Engineers develop water filtration that removes “forever chemicals” | Hacker News Reader

Engineers develop water filtration that removes “forever chemicals”

news.ubc.ca

483 pointsbenguild226 comments

It is important to stop the introduction of these chemicals and microplastics into our environment. That should be the number one goal - to stop it at it's source instead of dealing with it after the fact. Depending on how the filtration systems scale, not everyone would be able to benefit - and certainly not wildlife which is affected.

In the meantime, it may be effective to remove these chemicals from your body through regular blood and plasma donation[0]. Although not entirely altruistic, I doubt those in need of emergency blood are asking if it contains PFASs. In the end it helps you and those in need.

I have also recently switched to stainless steel cookware and picked up a LifeStraw home water filter[1] that claims to reduce these chemicals in your drinking water.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8994130/ [1] https://lifestraw.com/products/lifestraw-home

> It is important to stop the introduction of these chemicals and microplastics into our environment.

This is an unreasonable, although noble, goal. The petrochemical industry is simply too embedded to be meaningfully regulated in the ways that it should be. They have had de facto nation state powers for decades, or, in the case of Saudi Arabia/Aramco, are state actors themselves.

Moreover the tradeoffs that would come with an actual meaningful reduction in, say, microplastics, are drastic QOL downgrades that many people would not accept, forever chemicals be damned.

There’s already a long list of petrochemical byproducts that are regulated.

Sure, it’s not perfect, but nothing is.

The name "forever chemicals" kind of suggests that these things being in essentially every body of water on earth means we still could use a way to deal with filtration even if we never pollute again.

regulated by who though? the GP was making the argument that the government is captured by the oil industry. regulation by a captured government is not legitimate regulation.

That kind of black and white cynicism is incorrect and the opposite of a solution. It impedes people who actually want to fix problems, and who occasionally succeed.

I’ve found my own pockets of cynicism is motivated fundamentally by laziness. If it’s impossible to succeed, you don’t need to try, don’t need to risk failure. But it is possible.

What successes have you seen here / been involved in?

Saying there's an ubiquitous failure of a certain approach to a problem doesn't mean "give up". I think it means you should step back, question your assumptions, think more broadly. A nice example of people doing that: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-... (not to endorse their specific policy proposals, necessarily).

Got it. That’s not cynicism, but saying “all progress must stop until my favorite solution is implemented.”

Centralized authorities are even less accountable to private interests.

Your argument could be used against doing anything about climate change as well.

Most of the “bad” microplastic pollution comes from clothes and disposable bags and utensils. Bags are clearly on their way out, being replaced by cardboard bags.

Clothes are trickier. Polyester is extremely versatile and durable. But newer formulations of nylon (which is biodegradable) or PTFE (aka "teflon") treated fabrics are comparable.

> Bags are clearly on their way out, being replaced by cardboard bags.

In your city, maybe. Absolutely not globally

Disposable bags in the west contaminating the water? I would be immensely surprised if that's even 1% of clothes and shampoos/beauty products. We don't normally put plastic backs in running water for ages.

Yes. Thin disposable bags are easily degraded mechanically, resulting in lots of microparticles.

For clothes it's even worse, they produce microparticles at all times, especially during laundry.

Thin plastic bags in the west have a very short lifecycle that goes mostly shop->home->bin->landfill (segregated from water table). There is almost no opportunity for it to actually contaminate the water.

Unfortunately, the EPA, and modern science has no proactive models to predict toxicity.

By the time disclosure occurs, studies are completed, you're 5 to 10 years into mass production. And a ban then gets another 5 years and manufacturing just needs to rotate a few molecules and those studies are now irrelevant.

Until we have a predictive model of toxicity, there's no real ability to do anything but in decadal scales.

Or you can just mandate that new chemicals need the studies before they are mass produced, not after. I really don't see a reason companies need to be able to invent a new type of plastic then immediately start spraying it onto everything I eat.

Absolutely. We are at a point where we have ore than enough technology to survive comfortably, and any new chemicals introduced into the environment should get approved before use.

Would this ban include EUA vaccines, or would you envision an exemption for Pfizer products?

I think EUA would be fine except for the fact that no one is probably introducing new plastics in an emergency situation anyway. Also the EAU authorization has lasted way too long. I think if you ask most reasonable people the emergency is over. Certainly lots of pandemic-era behaviors are over.

This would basically freeze chemicals at the ones we currently use, with innovation being essentially impossible due to cost.

Continuing to let us experiment with new chemicals may be better.

The "experimenting" taking place right now is pouring it into our body and water supplies. How much does that cost? An unfathomable amount, but it's not paid by the companies, so they don't care.

Wait a minute: what if leeching was actually a legitimate treatment to remove blood toxins, maybe like mercury or lead poisoning?

By the way, looks like donation removes 8% of your blood, so you’d have to donate 9 times to halve the amount of any chemical in your blood (assuming it’s not also stored elsewhere in your body).

"phlebotomy [...] A procedure in which a needle is used to take blood from a vein, usually for laboratory testing. Phlebotomy may also be done to remove extra red blood cells from the blood, to treat certain blood disorders. Also called blood draw and venipuncture."

https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-term...

I've heard that whatever benefits you get from Thiel's vampire transfusions also just come from removing blood via donation

Given the long and controversial history of bloodletting [0], this might do more harm then good.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting

Any usage prior to the widespread adoption of the scientific method is largely irrelevant.

You certainly shouldn't donate blood in unsanitary conditions and while you are ill and weakened from some other sickness. Which is the conditions under which bloodletting usually occured in the past.

I’m not saying people should do it, of course. Just wondering if there’s at least a grain of truth in it.

I'm sure there's a grain of truth to it, else it wouldn't have been pushed as a treatment; likewise, there's a grain of truth in using ivermectin to treat the 'rona (in that it increases the survival chance of people who also have intestinal worms, see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...)

I mean the legit way to remove blood lead and mercury is chelation therapy,

So does blood donation have an effect on life expectancy?

It sure does for the recipient!

Probably yes, but it's hard to tease out how much since there's a lot of restrictions on who can donate, so people who donate are already a healthier demographic

If the effect is likely positive, then isn't it in the interest of bloodbanks to find out?

> picked up a LifeStraw home water filter[1] that claims to reduce these chemicals in your drinking water

Seeing that the LifeStraw pitcher is made of plastic, I wonder whether the amount of filtered chemicals is greater than the ones introduced by the plastic in the pitcher itself.

Civilization is built on plastics all the way down.

It depends. If you buy fresh fruits and vegetables and meat, eggs, milk from a local farm and use only glass/copper/stainless steel for all your cooking and drinking needs you can do pretty well at an individual level. Having water from your own well helps too but that may not be available to everyone.

