The problem is 3M scientists have know toxicity to human and have withheld the information to the public and regulators. Since 1970s.
I doubt very much that they're the only ones able to manufacture this stuff
Unless the decision-making folks have their personal wealth destroyed, they really haven’t anything to lose. I would expect the worst-case scenario is that their stock portfolios will need to be adjusted, by tax-loss harvesting their losses in 3m stocks as an opportunity to divest and rebalance their portfolios.
Looking at it, I think thats pretty good and hope the possibility for future lawsuits means they continue to pay, but knowing that case is an unusual outlier and that none of the other people involved like the CEO or other executives have had any consequences makes it feel a little underwhelming.
I'm glad government is going after bad companies more and I hope they continue, but it does seem like our legal system is just not equipped to correctly hold people responsible in these cases.
Yes, but it prevents them from harming the public like this in the future, and also serves as a very strong deterrent for others.
(rapping on another comment saying that there's a chance this is a way for the USA government to sell the 'manufacture capacity' that 3M is to other "greener" owners)
now that I type this out, I realize that this is perfectly consistent with the behavior of empires. the realization that the alleged 'pax romana' (stability and 'peace' for the roman empire) was built on stealing from 'barbaric' tribes and selling stuff to more 'civilized' owners in Rome.
But it's hard to see how the particular people who brought this case to bear would be motivated by the small slice of the increase in federal funding that would redound to them. And it's not consistent with most of the government's behavior -- it doesn't spend as many resources extracting judgments from big corporations as would be likely if its profit motive loomed large.
philosophically, at this height, the principle of "justice" is to not so simple... what does it even mean "to be just"? may as well say "be good" but the point is that the issue is good for whom?
the concept is "Empire"... USA government is the empire? aside question: can there ever exist multiple "empires"? monotheistic~ally speaking?
uff... My English prose is answering its own questions... I am no longer deeply disturbed by this phenomenon... but it's not something scientifically real so it still shakes me.
(1) How much do you care about whom? In particular, do you care equally about everyone, or are you a jerk?
(2) How do you weight the relative value of things like money, health, longevity, entertainment?
(3) At what rate does the marginal utility of such things diminish?
Okay maybe that's a lot of wiggle room. Still, under any reasonable set of weights, making millions of people sick is not worth the money 3M made.
Who are you people who feel compelled to defend mega corporations that screw people over? What is your psychology? What do you value in life? My goodness.
That's not even the least liberal worldviews widely held. Love thy neighbor and the golden rule and accountability are not universal
Its been seen across the centuries and countries alike. Colonialism, MegaCorps, Hague Invasion Act and countless examples that prove that morals matter very less in the long run.
DuPont, while removed from the threat of this lawsuit, is guilty on plenty of counts of the same behavior with other chemicals.
I believe I've read articles about GE and Monsanto also knowing the health risks to their own employees and doing nothing about it. Let alone the dumping into public waterways.
$143 billion is hopefully the judgement which is levied, and hopefully the first of many.
There can and will be others. Esp. if there is a legal precedent.
Companies don't need to prove the safety of things like this.
Look at bpa free. Most people don't even know that bpa free plastic tends to be just as bad, or potentially worse than bpa. The press doesn't give a shit I guess. Society went through its giant bpa panic and now it's tired of dealing with this so let's just ignore it and move onto the next thing. Ignorance is bliss.
The problem is:
- Humans invent something useful and cool.
- Humans discover that the cool and useful thing is toxic as fuck, but only after years go by. It takes years for the awareness of the toxicity to become widespread enough for everyone to concur it’s a problem. Often, we only find out about the toxicity as a result of the cool chemical becoming hella widespread.
- Humans invent alternatives that are different enough to obviously not have the same exact problem.
But: what toxic nonsense or buttcancer risks will we discover about the alternatives? No way to know immediately since it takes years to find out. And it’s only when the alternatives become widespread that we can even do the science to figure out what’s up. And by the time they become widespread, some folks got buttcancer.
That’s the problem: just because there’s an alternative that is different from the thing we found out to be toxic doesn’t meant that the alternative isn’t toxic. And we find out it’s toxic because people get hurt.
