Scheele’s Green, the Color of Fake Foliage and Death (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Scheele’s Green, the Color of Fake Foliage and Death (2018)

theparisreview.org

105 pointsconductor26 comments

As an aside, what’s the conversion on that horrible pop up? I’m on your site for .5 seconds, I’ve never heard of you, and I don’t even know what I’m reading yet and a giant blocking “Subscribe & Save” modal? Yuck.

This is "standard" missionary behaviour from websites in 2023. Apparently they think that people will pay for any story they publish.

> carving breasts into rocks and crafting cloth into petals.

The anti-parallelism of this phrase is epic.

It is probably a syllepsis, where a governing word or phrase applies differently in multiple contexts. The canonical example is "He hastened put out out the cat, the wine, his cigar and the lamps."

In this case the governing word would be "into" but I'm hesitant because prepositions in English are treated so differently than they are in Latin or Greek. It also verges on paraprosdokian.

Anyway, I love these structures, so thank you for drawing attention to it.

Could you say that the writer's style is... florid?

- "Commercial greens are often made with pigment green 7, which contains chlorine and can’t be recycled or composted safely."

Uhhh what's the problem with chlorine?

Chlorine kills living cells, bad for any living organism in water, most often damaging fish's sensitive gills as well as the skin that covers their entire bodies.

Definitely bad for compost as it kills all the microbes and little fun guys doing the work.

Elemental chlorine maybe, but there’s none of that in green 7.

I agree. Probably the confusion is caused by the common name of the additive for fish tanks "Dechlorinator". But the "Dechlorinator" does not remove Chlorine atoms from the water. It only transform the NaClO (bleach [1]) into NaCl (table salt[1]). It "steals" the oxygen and binds it to another molecule.

[1] ignoring a few technical details.

"However, the presence of chlorine in an organic compound does not ensure toxicity. Some organochlorides are considered safe enough for consumption in foods and medicines. For example, peas and broad beans contain the natural chlorinated plant hormone 4-chloroindole-3-acetic acid (4-Cl-IAA);[13][14] and the sweetener sucralose (Splenda) is widely used in diet products. As of 2004, at least 165 organochlorides had been approved worldwide for use as pharmaceutical drugs, including the natural antibiotic vancomycin, the antihistamine loratadine (Claritin), the antidepressant sertraline (Zoloft), the anti-epileptic lamotrigine (Lamictal), and the inhalation anesthetic isoflurane.[15]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organochlorine_chemistry#Toxic...

incineration might be a bad idea but composting might be fine

if we are talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phthalocyanine_Green_G it's apparently nontoxic enough to use as a tattoo ink so I wouldn't worry about it

this is just another witch-burner who wants to destroy anything they don't understand out of fear

I agree, except for the last sentence. My guess is that it's someone confused by the misleading name of the fish tanks additives. (More details in my reply to the sibling comment.)

could be, but i meant the scaremongering in the article

elemental chlorine legitimately is pretty toxic

Oops! Sorry for the confusion.

You're referring to elemental chlorine.

Your food almost certainly has a compound which contains chlorine too, and makes it taste better.

Not only it makes the food taste better, but if a human or any other multicellular animal does not ingest daily enough chlorine in chloride form a quick death is certain.

Chlorine, as chloride, is absolutely necessary for the control of the pH and of the osmotic pressure of the extracellular water contained in the body of animals.

Moreover, chlorine, as chloride, is necessary for the digestion of the food and for killing most of the microbes ingested together with the food (by making acidic the interior of the stomach).

The plants need much less chlorine than the animals, but nonetheless a very small amount of chlorine is absolutely necessary for photosynthesis, being bound in the structure of the Photosystem II, which splits the water, releasing free dioxygen.

Just by intuition, highly halogenated polyaromatic compounds such as this seem like they might degrade into terrible things - Compare to dioxins. Definitely would not want to burn them at the very least

fascinating article. one brief element I found interesting was the government regulation of production materials (arsenic in green dye)

I was genuinely unaware that it went that far back. for whatever reason I had the impression that these kinds of laws largely began in the post-war era

Nah, stuff goes way back. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phossy_jaw

"The Grand Duchy of Finland, part of the Russian Empire, in 1872, was the first country to place an absolute ban on the manufacture, use, and sale of white phosphorus in matches, followed by Denmark in 1874 and France in 1897"

Sugar-of-lead (as a sweetener in wine and other foods) goes even further — it was suspected to be toxic millennia ago, though maybe only subject to a governmental ban as recently as the late 1600s.

I'd buy you a green dress. But not a real green dress, that's cruel!

Explaining a joke ruins it, but as this has been voted down it seems necessary. This is a seemingly non-sensical quote from the song "If I had a million dollars" -- in the context of TFA it suddenly makes perfect sense. Chapeau!

I think fake flowers are kitsch.

Lots of other modern dyes are quite poisonous as well, and are not banned even for things like toys, or foodware.

Lead oxide for example only got banned in the most of the world in 200X, with countries copying EU's ROHS regulations. Chromates are well known to be cancerogenic, but are only about to be banned in EU.

All bright red cars manufactured after nineties have to use organic red pigments, which fade very fast, in comparison to chromate or lead pigments, that's why there is such huge monetary interest in finding a new inorganic bright red pigment.

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