For $20 more, you can get a glass version: https://lifestraw.com/products/lifestraw-home-glass-pitcher

It's too late. They're everywhere. They're even in rainwater.

too late to remove them completely, sure. too late to reduce their abundance, probably not. thank god everyone doesn't have such a short-sighted, nihilistic outlook that makes them immediately give up when presented with a difficult problem

nobody's giving up, but the priority must be in mitigation / removal not prevention (since for the reasons outlined prevention is going to be a steeper hill.) Mitigation isn't a replacement for eventual prevention though...

i agree with you, but certainly you can appreciate that what you just said is very different from expressing doomsaying sentiments like "it's too late" with no mention of pursuing a solution

How is it “giving up” to disagree with the suggestion of trying to shut the barn door after the horse has bolted rather than trying to chase it down? If we never polluted the water ever again we’d still be left with contaminated water.

> How is it “giving up” to disagree with the suggestion of trying to shut the barn door after...

the submission is about engineers filtering forever chemicals from the water. the response was "it's too late." that's giving up. if you want to be intellectually dishonest and pretend it's not, that's your choice.

> If we never polluted the water ever again we’d still be left with contaminated water.

sometimes in life you find yourself in a position where there's a mess and you need to clean it up. i don't know what else to tell you.

The post I was replying to said "That should be the number one goal - to stop it at it's source instead of dealing with it after the fact." Who's being dishonest here? The gratuitous condescension seems rather unwarranted if you're not going to figure out the context of my post before attacking it.

mitigation #1 goal.

stopping #2 goal.

Does the lifestraw also remove essential minerals from the water?

I mean that's the primary reason we got a water filter ourselves, filter out some minerals so our cats get less urinary stones.

But we've switched to stainless and/or 'plain' steel ourselves as well, we still have some non-stick pans for e.g. frying eggs but we try to avoid them. Even before PFAS, I never liked the teflon pans because they wear and sometimes flake off after a while.

I won't cook eggs on anything but cast iron. I wonder what the hell people are doing that drives them to use cheap, thin, pans coated in hormone disruptors. My eggs never stick. In restaurants your eggs are cooked on steal...hundreds of eggs each shift.

> In the meantime, it may be effective to remove these chemicals from your body through regular blood and plasma donation[0]

slight distinction: remove these chemicals from your blood

I only mention that because there are most likely places in the body where doing this will not do anything to help remove them from that organ

As far as removing it from the blood, I wonder about the efficiency of blood donation. It seems to me that simply stopping the intake of new PFAs by drinking purified water from your pitcher should help considerably, because water consumed goes into the bloodstream regularly. Additionally, red blood cells are constantly being cycled in the body as well, with their byproducts excreted.

I definitely don't understand why post-use regulation and cleanup fees aren't baked into the cost of doing business for these companies. We need to stop being reactionary in our capitalism and be proactive.

We really ought to show more care and test more when we are creating chemical marvels and new materials. At a certain level of scale a lot of the inventions of the last 50 years turned out to be quite damaging to our health and environment. We don't seem to have the balance right yet comparing freedom to release whatever and complete lockdown until something is proved safe and we keep damaging people and the biodiversity of the planet on which we depend.

You could make the argument that we really need better methods and technology for determining the health impact of what we put into our environment. The problem as I see it (as a total layman) is that the health sciences are not good at determining the effects of almost anything in the future. The best we can do is wide-scale studies that try to control for different variables (and largely fail, because the set of variables is incredibly large).

I have a feeling we aren’t going to solve this problem anytime soon, as the simulations required appear to be so large they are beyond our reach. I am optimistic that we can massively increase the data collected as time goes on, and that will increase our accuracy of studies of things that occurred in the past.

> is that the health sciences are not good at determining the effects of almost anything in the future

For this particular case I think the real problem is that no one really spent much effort seeing the effects of particular PFOAs in cell culture prior to marketing it. We've had cell culture for over 100 years, so this lack is basically because people either didn't even think about it, or didn't care thanks to dollar signs or greater fear of another threat (household fires).

I've been hearing about the dangers of Teflon for at least a quarter century.

Lawsuits were being settled in the 9-figure range as far back as 2001 - they kept making it, and actively covered up what they knew, tobacco firm style.

I haven't watched it yet, but 'The Devil We Know' apparently goes in depth on this, with very highly rated reviews. I don't need to be that angry right now though; I know enough about Du Pont for "strong opinions" as it is.

I certainly wouldn't have bought that bottle of Scotchguard for my shoes in the late 2000s if it had had a warning label on it.

Or scotchguard my entire car.

Or outdoor textiles, or toilet paper, or paper food boxes, or furniture with stain repelents, or cosmetics, or school uniforms, or breast milk, or microwave popcorn bags, or carpet cleaners, or candy wrappers, or pizza boxes, or cattle, or agricultural fields and products, or houshold dust, or water, or firefighting foams, or dental floss, or air ... better to stay away from it all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_subst...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanoic_acid

Also every stain resistant material. Clothes, carpet, etc.

I'm not sure, but I suspect even bubbles. Like when we were kids.

Teflon itself is safe to use as long as you don’t heat it too much (stay well clear of 260°C/500°F) - it’s technically a PFAS but polymerised into to molecules that have a high molecular weight so have no biological activity and it is chemically inert. It’s the shorter chain PFAS chemicals used in the production process that has caused the huge problems - especially to workers and to people living near the plants (due to groundwater contamination and other environmental release of PFAS)

Teflon itself is safe to use as long as you don’t heat it too much

The problem is, people make mistakes. All it takes is a crying child, a burned pot, a mistake in cooking (not thinking about it), and you've hit the wrong temp.

And then the pan is dangerous, leeching, trouble.

The whole thought about the approval was "Well, people can be trusted to not let a pot get too hot! And to know 100% to throw it away if it does!".

Right. Trusted. In a country with warning labels like 'coffee is hot' and 'water is wet'.

Edit: my point is, the above means "teflon isn't safe for home use". Engineers know, also, to have safety tolerances. For something like this, I'd expect the 'danger zone' to be 2x the max possible heat a consumer could apply by accident.

As burners can get crazy hot, that probably means I'd call teflon unsafe, unless it broke down at 2000F.

This is how we can approve things safe or not. Not "trust people will constantly monitor how hot their pan got".

Just as an aside, I was at a hotel the other day, and someone was trying to put buttered toast in the hotel toaster!

> As burners can get crazy hot, that probably means I'd call teflon unsafe, unless it broke down at 2000F.

That seems a bit... unrealistic. Not even cast iron is usable at 2000F.

No, that’s the thing: it’s unsafe unless it stays safe to an “unrealistic” range, since people exceed “normal” usage without meaning to.

Nothing is safe in that range - that's why it's unrealistic. The cast iron would decompose, shatter, and light a commercial kitchen on fire, let alone a residential tinder box.