It’s not that the press is bad… it’s just a fundamental problem in science and engineering. You need scale to discover the really bad issues.
In my opinion is is a problem not of science and engineering, but of human greed.
We do not need these products, we want them. As a species we did fine without them but suddenly in the last 100 years we need the so desperately?
Adding, no one can give me a response, just downvotes. Why is the aversion to speaking about greed so strong here on hacker news?
Thats why I don’t usually use greed as an explanation for stuff. Of course greed is part of the system and sometimes it causes bad things to happen. Sometimes it also causes good things to happen. So, if you want to prevent the bad, it’s useful to look for some explanation that isn’t just “greed”.
That statement is doing allot of heavy lifting.
Greed: excessive or rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions.
That definition of greed is certainly not a part of everything in my life.
Can you name something that that greed leads to something good happening?
- Humans who discovered the toxicity lie, bribe, bully, and cheat to stop anyone else from finding out. The solution is delayed by decades and deaths go through the roof.
But we have seen that movie many times, haven’t we? It’s a given that if someone builds a business on a thing and that thing turns out to cause buttcancer, they gonna cover that shit up.
Sometimes covering it up is easy if you just rely on scientific ground truths, like “the dose is the poison”. Even water is a poison if you chug too much of it, so just the discovery that something is poisonous at some dose is almost like tautological. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the “cover up” was based on that kind of science.
Basically, if there’s utility to something, then there’s money to be made, careers to be made, legacies at stake, etc - and that will bias folks towards covering shit up.
I bet you the folks involved in the cover up were good people who just failed to check their biases.
There's no reason for there to be years between discovery and action. It doesn't matter how quickly the discovery ripples through lay society. Once it's known that something is harming and/or killing people, it should be stopped.
But what if there are no alternatives?
What if the alternatives are worse?
What if the alternatives are the kind of thing that could possibly be worse but we don’t have enough experience with them yet to know that they are worse?
Often the known bad thing is better than the thing you don’t know to be bad yet.
Democracy is slow.
As a non-chemist I don't claim to have a comprehensive understanding, but as far as I can tell: PTFE (Teflon) is found in consumer products today, and has not been directly linked to cancer yet, i.e if you eat teflon (and you have) it will supposedly just pass through your gut in an inert fashion. PFOA and more generally PFAS are used to manufacture PTFE, these are known carcinogens according to independent studies and (allegedly) internally by 3Ms own research, unfortunately PFOA is also in your blood and my blood, not because you ate teflon from a frying pan, but because once it's in the environment it doesn't get broken down, and so inevitably we end up ingesting it.
The reason we have to generalise to the group of chemicals "PFAS", is because once PFOA specifically was found to be problematic companies looked for similar alternatives, but these have also found to cause similar issues.
To complicate matters the PTFE in your non-stick frying pan can also releases PFOA if heated high enough, supposedly the threshold is around 300 degrees C, however it has been found that this threshold varies between products and can be realistically reached under in "normal" cooking scenarios, but usually when someone accidentally dry heated a frying pan too much, or is just plain cooking on too high a temperature. The side effects of being exposed to PFOA in this way are supposed to feel similar to catching a cold that disappears fairly quickly, and is often mistaken as such, I presume this is because it's vaporised.
Even knowing all this (that provided you don't nuke your cookware it likely makes no personal difference) I've still decided to personally go down the stainless steel route, it's not very scientific, but the relationship between PTFE and PFOAs is close enough, and it flakes off my frying pans frequently enough that I've decided I don't want to keep on ingesting it only to find out later that it's also a problem. Although stainless is not hazard free, because you can get problems with metals leaching into the food and have to be careful with acidity, and also make sure you buy high quality pans. They also require more skill to cook with without destroying them, but ultimately last indefinitely if you can take care of them.
The main problem with continuing to use PTFE in products is the indirect cost to the environment and human health through the "externalities" of manufacturing.
