EPA moves to limit toxic 'forever chemicals' in drinking water | Hacker News Reader

EPA moves to limit toxic 'forever chemicals' in drinking water

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102 pointsrntn16 comments

3M is exiting the fluorinated polymer business of their own volition. They are spending billions to shut down a 2 billion a year profit center for the company. This should give you an inkling of how fucking toxic this stuff is, and how much liability they see in the future.

I hope they do not avoid culpability for having knowingly polluted the planet for decades. They should be saddled with the cost of developing and deploying the necessary mitigation technologies to neutralize or remove the from the ecosystem. They knew what they were doing.

Great documentary called “the devil we know” about the proliferation of perflorinated chemicals invented by 3m and sold to DuPont and chemical companies overseas.

To which company are the machines and territories sold too, and who owns the majority stake of the "spin" out company?

I have heard that so often, that this or that technology is faded out in the car industry, and in reality, that just ment, the factory is carefully dissasembled, shipped to some 2nd world or 3rd world country, reassembled and buisness just continus or more often then not, actually expands. Fridges, diesel cars, you name it.

One thing about fluorine chemistry is that it is an exquisite engineering challenge. The reason these molecules are majority synthesized by the major chemical companies is that smaller players lack the capacity to run these plants. There have been catastrophic explosions at more than one plant in China.

The U.S. needs to establish a process for collecting externality taxes from companies. Of course, it's impossible to track all externalities, but certain ones might be easier to track and it would make companies think twice before getting into industries without doing their due diligence on safety upfront.

Imagine if Big Oil knew they'd be on the hook for trillions of dollars in damages due to catastrophic climate change. As of right now, the U.S. gov is essentially making the citizens pay (in taxes) for the destruction climate change is causing, even though Big Oil has known for decades that they directly contribute to accelerated climate change.

Reverse Osmosis your drinking water. No guarantees your water district is monitoring for these toxins or what happens when it leaves their facility and goes through public pipes. Like type safety, validate what your source is when you use it.

I wonder how much the skin could absorb PFAS during a showers or baths…

or wiping your butt https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/13/toxic-fo...

Thank goodness. This is probably one of the greatest threats to civil society right now.

What people don't take into account is that human effort is both limited and fungible. Even if we restrict ourselves to only activities that improve health and/or environment, any effort spent on this could have been spent on something else. Is this the BEST way to spend that effort? I don't know, maybe it is. But would it be better spent on recycling, solar power, species protection, cancer research, etc?

I hope someone is trying to do some level of analysis of this so that we don't spend a lot of effort on a tiny problem when there might be larger problems we could be going after.

Can anyone explain to me why the article states

"The chemicals had been used since the 1940s in consumer products and industry, including in nonstick pans, food packaging and firefighting foam. Their use is now mostly phased out in the U.S., but some still remain."

but I see more categories of products using DWR coatings as a selling point every year?

I am skeptical this has the desired outcome. Many of these chemicals have been banned in the past so the industry compensates by making new variants. There are literally hundreds of PFOS, PFOA, PFHxS, PFNA chemical variations. The laws always seem to block specific ones rather than making generalizations that would cover all future variants.

About every decade as long as I can remember there is a new kind of plastic or coating. With the tacit admission of like "ok, that one maybe wasn't great for you, but this new one is fine we promise :)"

I also think online reflexive contrarians who have snorted too much "correlation isn't causation" is a small but real part of the problem too. Maybe correlation isn't causation but it isn't completely spurious either. If we always wait for incontrovertible proof we will never turn aside from a harmful path in time.

Are they gonna ban most pharmaceuticals that are excreted into the drinking water?

inb4 this gets blocked by lobbyists. :(

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