You all may be arguing against a strawman. A completely hypothetical one, at that.

The actual danger temp, 260c / 500f, is trivially achievable on most home cooking equipment.

And even if the danger temp were 2,000 degrees, there would still be the major dangers from manufacturing and the associated pollution, as has been noted.

Not usable, but doesn’t cause forever chems to leach into food or aerosolize.

The only danger from 2000F iron is that it's hot, and that is very temporary.

How would one heat iron to that point?? People got usually gas stoves or electric stove. For 2000 degree one needs a china stove or sth

Kilns work because they lose far slower than then generate it. You could conceivably reach very high temps due to the heat source being in direct contact whereas the pan must lose heat through convection. I doubt it would ever reach 2000° but 600-700° seems easy enough.

TikTok challenge...shave off some Teflon, burn it, and consume.

True. Sometime for frying oil is heated to higher temp and it is easy to forget.

If they can ban gas stove like we saw in NY, they can ban these forever chemical utensils.

> The problem is, people make mistakes. All it takes is a crying child, a burned pot, a mistake in cooking (not thinking about it), and you've hit the wrong temp.

Then you turn off the cooking pot, and air the room. Burning teflon releases nasty stuff, but not much worse than burning oil. Unless you heat it up all the way until its thermal decomposition (your pan will be visibly glowing red at that temperature).

Also, it's time to switch from natural gas burners to electric stoves that can have automatic protection.

Or you could just not use Teflon pots at all, which is what I would recommend to everyone here.

The most common mistake made when cooking is to apply far too much heat. A pan can easily be accidentally heated past 500° on a stovetop. The only save is that it takes time to harm you and the cause is impossible to directly attribute. DuPont's lawyers now have all they need.

When you're in the mood for some anger towards DuPont, check out "Dark Waters" (2019) too. The cinematography, acting, and pacing are great — my favourite DuPont rager so far.

A Civil Action, 1998, is not directly about DuPont, though DuPont did manufacture the same chemical that the film concerns itself with, trichloroethylene. Duvall was nominated for best supporting actor for his role in this, and the film was nominated for best cinematography.

Now replace health science with climate science and see how it reads.

https://www.tellerreport.com/life/2021-02-23-%0A---%22the-fa...

edit: documentary might come back on ARTE in the future but in the meantime, if you understand french: https://video.ploud.fr/w/4d35ad9a-6eac-4708-aa62-3b754057407... and https://archive.org/details/la-fabrique-de-lignorance-docume...

It's usually subbed/dubbed in French and German.

Cites the documentary "La fabrique de l'ignorance". I could only find a trailer.

https://boutique.arte.tv/detail/la-fabrique-de-lignorance

Please share if you can find the full video. TIA.

I would argue there are enough companies that have continued creating these cash cow chemicals even after there was sufficient evidence of substantial harm that additional testing would be useless, except to class action lawsuit plaintiffs to prove what the defendants already know.

Movies that cover this topic: Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, Dark Waters. More recently the talc powder lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson.

Hell, the Bay Area is littered with EPA Superfund Sites where all of the old chipmakers and their suppliers were. Good luck to Chandler, AZ (where the new American chip fans are being built). I hope you learn at least a little something from the SF peninsula’s mistakes of the 1960s-1990s.

A former naval base in my area has been decommissioned for years but still hasn’t cleaned up the firefighting chemical runoff that has seeped into the ground. Sometimes there simply isn’t a healthier substitute for a chemical or there is no legal method to prevent an organization from screwing up the environment (good luck suing the Navy for something they did 50 years ago before the harm was known).

I would agree that better testing and health trials could have identified these health risks before the companies started using these chemicals, but companies don’t have emotions or ethics. They are sociopaths seeking maximum returns and will turn a blind eye (or worse) if their profits are threatened. There is a ton of motivated reasoning within and around companies that produce and use harmful chemicals, especially if they are the only industry in a region.

There are multi-million dollar homes and a school facility built on top of (parts of) the EPA Superfund site near the old El Toro MCAS in Irvine. Another set of million dollar homes nearby was built on top of a nursery that was founded in the early 1900s. In both cases, residents are warned not to plant edible fruits or vegetables directly into the soil.

> I have a feeling we aren’t going to solve this problem anytime soon, as the simulations required appear to be so large they are beyond our reach.

That's what we need quantum computers for!

Seriously, crypto breaking problems tend to get all the attention when we are talking about quantum computing, but one of the most promising application of quantum computers is modeling quantum systems. Studying the health impact of substances involves a lot of chemistry, which is a quantum process. A quantum computer could help with modeling the interactions between artificial substances and biomolecules.

Maybe, but isn't it an intrinsically hard problem to model? How close are we to growing organ tissues at scale? Can we dose these things and correctly ascertain an expected outcome?

Aren’t we totally ignoring this with the renewed push for nuclear energy? If we insist nuclear waste can safely be stored than surely we can safely store PFAS.

There's a pretty big difference between the two. Nuclear waste is always tracked and treated carefully. PFAS are on store shelves and in homes and in landfills and are entirely untracked. Nothing's being ignored, it's just an entirely differently kind of situation.

We don't use nuclear waste to make non stick pans and water resistant jackets.

Not non-stick pans.

But yes, they did make red Fiesta ware using what is effectively low-level nuclear waste:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiesta_(dinnerware)

But nuclear waste isn't going to be mass distributed?

History tells otherwise. Radioactive toothpaste was once a product...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doramad_Radioactive_Toothpaste

I said it in current/future tense, why ignore all cotext.

What does 1920s product have to do with a now heavily regulated material?

Also, AFAIK the radium in the toothpaste wasn't waste from a reactor?

Watches and toothpaste are not enriched radioactive waste.

Iodine, Bananas, and Smoke detectors are radioactive too.

look at the one man environmental hazard that was thomas midgely jr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

one man was so absolutely prolifically bad to the environment.

> Kettering was elected as president with Midgley as vice president. However, after two deaths and several cases of lead poisoning at the TEL prototype plant in Dayton, Ohio, the staff at Dayton was said in 1924 to be "depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program". Over the course of the next year, eight more people died at DuPont's plant in Deepwater, New Jersey. …

> The risks associated with exposure to lead were known at least 150 years before, when Benjamin Franklin wrote about his experiences as a typesetter.

Holy cow. I always chocked up leaded gasoline as one of those “well how could they know” kind of things but people were dropping dead just making it, and Midgley himself was sickened from it by researching its production. Absolutely fucking evil people.

I think we've known about the dangers of lead since Roman times so it's even worse. Quoting Vitruvius [1]:

> Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead [PbCO3, lead carbonate] is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system. Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome. That the flavour of that conveyed in earthen pipes is better, is shewn at our daily meals, for all those whose tables are furnished with silver vessels, nevertheless use those made of earth, from the purity of the flavour being preserved in them

We've known about the danger of the fumes for over two thousand years!

