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Comment by rowanG077 | Hacker News Reader

For all the grief 3M has put on humanity they still make some pretty neat stuff.

There are times when they have been less recalcitrant than their competitors. Faint praise for sure but when you are doing PR bits for recapturing solvents for reuse instead of exhausting them or burning them, years before your peers are getting sued for not doing the same, you might not be angels but you’re also probably not the devil either.

Sometimes I just bump around their site looking at all the neat stuff they offer and especially the oddball niche application stuff. They really have a glue or tape for just about any scenario!

The best places for that are websites like Grainger and Fastenal. They sell all the things you see all the time in commercial businesses, but never realized you could actually buy. (Of course, they tend to be surprisingly expensive.)

Also, check out U Line. They are more packaging / facilities focused.

I remember 3d printing a pokeball that I wanted to swing open automatically when a latch was opened. Struggled finding anything useful until I hopped on Grainger where, lo and behold, they had a little spring that was perfect for it.

The guy on the phone was really helpful too and held it for pickup.

Genuinely serious and ignorant question: What grief?

As a huge chemical conglomerate with a long history, they've been involved in their fair share of pollution incidents and other controversies.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-3m-pfas-toxic-foreve...

https://www.reuters.com/business/3m-agrees-pay-98-mln-resolv...

Management by post it notes comes to mind.

3M products are great because they always do what they say they're going to do. They usually even overperform by a large margin. They're one of my suppliers of choice for industrial applications or anything R&D where we don't quite know how good it has to be yet.

3M toxic chemical waste is also a core 3M product, and overperforms too. Some of their Superfund sites, particularly the C8/PFOA/fluorinated crud ones, are among the worst around. (I grew up on the other side of the city from their worst one! Yay!)

And, like any company in the fluorinated chemicals business, 3M has overperformed at ozone depletion and greenhouse forcing. I can give them a pass on that particular one, since society as a whole didn't care much about that stuff until recently. I can't, however, give them a pass for how nasty Scotchgard was/is and how much of it was sprayed on/near me as a child. If you remember Scotchgard, don't look up what it really was or you might regret your parents' life choices.

I recall once researching superfund distribution on some sort of thesis that the West Coast is Better, only to discover that Washington State is top ten for a superfund sites, and in large part because of all of the nasty ways we’ve come up with to preserve lumber over the years. Well, shit.

It’s no PFOAs but it’s a class of chemicals specifically selected for preventing decay so it’s up there. We really should know better by now.

People get mad at concrete re:co2, but compare its lifespan to wood, without preservatives.

How many houses, without preservatives in the wood, would rot and be rebuilt, compared to 100% concrete/rock housing?

And with each rebuild, comes all the wiring, plumbing, which is rarely recycled well, and recycling isn't environmentally cost free.

ICF seems a good idea to me.

Probably very few since interior wood is not pressure treated.

> How many houses, without preservatives in the wood, would rot and be rebuilt, compared to 100% concrete/rock housing?

This isn't a great comparison, as unreinforced concrete is not used for structures. If you're speaking about steel reinforced concrete, they usually have a lifespan in the 100 year range for something protected from the elements like structural walls (assuming the aggregate is well chosen to avoid sulphate attack). For comparison, much of the housing stock in my area is stick framed and is of a similar age - ~70 years.

You’re not wrong, but there are also any number of rules about building code that try to prevent water infiltration, which makes the wood last many times longer.

For instance, wood laid horizontally in water doesn’t wick water as far as wood standing vertically in water. If you look at deck and house designs you see a lot of horizontal pieces. Especially in new construction.

That said, letting water pool at the corner of your house can eat your foundation too. Water is bad. Get rid of it.

Preservatives aren't to prevent rot, but instead, to prevent insect, mould, fungus, etc from eating/rotting the wood.

Moisture can come from the air, and damaged/poor air separation. Insects are, well, they're insects.

And of course, there are mice, ground squirrels, and other critters which chew on wood relentlessly. If I didn't kill 100+ mice a year, and a few ground squirrels, I'd be up to my elbows in critters, not to mention, dead from the hantavirus, and my house burned down from wire damage.

German maker Laura Kampf is doing a video series on restoring a a 140 year old house. It turned into a much bigger project due to water damage that destroyed large parts of the wood frame and stone work. It’s interesting to watch if you’re into that sort of thing. She’s more of a maker type than a home renovation type so she comes at it from a different perspective.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLsyCFICnr819K6cWPGm1...

When I was a kid, finding water damage on This Old House projects would increase the budget by 50%. The owners always looked like they wanted to puke during the wrap up episode.

You probably don't want 100 or even 50 years old wiring and plumbing tho.

And it only "helps" if the future owner doesn't decide to destroy it and build something else anyway

This reminds me of the "designing a house to last 1000 years" article discussed on here earlier in the year, and the many factors that the author considered there.

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/how-to-design-a-h...

One can go down a pretty nasty toxic waste rabbit hole if you research all the attempts at chemical treatment for wood utility poles (for electrical grid and telecom, historically). Particularly a place like WA, OR, ID, BC having plenty of trees also has a mostly aerial electrical and telecom distribution last mile. And of course the companies that own and must maintain these poles have an interest in them lasting as long as possible...

My understanding right now is they've gone back to more traditional tar/creosote impregnated and coatings.

Don't forget rail ties!

I met someone whose ancestors lived in Missouri clearing the swamps. Those swamp trees made good railroad ties. And then creosote was introduced and the ties lasted ten times as long, so demand crashed over the next few years as the old ties were swapped out one last time.

As near as I can tell the economy never recovered. They grew cotton but that’s mostly overseas now too, and at any rate means arsenic accumulation.

Some people were trying to engineer a strain of rice that absorbs less arsenic. Apparently cotton and rice growing conditions overlap enough that this is a potential option.

Scotchguard is the biggest black eye I know of. I don’t know what’s in it now but it used to be cancer in a can.

Old formula Scotchguard had PFOS in it from the 1950’s until sometime in the last decades. People sprayed it on their furniture, indoors. We’re worried about off gassing from pans, and here was a can of the stuff in aerosol form.

Maybe ask instead of downvote?

You (and most Americans... maybe most humans), have PFOA's (forever chemicals) in your blood that came from 3M.

https://www.healthvermont.gov/sites/default/files/documents/...

https://theintercept.com/2018/07/31/3m-pfas-minnesota-pfoa-p...

One of those 3 Ms must stand for "malevolence".

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