Basically, teflon consists just of long chains of carbon atoms saturated with fluorine. They are extremely chemically resistant, and they appear to be biologically inert. Even if you heat the teflon past its decomposition temperature, you simply get pieces of the hydrocarbon chain as a result. They are nasty, but they are not persistent pollutants.
PFAS are different. They also consist of a chain of carbons with fluorine atoms attached to them. But they also have a hydrophilic "head" attached to them at the beginning of the chain. This hydrophilic head allows PFAS to function as surfactants, and it also makes them biologically active. The body can't do anything with the hydrocarbons saturated with fluorine, but the head provides a "handle" that can be used to absorb the PFAS into cell membranes where it can stay and cause all kinds of issues.
* We use silk dental floss (we use Radius)
* We use glass storage containers instead of Tupperware
* For cooking, we use All-Clad.
* If a recipe calls for non-stick (e.g., pancakes) I use a braiser from Le Creuset, which works reasonably well.
(Edited: formatting)
For instance, when making pancakes, my first step is putting the griddle on the range. Next, I start making the batter.
Of course, you can set the range to high and heat it up really fast, but then you end up risking overheating it.
If you ever have the surface roughen up you can also strip the old seasoning by covering it in oven cleaner and heating it to cleaning temperature. The easiest way to do this is to stick it in an oven on high.
I’ve had the same frying pan for 10 years now and this is how I keep it non-stick.
Yes, complex hydrocarbons are not good for you, but PFOAs and their ilk are really really really bad for you and the environment. It's like comparing spent nuclear rods with brazil nuts. Yes, both are radioactive, but there is zero equivalence.
I have an old school cast iron skillet and pot. I wish I'd watched videos because newer types of cast iron apparently has a smooth finish and is thinner and lighter. When new, I washed it with soap and water, dried it, added a nice and thin layer of olive oil all around wiped it with a kitchen towel to take off the excess, then baked it for half an hour. Let it cool. Repeated that once or twice. You can even just heat it on a stove top.
Once I'm done cooking something, I rinse scrub and rinse with warm water to get all the food off and add a touch of oil. A little goes a long way.
That's all, really. It isn't complicated or particularly laborious. It just weighs a fair bit - it'll take your hands a couple of weeks to get stronger and then you won't care.
I had a few “ceramic” pans but inevitably they become scratched (and useless) after a year or two in everyday use
I then dry it with a towel, heat up the pan with Avocado or Bacon grease until it almost starts smoking. I then use a paper towel to wipe out the pan and it stays on the stove until the next use.
Of the pans I have now (bought over the past 2 years), 3 are seasoned well enough that they’re effectively non-stick.
Eggs pancakes, fish, no problems.
Lmao. Hapless beginner follows your advice, decides to scramble some eggs on day 1 with his badly-factory-seasoned Lodge pan. Egg glue now encrusts his shiny new pan. What do? Wash with soap? BAD NOOB - that's bad for the seasoning. Scrape it off with steel wool? BAD NOOB - that's even worse for the seasoning.
(If you do this, fellow noob, I think oil + a scrubber sponge got me out of the predicament)
Edit: In fact we had scrambled eggs as part of dinner this evening (with rice, chilli crisp, garlic mushrooms and bak choi) and the pan is currently in the sink full of water, where it will remain until tomorrow morning because it's Friday night, dammit, and it will be fine.
Source: Been cooking exclusively on carbon steel, cast iron and stainless for years.
If you do season the pan, the most important thing is to wipe off all the oil after applying it. You brush the oil on and then wipe it completely dry. It should be dry to the touch and matt, not shiny. You should not be able to see ANY oil. The microscopic invisible bit of oil left is all you want. Only then do you heat it. The temperature doesn't matter much. 180 C or so in an oven is what I've used. The kind of oil used also doesn't matter. For best results do the whole thing 3 or more times. If you bake a visible layer of oil onto your pan you're not seasoning it, you're just covering it in burnt crap.
And it's optional!
Note that the above is for skillets, which self-season because they're used for frying. (Hence "seasoning" - i.e. using them for a while.) The story is very different for some other things. For example, we have a dutch oven used for baking bread, which is not an oily process. For that you really do have to season. Ours came pre-seasoned but it rusted after an unfortunate baking mishap and I had to electrolyse it and then give it 5 rounds of oven seasoning (as described above), after which it has been a zero-maintenance workhorse.