[1] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wi...

Wow, first time hearing of this.. so terrible.. no money in the world is worth the lasting damages he contributed to.

There are few of such people still alive in the world, without which we'd have millions of less deaths and people left disabled.. Hope someone finds out and the PR stops them from continuing somehow :/

This is particularly ironic:

> In 1923, Midgley took a long vacation in Miami to cure himself of lead poisoning. He said, "I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air."

Sorry, but more care and testing harm shareholder value. Denied.

Because we don’t close the loop. We find out asbestos and plastics and whatever else is dangerous actually and then go “ah shit” and that’s all. We don’t prosecute the makers of it or charge for cleanup. Yeah we have superfunds for breathtakingly poor resource and conservation management, but with micro pollutants don’t have the same kind of knee jerk visceral reaction a major radioactive waste site does.

We should have laws that say “if you make something, you own its entire lifecycle, including its safe and ecologically sound disposal.” That would turn the page on wasteful production almost overnight.

What about the BP Oil Spill? How would that go, reparation and paying someone money like the government isn't going to benefit nobody and especially not the world.

After the Fukushima incident they just dropped the radioactive water back into the ocean. yayy ...radioactive seafood :/

Something that blows my mind is that you can get a patent on a new "state of matter" (implying intrinsically that it has novel properties) but then claim to regulators that it doesn't need new safety testing because it's similar to something existing.

Or, you know, not dump millions of liters of waste water with all kinds of chemicals in the rivers at all.

I don't think it'll ever be the case. There's an infinite number of unknowns and unknown unknowns. It's a lot easier in our economic system to solve a bounded problem by throwing money at it than for regulations to be enforced politically on what would be 99% speculative problems.

>> At a certain level of scale a lot of the inventions of the last 50 years turned out to be quite damaging to our health

Except that people like longer

These were invented during ww2 to make high temperature machine parts.

Having been around lots of chemists in my life, they just don’t think that way. And that’s a problem.

Link to the actual paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...

Link to a better article: https://news.ubc.ca/2023/03/22/new-ubc-water-treatment-zaps-...

Much thanks for the good links! I hate trashy TV news videos.

Ok, we've changed the URL from https://www.nbcnews.com/now/video/engineers-develop-water-fi... to the latter article. Thanks!

I know there was a big scare around PFAS and stick-free pans. That confused me because they are actually on most food-wrapping. Sure, the heat and scraping don’t help the pans, but I can’t imagine that having it on most things we throw in the trash and then burn or put in a landfill helps much.

> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) currently approves more than 90 PFAS in food container materials ranging from paper cups, parchment paper, and microwavable popcorn bags to fast-food wrappers, pizza boxes, and pet food bags, the Interstate Technology Regulatory Council reported in September 2021.

Oh my god, I didn't know it's on most food wrapping. So when I get a coffee to go it's also a PFAS that seals the paper from the fluid?

And it's on the inside of those shitty new papers straws.

Blows my mind, we've replaced relatively inert pieces of plastic with paper coated in this PFAS stuff and we're acting like it's good for us and the environment.

plastic straws were a rounding error on a rounding error of plastic waste.

Straws should be avoided instead of making alternatives.

What about metal straws, reusable and dont break

Feels bad on the teeth and is a good way to lobotomize yourself if you trip

And enormous embodied energy. They are not any better for the environment unless you use a metal straw for like 10 years

This is what we get when we make decisions based on panicked masses and noise they generate in the news. That banning plastic straws made zero sense, and was actually counterproductive to humanity's survival in general (distracting from and confusing people about climate change), was obvious to anyone who paused to do some basic math. But people who kept panicking each other about it didn't, and people making the decisions seemingly didn't either (or they did, and went through with it anyway, just to shut the "environmentalists" up).

I fear the same will be the case here - I mean, the very term, "forever chemicals", is already a clear giveaway that the topic is discussed and reasoned about in nonsensical categories. Occasional scientific paper that tries to navigate around this term won't help when the overall discussion is consumed by magical thinking.

Straws are easy low hanging fruit that make individuals / consumers feel guilty and like they're doing a good thing, it does not have a measurable impact on the environment.

>plastic straws were a rounding error on a rounding error of plastic waste.

Not as a percentage of “outrage”. We know who pushes for this stuff, and for some reason they just keep going with it.

I’m pretty convinced things like straw ban are a test to evaluate the demographics of “true believers” out there.

I don’t think it was ever thought that PFAS would coat alternatives.

I don't think it was ever thought at all. It was a device to find out who was with them, and to denounce the "anti-science bigots" who were against them.

What device? The ban itself? I seriously doubt it was made as a purity test with no social reward… it’s a pretty easy argument to understand as a stepping stone towards pollution concerns.

It’s like complaining about crumbs on the floor of a house filled with garbage. It’s missing the forest for the trees. Plastic straws have nothing to contribute to the problem that supposedly motivated the reason to ban them

For me the problem is the prevalence of one time use cups, plates and so on, it may be almost ok if you want something to go (but should be incentivized to use a reusable cup), but to have it when you are eating at a restaurant is like an ode to our idioticy

> "the problem is"

That's not actually a problem statement though right? That's just things that might be contributing to a problem. We have to first settle on what the problem is before we can start focusing on what the contribution is. I could be wrong but what I've heard communicated as the three main problems with plastics are greenhouse gas emissions in their construction, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and PFAS.

Do straws or one time use cups/plates etc contribute to global greenhouse emissions? Seems doubtful as transportation and agriculture seems like the largest contributors and straws/plates/cups etc are a tiny fraction of the contribution for plastics themselves.

Do they contribute to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? IIRC that's the motivating scenario for the plastic straw ban and yet. And yet [1].

> the patch is mostly abandoned fishing gear

That's for the larger items. The majority of the plastics themselves is microscopic. And no, AFAIK it's not from land plastics that are leeching into the ocean & certainly not straws AFAIK.

Do they contribute to PFAS? Maybe but given the prevalence of PFAS everywhere I'm going to guess that it's in the noise compared to other sources (& as I've learned in this thread, getting rid of plastic straws has converted inert ones into PFAS emitters).

[1] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/great-paci...

See origin story here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/07/18/anti-straw-mo...

I believe people picked up on this 9 year old’s proposition as a symbol for needless waste that stays around forever in large quantities. There are many simultaneous efforts to reduce plastic going on: some are trying alternative methods for producing it (bio plastics), some encourage the use of alternative materials (eg bamboo plates), others ban it outright (plastic bags in SF), and try to not have it offered by default (the origins of the straw bans).

