters] with [state agency guidelines]. [...] it is concluded that
(1) levels [in rainwater] often greatly exceed US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ["Lifetime Drinking Water Health Advisory levels"] and [are] often above Danish drinking water limit[s...] (2) levels [...] in rainwater are often above Environmental Quality Standard for Inland European Union Surface Water; and (3) [the rain contaminates the soil, on a widespread basis] above proposed Dutch guideline values.
It is, therefore, concluded that the [rainwater, soils, and surface waters, across the earth, have all been contaminated]. [We also hypothesize] [the soil contamination] are especially poorly reversible because of the high persistence of [the chemicals] and their ability to continuously cycle [...]. Because of the poor reversibility of environmental exposure to PFAS and their associated effects, it is vitally important that PFAS uses and emissions are rapidly restricted."
Direct link to the study: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
Cousins et al., Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), Environmental Science & Technology, 2022
From the book “Exposure” by Robert Bilott, the real-life lawyer portrayed in the “Dark Water” movie:
> The internal alarm bells had first been sounded at 3M and DuPont after the publication of a scientific paper by the American Chemical Society in 1976. The paper had a curious impetus: Donald Taves, a University of Rochester toxicologist, had discovered two different kinds of fluoride in his own blood. Finding inorganic fluoride was not surprising—it is routinely put into the public water supply as an aid in preventing cavities. But the other form, organic fluoride, is man-made in industrial labs. What was it doing in his blood? Dr. Taves wanted to find out. So he teamed up with W. S. Guy, a faculty member of the College of Dentistry at the University of Florida. They gathered plasma from blood banks in five cities and tested them for the presence of both kinds of fluoride. They also obtained records of how much fluoride was put into the water of those cities. As expected, the levels of “regular” (inorganic) fluoride in blood correlated with the levels of fluoride in the public water. But the levels of synthetic fluoride (organic) did not. Where was it coming from? Guy and Taves noticed that the compounds found in the blood had a chemical structure consistent with compounds “widely used commercially for their potent surfactant properties.” In their publication of those findings, they hypothesized that the source was industrial fluorochemicals manufactured by 3M.
We were fluorine and silicon chemistry leaders, and there was even a bulk tube-trailer of elemental fluorine parked on the site, rendering us un-insurable.
One time it was pentafluoropropionic anhydride day. This is some agressive stuff, and had to be handled in a disposable glove bag under an inert nitrogen atmosphere.
It had to be flame-sealed into special glass bottles because it would eventually escape from any other type of closure.
When it comes into contact with moisture or humidity, it separates into two short-chain PFAS molecules that are still notably acidic and tend to bond to living tissue and not let go.
The acidic form was more widely available and was handled in regular drums, and I guess you could say it was quite a bit milder as a bad actor.
There was an operator who had left his gloves on top of a drum and a number of grams of fluorinted acid had gotten into them before he put them on again later. There was a delayed reaction but his hands did start burning after a while, fortunately this stuff was mild enough that his hands did not even fully dissolve.
But you can't wash it off and it keeps burning for years until you get accustomed to the pain. The scarring alone was painful to look at.
Anyway they put a brand new student model mechanical balance into the glove bag with the world's only kilo of the anhydride and weighed it into portions. It was possible to watch the paint peeling off the scale in real time and the corrosion process proceed to destruction. The glove bag and the scale were then discarded.
Out in the pit with everything else.
The temporary closures were then flame-sealed under a hood, and I get to pick two of the smallest ones for the analytical lab, one to test and the other to hang on to unopened.
Well they don't always seal, and upon inversion a couple micro-drops flew out and hit me on the shoulder and the hip, soaking right through the fabric and basically evaporating before long without doing visible damage. It did start to burn after a while but it mostly felt like a couple mosquito bites. Small red spots did show up along with the irritation which faded quite a bit over a few months but it took a few years before it could easily be forgotten.
In following decades though, the same red spots would re-appear if I was over-exerting myself and almost feeling like I was going to get heat stroke or something, yep, there they were still.
No surprise when I found out that Gainesville industrial park was an EPA Superfund site decades ago.
Now it's also been a couple decades or more since one of the most brilliant workers I had in Texas, later moved to an oilfield services group where they were injecting rare kilos of as many different short-chain perfluoroalkyls as they could, and using them as tracers to determine subsurface formation characteristics, when the different compounds could later be detected in the producing wells across a vast field.
Perfluoroalkyls are really inert and not acidic at all, but they are forever and they were thought especially good for geological tracing for that reason.
My associate became a specialist in a type of fluoride-specific ultra-trace detailed analysis that was more sensitive than what they were doing before.
Fluorides are a bitch.
Nobody's fault but mine.
It's mind blowing that the people manufacturing this stuff didn't have their doubts, but oh well, 1970s...
If we’re lucky it’ll take years if not decades to as a society stop this contamination.
These levels are just the beginning and we’ll look back on them as the good ol days when the levels were ‘low’.
our systems and thinking have not been blind to it, there have been both serious and emotional objections at every single step. The ugly truth is that there is very little of "we" when it comes to control and making money.
This is probably going to have to get a lot worse before it gets better, like the leaded gas problems of the 1960s.
> [...] linked to fertility problems,
> increased risk of cancer and developmental
> delays in children.
Is it because of acidic stomach environment?
In the human body, these properties are unwanted, slightly speaking. These molecules screw up pretty much everything at the cellular level—worse, they tend to accumulate in internal organs, which slowly makes them more and more water-repellent and non-sticky.
Imagine having your liver and kidneys try to do their thing with those molecules everywhere interfering with the entire organ structure as well as the movement of fluids.
In many places, like Hawaii, where you can't drill a water well for whatever reason, and don't have access to filtered surface water, rain catchment is the primary source of water. This is common.
If the health effects of these chemicals are really as bad as it's claimed they are, then shouldn't it be easy to conclusively show some small but nonzero effect?
But there are filters for them: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/wisconsin/2022/02/...
One big mechanism for dispersal is sea spray aerosols, probs because pfas chemicals have fun surface chemistries. Concentration of pfas in sea sprays can be 10,000x concentration in bulk seawater
Hanlon's razor says 'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity'. But, after 150 years of it, is stupidity truly an adequate explaination for the unending rain of 'better products for better living through chemistry'?