Griddles are absolute fucking bastards and will ruin your life.
If you ever do electrolyse any cast iron (it's great fun and will restore anything), A) pay a few quid for graphite electrodes (overgrown pencil leads, available on Amazon), rather than using an old stainless steel knife and producing hexavalent chromium (Erin Brockovich's favourite chemical) and B) use a bench power supply because nobody sells the kind of car battery charger all the online tutorials tell you to use any more (they're all pulsed ones now, completely useless for electrolysis).
No. I polymerized it with the grapeseed oil. I tried it with sunflower oil. I polymerized until my apartment swirled with smoke. I wiped it down with nothing besides a paper towel and water. I followed youtube guides.
Nothing worked, and that goddamn pan would lose slickness in the heavily-used center every other day. Plus, I'd leave it unused for a few weeks while traveling, and upon returning, it'd be covered in rust! This happened with at least 3 different pans from 2 different manufacturers.
Low-maintenance my ass.
I bought a couple carbon steel pans I had to season myself and they're a constant nightmare.
You may want to try again with a different brand.
You oil it (with any cooking oil) and then wipe it all off. It needs to look and feel like it hasn't been oiled. Any visible oil or stickiness will burn to black shit that isn't seasoning. There is still oil there. The invisible, microscopic residue is what you want. When you heat it (in the oven around 180C) it will generate a faint smell around the cooker, not fill your home with burning oil smoke. Do the whole thing 3-5 times.
But for a skillet this is just a kick start. It is neither necessary nor sufficient. The real seasoning comes from use and is way better than anything you can do by explicit seasoning. Use it frequently. Fry in it. FREQUENTLY. And when you do use use oil, ffs. While it's newish, clean it promptly, dry it thoroughly and give it a thin wipe of oil before you put it away to prevent rust and help it season.
(If you're the sort that thinks never letting a single fat molecule enter your digestive system is a virtue, don't buy cast iron. It won't work for you. It'll rust and stick. Use teflon. It's the only thing you'll ever be able make a "fried" egg on. It might give you cancer but at least you won't accidentally ingest some butter. Also, if you cook once every 6 months, don't use cast iron. It needs use. Weekly at least, if not daily.)
One of our four cast skillets spent last night in the sink, full of water (see my other comment). We treat them how we please, scrubbing and washing them with detergent if needed, leaving them dirty if we want. They cook wonderfully, don't stick and will probably survive the death of the sun.
People mostly really get into trouble when they try to stew tomatoes or something like that (I just keep a steel pan around for really acidic stuff).
(this is a pain when you have parrots, because one overheated pan, and all birds in the house - big and small - will die)
As one example, I bought some hexclad pans. They had very strong wording about their use of teflon:
https://hexclad.com/blogs/posts/pfoa-free
when you try to figure out what their coating is, you are told:
"We’ve used a high-grade non-toxic Japanese coating infused with diamond dust for extra toughness." (https://hexclad.com/pages/hexclad-science)
and... well keep digging.
Finally you can find this:
Q: Are your pans free of PTFE?
A: Our pans are PFOA free but contain some PTFE. PTFE is in over 95% of all nonstick cookware including our ceramic-based nonstick. PTFE is safe and inert. In fact, it is used in surgical matches meshes, dental implants and heart stents which are all implanted in the body. We do not use PFOA chemicals and other chemicals that gave many other nonstick pans a bad name. Why do we use some PTFE? Sadly, non-PTFE nonstick cookware does not work well for long periods of time. In fact, in our tests, the largest non-PTFE nonstick in the world only held up for 45 minutes of consecutive use.
https://hexcladcommercial.com/pages/frequently-asked-questio...
What's especially ridiculous is that the "good" hexclad sets you can get at costco also put this coating on the BOTTOM of the pan, against the flame or burner! High temperature is the achilles heel for these chemicals.
took them back.