I don’t see the flaw in doing all of the above simultaneously. The problem is real and obvious, and given how embedded plastic is in our lives, we need an “all of the above” approach to change.

I mean when the replacement is using PFAS, I don’t see how you’ve actually improved anything. Arguably you’ve made it astronomically worse for a previous problem that was in the noise of any real issue.

Well it certainly wasn't made to help the environment.

What would make you say that?

Because it does the opposite. PFAS leeching into us and groundwater is exponentially worse than inert plastic straws.

"Helping the environment" does not just begin and end at banning things.

I would accept that logic from a well meaning child, but not a serious adult.

The obvious questions to any reasonable person would be, how much does this actually help the environment, what alternatives are there, and what might be the consequences of doing this. Banning straws never even got close to having good answers to any of these, and yet you were a dumb greedy redneck who hated the environment for pointing it out.

It's clear where the value for this came from, and that was as a tool to bash political opponents with.

Do you really not examine costs and benefits when you think about what motivates people?

"No straw" is a much simpler and better solution than "mushy cardboard straw".

Ultimately, that's the route Starbucks went --

-- with their plastic cups.

I don't use plastic straw at all and I think it isn't even hard. We can always pour liquid in clean glass if required.

I mean that's the obvious answer, but there's a culture (mainly in the US but elsewhere too) that drinks should be taken on the go / while driving instead of just sitting down. I mean straws are a side-effect of an established practice of take-out meals & drinks and avoiding doing (or paying for someone to do) dishes.

Make coffee at home. Sit down for a meal. Make food at home. Make time to do these things. Which is easier said than done, granted - they're big cultural and political shifts that require things like affordable housing and living wages.

Getting rid of straws is easier than giving people a living wage.

Why would anyone ever drinks coffee from straw?

Hot black coffee, no. I suspect they’re referring to coffee-flavored drinks. The kind of thing you see at Starbucks, which are more like milkshakes with a touch of coffee. But even iced coffee is generally drunk through a straw.

Plus, let's be realistic here, it's not like westerners are responsible for plastic in the oceans. More than 80% of all plastic pollution is coming from a handful of rivers in Asia [0].

According to our political elites, getting our children to ingest hormonal disruptors will somehow solve this issue.

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/25005/riverine-plastic-emissi...

Seriously? So we’ve replaced aluminium, glass and cardboard with “environmentally friendly” toxic coated paper?

Some companies think it’s cheaper or easier to organize to have disposable wrappers. In the US (and Europe, and likely everywhere, but that thread was about the US), those are allowed to be covered in PFAS. Many of them do; you can tell as they have this waxy surface common on fast food wrappers and disposable cups.

Whether PFAS are toxic is debated, mainly because there are thousands, and the few we’ve been using for a while proved to be not great. Manufacturers seem to be playing with how slow toxicity science works by claiming ignorance until experiments and financed and results are reviewed, which can take a lot. I’d call them “likely toxic,” but people with expensive lawyers don’t like that.

There can be PFAS on other non-disposable materials: non-stick pans are the big ones. You don’t need them on glassware, but (steel) water bottles and some cans (historically aluminum, but many are thin steel now) typically have a coating that could be PFAS. It depends on the manufacturer.

All those precautions out of the way… *Yes.*

Whenever possible, avoid disposable wrappers. Glass is great. Bottles in steel with no ultraviolet, excessive heat, or scratches are less likely to leak the coating either.

Most coffee chains now offer permanent cups; some even take cents off to encourage people to use them. I have yet to see fast-food chains do the same (or convince the local one to let me use my own glass). I don’t foresee an easy solution to wrap burgers or fries.

This being HN: if you have an idea, please develop it. I have invested (Angel round) in several (well, three) efforts in that direction. All three have fairly low-tech containers (glass, steel, QR code), local collection points, and non-trivial software to know who holds what.

If you want to hit the big boys like McDonald’s, ask friends at Uber Eats to introduce you to people who work with chain restaurants. They will explain better than I can why it’s hard.

Thermal hydrolysis (raising water/sewage to very high temperatures and pressures) can also break down PFAS and other bad stuff like pharmaceutical compounds. The Washington, D.C. Blue Plains water treatment plant uses this technology to safely convert septic sludge to fertilizer, sold under the brand name Bloom:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Plains_Advanced_Wastewate...

https://bloomsoil.com/faqs/#what-is-bloom

edit: As I Google to double-check my recollection, I'm finding mixed but encouraging reports on this technique's effectiveness. For instance this 2021 paper:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22133...

>To our best knowledge, there are only two studies that have evaluated fate of PFAS in sludge before and after HTL. In a report presented by Mitroshkov et al. [19], 15 PFAS were quantified in five sludge samples before HTL. After HTL, concentrations of the majority of these PFAS were below detection limit of the GC/MS/MS. However, the authors did not report the HTL operating conditions used in this study. In addition, PFSAs including PFOS, the commonly recognized most recalcitrant PFAS, were not targeted in this work.

>In another study, degradation of five PFAS (i.e., PFOA, 7:3 FTCA, 8:2 FTUCA, 8:2 FTS, PFOS) in sludge by HTL was conducted [35]. Among the five, each spiked at 1000 µg/kg, the first three were degraded > 99% at 350 °C for 90 min. Degradation of 8:2 FTS and PFOS was 34% and 67%, respectively. It was found that undegraded PFAS partitioned to the biocrude phase, which may negatively impact the quality and use of these biocrude in the real world.

>Compared to PFAS in water only, more degradation was observed when these PFAS were spiked to sludge. It was speculated that metal ions and mineral solids in the sludge might have contributed to enhanced PFAS degradation [35].

Couldn't find them on LinkedIn

Who do you mean exactly?

If you want to follow their progress what social media would you use?

I never could get a straight answer if the activated charcoal filters can remove these.

I’m distilling my own water now. Seems about the same price as filtering once you factor in the costs of the filters. And you know you’re getting everything out.

(I add in my own minerals in case that’s important.)

I don't think distillation actually works for forever chemicals, as they may be miscible to a certain degree or also vaporize and condense. Don't have the source, but there was a story about PFAS in rain recently. Your best bet would be reverse osmosis, which is unfortunately a pretty big waste of water.

How does reverse osmosis waste water?

You don't get all the water out that you put in. Currently, very efficient systems output about half the input as pure water, and half as doubly-impure. Less efficient systems are more like 1:2 or worse.

I'm not an expert and can't explain it much beyond that. This summarizes the math better than I probably could: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis#Disadvantages

maybe those wasted water can be used for other purpose like washing/flushing?

Yes but reclaiming it for reuse makes the installation much more complicated.

You need pressure on the feed side to overcome the osmotic pressure differential between the dirty and clean sides. The dirtier the dirty side gets, the higher pressure you need to move water from the dirty side to the clean side. Eventually you have to flush the dirty side because the concentration of contaminants is too high and nothing will go through the filter even though there's still water that you could use if you could get it through the membrane.

