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Comment by DubiousPusher | Hacker News Reader

> IF we eliminated all PFAS chemicals today, society would collapse.

I think this is a failure of imagination. The modern world, largely as we appreciate it today, existed in 1940 in Europe and the U.S. That is well before the widespread deployment of plastics. It was a world in which everyone, including the very rich did with a little less but still, a fairly high quality of life.

The only question that separates then from today, is whether we can scale that kind of material to the much larger global middle class.

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In 1940, (with the exception of primitive point-contact radar diodes) there was no production of semiconductor devices.

Without PFAS there would be no production of modern electronic devices, so no computers and no mobile phones.

Nevertheless, unlike with PFAS used in things like clothes, kitchenware or packing, when PFAS are used in industrial processes or in electronic equipment (as high-frequency electrical insulators or in optical devices) it is much easier to avoid any pollution.

> Without PFAS there would be no production of modern electronic devices, so no computers and no mobile phones.

Uh, yup. That in no way contradicts what I said.

> Nevertheless, unlike with PFAS used in things like clothes, kitchenware or packing, when PFAS are used in industrial processes or in electronic equipment (as high-frequency electrical insulators or in optical devices) it is much easier to avoid any pollution.

Yeah, I'm not arguing for a ban. I'm arguing that from a historical perspective, civilization in no way hinges on plastics. They are ubiquitous so an abrupt end of plastics would obviously be very disruptive. But there was a pretty decent life to be had before they became so and I imagine we could figure out how to do that again.

Synthetic chemistry in the 40s was like alchemy compared to the processes today. There are myriad chemical techniques and reactions that exist today, that didn't exist in the 40s, and you flat out can't do without fluoropolymers, because the reagents used are way too aggressive on virtually everything else.

I didn't say a damn thing about the state of chemistry in the 1940s. My point was that it's silly to claim the absence of PFAS or plastics would cause societal collapse when we have a ready image of our civilization without plastics.

Metal, wood, resins, etc were just far more ubiquitous, doing many of the jobs plastics do now. Lots of things were a bit more expensive because of this. But none the less, people lived pretty decent lives.

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