Under-cabinet RO systems are less efficient because they rely on the relatively low-pressure water that's running to the tap and are made to work without electricity.

but do you really care? The "wasted water" is miniscule vs how much people use daily. You fix the 90% problem before you fix the 3% problem, at least that's been SOP in my engineering life.

Yeah, water that is drink is a trivial proportion of water that is used. If water that is drunk goes up by 100%, it's still a trivial proportion.

So? Just increase chamber pressure

Interesting. I can’t seem to find any information either way about distillation removing them.

Just curious, why not a reverse osmosis setup?

"Filters containing activated carbon or reverse osmosis membranes have been shown to be effective at removing PFAS from water supplies"

https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/hazar...

Some carbon filters make the claim on the label, some don't. The only difference is some companies pay to test for it, and then they can make the claim on the labeling, there is no actual difference in the filters.

carbon filters remove PFAS but they're relatively ineffective so you need an awful lot of carbon to get a substantial reduction at least compared to the amount needed to remove other things.

RO is effective, as the chemicals in question have fairly high molecular weight.

But then RO is usually used with a bladder tank which will leach plasticizers so ::shrugs:: (they taste awful at least, so the norm is to follow up the tank with RO).

Relatively ineffective according to what? The study linked in another comment shows a simple Brita carbon faucet filter being very effective.

Compared to it's effectiveness against things carbon is usually used for. E.g. go look at the setup required for whole house filtration for people with actionable levels of PFAS contamination-- it ends up being like four or five 50lb carbon canisters.

If you're talking about 'safe' drinking water and want to reduce it from 2ppb to 1ppb or something-- just a 50% reduction-- then perhaps a small carbon filter is adequate.

For just drinking water RO is pretty reasonable, it's just not particularly reasonable to use RO for dishes, shower, etc. Thus the huge carbon canisters for people with acute contamination.

Yeah, standard practice is to filter through carbon to remove the bladder impurities.

Do you actually want this? I imagine there are probably beneficial minerals and things in water that you want.

I stopped only drinking filtered/bottled water exclusively for this reason.

Honest question - what minerals can you get from water that aren't available in the food we eat?

In Israel, where a lot of drinking water is sourced by reverse osmosis, it appears that the lack of magnesium in drinking water may have increased heart disease:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...

There are of course many magnesium rich foods but the lack of magnesium in water could make a difference at the margins.

I have a RO system at home, and it has a remineralizing cartridge attached to it. It's pretty cheap and seems to do its job well, the water contains healthy levels of minerals (I tested it in a lab).

Why isn't Israel doing it at a large scale? It should be pretty straightforward.

I am still highly sceptical about this and feel it is more of a "fear mongering" advertising - that this "remineralizing water" thing only started so that the RO filter businesses could create another source of recurring revenue. I also remember reading some study that said vitamins and minerals are better metabolised by our body as chemical compounds, as found naturally in food, than as individual elements in tablet forms. And that is why pharmaceutical companies have now started offering such compounds too - like Calcium + Zinc + Magnesium etc. Which also suggests that we may be better of with such vitamin and mineral supplements, if really required, than "remineralizing cartridges" which release questionable dosages into the water.

https://www.webmd.com/diet/distilled-water-overview#091e9c5e...

Distilled water lacks even electrolytes like potassium and other minerals your body needs. So you may miss out on a bit of these micronutrients if you drink only the distilled stuff.

Some studies have found a link between drinking water low in calcium and magnesium and tiredness, muscle cramps, weakness, and heart disease. Also, distilled water may not help you stay hydrated as well as other kinds of water.

I have a multi-stage water filter setup at home that pumps the water through mineral balls as the last step to re-introduce healthy minerals that were removed during the reverse osmosis process. Because it's true, RO water is not suitable for long-term human consumption because of the absence of healthy minerals.

Interesting, got a link to the product?

This is the one I have: https://stiebeleltron.ph/product/stiebel-eltron-glacier/ I think this particular model is only available in Asia though.

This is a common myth but it doesn’t make sense if you do the math. There aren’t enough minerals in tap to make a difference compared to the food you eat.

Per protocol, we gave our lab rats deionized water that was likely close to zero ppm. All the minerals they need are in the chow.

I have drunk delicious RO water at home for decades and have experienced no ill effects, all my blood work for minerals is perfectly normal, teeth healthy etc.

>Using an average calcium concentration in public water supplies of 26 mg/liter and a maximum of 145 mg/liter (Durfor and Becker, 1964) and assuming that the average adult drinks 2 liters of this water daily, then the drinking water could contribute an average of 52 mg/day and a maximum of 290 mg/day. On an average basis this would represent 5% to 10% of the usual daily intake or approximately 6.5% of the adult RDA.

>Therefore, typical drinking water in the United States, Canada, or Europe provides approximately 3% to 7% of the RDA for magnesium intake by a healthy human.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK216589/

I suppose if someone was right on the borderline for mineral deficiency the ~5% of the RDA from water could make a difference but that isn’t really a problem Americans have, if anything they get too much from food. There is some data showing excess calcium is actually bad for heart disease since it is found in atherosclerotic plaques, a problem Americans do have.

Not sure if legit, but WHO apparently issued a warning regarding RO water as well.

Doesn't necessarily mean that the warning was well founded. Mysticism sometimes makes its way into official advisories.

My understanding is reverse osmosis is pretty good for this for home use. Under-sink RO filters are pretty easy to source and fit.

If this becomes commercially available I will be very curious to see what effect it has upon obesity levels.

None. People eating carbs while sitting all day long causes obesity, not trace amounts of some chemicals.

People have been eating less carbs and exercising more for a number of years if not decades now, but obesity is steadily climbing, so this is not a correct explanation for the continuing growth.

https://qz.com/1230097/new-cdc-report-shows-americans-exerci...

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/us-soda-consumption-lowest-l...

You can actually already buy a Brita-compatible filter which removes PFAS: https://cyclopure.com/dexsorb/

It uses a starch which has been sized to interact with PFAS molecules.

How prevalent are these in water (vs other parts of the environment)? Are there some common places where a few well-placed filters could have an outsized impact in cleaningup our mess?

I think a big source is food, because it's bio-accumulating in our waste, which we spread on fields.

I don’t think human waste is used as fertiliser. It used to be and maybe it still is in some areas but it’s incredibly dangerous because it obviously contains human-specific diseases.

It's called "land application", and is still a thing. They don't apply human waste directly, it's digested biosolids.

There are some really nice lakes here in Düsseldorf that had to be closed to the public due to PFAS pollution. Makes me sad when I walk by them because they are beautiful, surrounded by trees, and there are still rope swings and such around, indicating to me that it used to be a great recreation spot.

If you have a common under the sink or above water filtration system that includes Active Carbon (granular activated carbon) filters and Reverse Osmosis. Most contain both, they are highly effective in removing PFAS.

> Most contain both

Most installed water filters are not reverse osmosis because it takes up too much room, wastes a bunch of water, needs to be remineralized, is more expensive than a non-RO 3 stage filter, and is not significantly more effective than a 3 stage that includes carbon.

What are the stages in a 3 stage filter? Do they really even remove anything? Think about it- if they aren’t removing minerals they aren’t removing things like lead, arsenic, chromium…

It’s like a glorified Brita filter and doesn’t even lower the ppm of the water that comes out of it.

> What are the stages in a 3 stage filter?

The first stage is some kind of sediment filter, either sand, ceramic, or polypropylene. The second and third stages are usually both activated carbon.

> Do they really even remove anything?

Yes. There are measurement standards for this. All of the major brands provide independent lab analysis data sheets. For instance: https://www.brondell.com/content/Coral_UC300_PDS_092821.pdf

> It’s like a glorified Brita filter

Brita also provides performance datasheets for their filters. https://www.brita.com/assets/23601607167498ba405a22f7692b3b8...

> Think about it...

It sounds like you have not yet learned about the NSF/ANSI testing standards for water filtration. Today is your lucky day my friend: https://www.nsf.org/consumer-resources/articles/standards-wa...

I'd like a device kit to measure the amount of these chemicals in my body.

There’s no way water companies will spend money on these frivolous filters. There’s no profit in saving fertility and brain function.

Does anyone know if the firefighter’s blood/plasma is disposed of? Or can it be treated in some way so it’s usable?

If this is scaleable, it will be very interesting to see changes in the trends of various disease rates before/after.

Article doesn't seem to say anything about how this technique removes PFAS from water. Disappointed.

Someone invent a Seinfeld joke here. Then why are they called forever chemicals?

Wonder if they also remove carbon nanotubes...

science might just save humanity

I had a chemistry teacher (retired analytic chemist for what's now DOW chemical) in highschool who pointed out something that stuck with me:

We tend to act without consideration and have confidence we can just engineer ourselves out of our mistakes.

I think she was right. While I never try to underestimate humanity's enginuity, there's some arrogance there that we may create problems we can't simply engineer around.

To be fair though, in the context of humanity we've never encountered a problem we couldn't later engineer ourselves out of. And it seems reasonable to think if we can engineer ourselves into the problem, we can engineer ourselves out of it as well (especially considering the alternative is to say we must stop innovating)

> we've never encountered a problem we couldn't later engineer ourselves out of

I think this is survivorship bias. There have been several civilizations which have basically completely died out in human history, who weren’t able to engineer themselves out of whatever killed them.

True but with technology that had not advanced beyond stone, simple metallurgy, and hand tools. Ultimately limited by whatever power could be extracted from human and animal effort. Once steam power and then electricity were discovered, civilization never looked back.

We've only had 200 or so years of widespread steam power (and closer to 100 for electricity). On an anthropological timescale, that's quite short. Egypt was ruled by pharaohs for 3,000 years.

The technology we have is bigger now, and so we're also making bigger problems.

Stopping innovation not the alternative, you're creating a false dichotomy.

Right. The alternative is to engineer in the solution at the same time you engineer the innovation, so that there's no problem in the first place.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Do we gain much by requiring innovators of the future to spend their innovation power on solutions to the side-effects of past innovations, instead of brand new innovations?

Sure we have. Climate change, radioactivity, and micro plastics are three major challenges that we have very much engineered ourselves into, and do not appear to be able to engineer ourselves out of.

We have tons of oopsies that we haven't fixed, and there is no reasonable path towards resolution. It is all a matter of the size of the problem we've created. I agree that we should continue with technological progress, but it's naive to dismiss the risks. Here are some humanity scale problems we've created for ourselves.

* Chernobyl is still unsafe to visit. The amount of radiation we've leaked into the atmosphere and oceans has a measurable negative impact on global health, and often a horrendous impact on local environments.

* Air quality/light pollution/noise pollution is significantly worse than pre-industrial revolution levels. These have measurable negative health impacts.

* We've directly and indirectly caused an uncountable number of extinctions.

* Glaciers are melting at an incredible rate.

For Chernobyl, what do you mean by "unsafe to visit"? Because it's a war zone? I remember a lot of people went in 2019 after the show came out and it was fine. They had a guide or took a dosimeter and weren't crawling over the melted core or anything like that. I don't think the radiation from a nuclear reactor meltdown had global impacts, can you cite something? Even the fallout from a full nuclear exchange at the peak of warhead counts would stay in the northern hemisphere.

Chernobyl safety -> "During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces subsequently captured Chernobyl. While there is an increase in radiation in the area, this is due to Russian forces disturbing the soil in the Red Forest and releasing radioactive dust and not from the reactor 4 itself. The New Safe Confinement is reportedly unharmed." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_New_Safe_Confinement...

Atmospheric fallout -> "Because all people in the United States who were alive since 1951 received some radiation exposure from fallout, some people may have an increased risk of cancer from this exposure, in particular, thyroid cancer. " https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/fallout/RF-GWT_home.htm

> They had a guide or took a dosimeter...

A perfect vacation resort. Just don't touch anything or disturb the soil.

We can't even mitigate relatively banal problems like wild boars and Himalayan black berries.

My go to "oopsie" is the radioactive plume crawling towards the Columbia River. Once that breeches, all settlements downstream will be uninhabitable. Bye bye Portlandia.

Right, there are problems, but we’ve survived the last 10,000 years of civilization I think it seems foolish to expect us to collapse in the next 50. I would also argue in the context of humanity, those problems have been solved enough to not be an issue to humanity as a whole (keeping in mind this doesn’t mean I personally love the outcome, just that society has been able to rebound and continue to grow)

1) You're ignoring everyone killed in the interim, from pollution, poisoning, etc.

2) It's entirely unclear whether we can engineer ourselves out of climate change. We've never experienced anything at this scale before, or from something (fossil fuels) we rely on so much.

The solution to climate change may have to be political rather than engineering, and it may be impossible politically.

Climate change has been the most important issue for the upcoming election for at least the past four decades. As real problems manifest themselves, we solve them.

And again, as I said earlier, this is in the context of humanity. Although I don’t want to undermine the death of someone, their death won’t stop the progress of humanity unless so many people die it resets our species. Even if we’ve never faced a particular problem as big as anything we experienced today, we’ve also never been so advanced and rich as a civilization.

There are thousands of species that went extinct due to engineered habitat destruction, pollution, and/or hunting.

We face an ongoing "vulture crisis" in India due to the tremendous use of antibiotics on livestock.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis

See the book "Their Fate is Our Fate" for more examples of ecological problems affecting humans, for which birds provide early warnings.

Speaking of anti-biotics, we've been so successful in our development and manufacture of these medicines that anti-biotic resistance is a significant and growing problem.

Stepping away from medicine, consider the ongoing water crisis in the Colorado River basin. We engineered our way into vast cities and agricultural projects in the desert (e.g. California's central valley) and there is now no clear path to sustaining all of these projects.

> We tend to act without consideration and have confidence we can just engineer ourselves out of our mistakes.

Or the people acting without consideration are not impacted by the mistakes and will not be held responsible for engineering their way around them.

Having confidence about engineering ourselves out of our mistakes is, after all, the conservative rationale for ignoring Climate Change. They're certain that out of the sky will fall the technology for combating the runaway warming of the earth and it all happen just in time (mind you) before any major harm is visited on the earth's populations.

The actions from the Right that are more directly disingenuous are where they try to deny scientific conclusions and the damage already done. They'll post on twitter (implicit denials of sea level rise by) showing 150 year old pictures of seaside landmarks beside today's version with similar sea levels. Yet where are are counter-arguments for why the arctic sea ice/ice shelf is in such worse shape than it was just 30 years ago?

holy crap -- my pithy comment blew up a bit. I'm really digging the discussion.

Why haven't we seen all the amazing properties of graphene commercialized yet? like super capacitors made from graphene that replace batteries and can insta-charge?

I came across this book Estrogeneration which covers this stuff and more. Haven't read it yet but bottom line he gives this site link where he provides products he has researched and likes. He does recommend a reverse osmosis machine etc.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Estrogeneration-Estrogenics-Making-Si...

[2] https://www.ajconsultingcompany.com/whatiuse.html

Looks like that book talks about flax seeds and soy which is a red flag for quack territory.

If flax seed and soy are so estrogenic and bad, then let’s look at the evidence.

Meta analysis of 41 studies: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33383165/

> Sub-analysis of the data according to isoflavone dose and study duration also showed no effect. This updated and expanded meta-analysis indicates that regardless of dose and study duration, neither soy protein nor isoflavone exposure affects TT, FT, E2 or E1 levels in men.

What about hops (beer)? I remember beer having magnitudes more than soy or flax seed.

It also turned out that gut bacteria in human keep producing the phytoestrogen from beer days after consumption. [0]

[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15826034/

> neither soy protein nor isoflavone exposure affects TT, FT, E2 or E1 levels in men

I'm team science, however, I think it's important to point out that total testosterone and free testosterone are only part of the equation. You also have to look at androgen receptor sensitivity.

From the study you quoted:

> there were insufficient data to evaluate the effects of isoflavone exposure on androgen receptor (AR) expression

More research is needed.

Which health outcomes would we expect to change wrt your concern?

More research is needed in this area, however, I can tell you that testosterone is critical to a man's overall sense of well-being, and I would expect that someone who is suffering from a significant reduction in androgen receptor function and can't process testosterone normally might experience symptoms of low testosterone or Mild Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (MAIS), even if their testosterone levels are normal. So, to answer your question, we're talking about depression, suicidality, anxiety, lack of confidence, lack of motivation, fatigue, decreased endurance, decreased muscle mass, increased body fat, cognitive impairment, erectile dysfunction, low libido, male infertility, gynecomastia, and in the most extreme cases, possibly even gender identity issues. People who have MAIS don't always have all of these symptoms. Some people with MAIS have no symptoms at all! It's incredibly complex, and I think it's safe to say we don't fully understand the whole thing yet. This is an area of men's health that I think is going to get a lot more attention in the near future...

To my knowledge, soy has never been considered estrogenic because it affects levels of endogenous hormones, but because soy isoflavones directly agonize estrogen receptors.

"Isoflavones are phytoestrogens with potent estrogenic activity; genistein, daidzein and glycitein are the most active isoflavones found in soy beans. Phytoestrogens have similarity in structure with the human female hormone 17-β-estradiol, which can bind to both alpha and beta estrogen receptors, and mimic the action of estrogens on target organs"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23161396/

Everything changes everything in the body all the time. We only care about when things change in certain ways for certain endpoints to certain degrees.

So, what are some hard health outcomes we can measure? What does the literature say about them as isoflavones are increased? Anything significant?

For example, does erection strength decrease when men eat 300g of edamame daily or something? Show me something.

I have the same questions about meat and dairy. Google "meat estrogenic" and "dairy estrogenic". I don't consume either so I haven't cared to read them but you can find papers talking about it. Without looking further, you can't tell if it's something you should care about or not.

By the way this is ridiculously sensationalised. Would love to see the world rid of nonsense chem journalists. They’re operating about 200 ppb at lowest conc. usually we’re looking to remove from a 1 ppb. Low quality journal. The issue with PFAS and them bad bois is the accumulation in body. It’s already low in the environment and doesn’t degrade. So this guy will be all good if we’re sitting at 200 ppb in the environment. If we were at that level I reckon we’d be a lot more cancery. Most of top of my head, please check what I say. I’m not an encyclopaedia but I did research in adjacent areas

if you claim this is sensationalized (ridiculously, too) would you care to decipher what this means:

> They’re operating about 200 ppb at lowest conc. usually we’re looking to remove from a 1 ppb

who does "they're operating" refer to in this sentence?

lol yeah that comment is hard to decipher

Sorry fellas I was baked. Yeah basically that's the cricket. If solutions they use are higher than those in the 'real world' it's actually a much bigger challenge than one would think at a first pass. Seeking a 1 ppm solution is a milligram in a litre, this is challenging. 200 ppb (this paper) is impressive, and on the cutting edge. Now, in the real world: 1-2 ppb and below that is where the real challenge lies. It's seeking a needle in a haystack, where your real world solution will contain a million other 'competing' species that will be preferentially bound or decomposed by your agent. The agent could be decomposition agent or a sorbent.

My interpretation: the paper describes a system that works for a starting concentration of 200 parts per billion, or higher. This is unrealistic because, in real world contamination scenario, you would expect to see a starting concentration of around 1 part per billion.

My best guess is that the GP is referring to the concentration of PFOAs in the test setup. It is possible that a technology that is good at reducing higher concentrations of PFOAs is not good at further reducing PFOAs concentration at lower concentrations.

However, from the link to the paper in another comment (note that this is from the introduction; I don't have permission to view the full paper):

> After finding the best operating condition, the effects of solution parameters such as initial pH, DO, temperature, PFOA concentration, and electrolyte concentration in broad ranges were determined. PFOA concentration and sulfate dosage were chosen to be representative of different aqueous environments (e.g., natural waters and brine solutions).

So I'm not sure where GP gets that this 200 PPB number is the case for all of the tests.

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