EDIT: also https://www.consumerreports.org/toxic-chemicals-substances/y...
The only downside is that you have to wash them right away, dry them thoroughly. Cooking with a lot of acidic sauces will mean you'll likely have season them again.
I only see people struggle with cast iron when they think it must be cleaned with soap until it’s shiny. That’s an invitation for rust and problems.
https://www.scanpan.com/haptiq-8-inch-fry-pan-40141-configur...
My dad has made pancakes for my entire life without ever using, or owning, a non-stick pan.
Plastic has a bad reputation because of its longevity, but that also makes it a good material for containers. That - in turn - makes it bad for throwaway packaging of course. I might have missed something, that's why I ask.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/18/are-plastic-...
My general view is that glass is super-durable, microwave-safe (I would never microwave Tupperware), and the cost tradeoff is minor, so it seems worthwhile. That said, if I order takeout and it comes in a plastic container that's hot ... I still eat it :).
PFAS and BPA are not used for (multi-use) food containers I think. Don't get me wrong! Avoiding throwaway packaging, where possible, absolutely makes sense. I specifically mean to find the culprit with Tupperware (or multi-use plastic food containers in general).
> My general view is that glass is super-durable, microwave-safe (I would never microwave Tupperware), and the cost tradeoff is minor, so it seems worthwhile.
Glass breaks faster than plastic containers (usually). I still use glass containers, but I am always aware that they break relatively easily.
Regarding microwave-use I am with you. Not a fan of microwaving plastic, even if it is safe for many plastic materials (the term plastic is vague I admit).
I have maybe 60-70 or so glass food containers that get very regular use from being used for leftovers, to being put in the deep freezer for 6mo and then warmed up.
We handle at least half a dozen of these a day on average from filling/cleaning/removing portions and putting back into the fridge.
I've broken dozens of the plastic lids for them. I can't remember a single case (although I'm sure it's happened) of breaking a glass container in the past decade. They have survived more than a few rather large drops. These are the Pyrex brand glassware with the new glass that is more drop but less heat shock resistant.
Luckily Snapware also sells lids, since the glass containers far outlast the plastic lids and we end up replacing 3-4 of those a year as wear items. That doesn't bother me much since very little food gets in contact with them.
I expect my Snapware/Pyrex food storage sets to largely outlast my lifetime, but without lids to match once they stop manufacturing them.
The plastic lids always break way more quickly than the glass containers IME. Can't remember the last time I broke a glass one, actually. Plus, they actually stay in good condition. An abused plastic container will cloud, warp, gouge, and release god knows what into your food the whole time.
I also switched to glass containers and stainless steel everything, about 20 years ago, out of distrust for reasons like in this article.
1: https://www.mamavation.com/beauty/toxic-pfas-dental-floss-to...
>They [PFAS] are used in all kinds of products that I personaly use everyday from pans to dental floss.
Perfluorooctanoic acid enhances colorectal cancer DLD-1 cells invasiveness through activating NF-κB mediated matrix metalloproteinase-2/-9 expression
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4637576/
I just do not understand how people can be so "whatever" about this stuff. It is sad and infuriating.
You can get it on Amazon too - price is the same as Glide, Reach, etc.
A few examples:
- food containers coated with PFAS (usually single use, often cardboard) - water-repellent PFAS spray for clothes, shoes, cars/whatever - surface PFAS treatment of clothes/shoes/whatever (better but still rubs off) - PFAS bike-chain lube
Why are any of these things legal? They cause much more exposure, by design cannot be contained and spread PFAS everywhere you go. They are the reason there are PFAS in snow on Mt. Everest.
Pans, medical tubes and maybe even inner layers in clothes can at least theoretically be responsibly disposed of, e.g. by reasonably contained incineration. I don't want to support unneeded PFAS, but pans seem a whole different category than spray-on PFAS for "weather-proofing" that people use because shrug "it helps I get less wet".
Instead, government should require disclosure of new chemicals, tax the chemical industry (or use general fund), and perform its own studies on new chemicals.
Sometimes I send them back and ask for another; always I remove the straw quickly.
And why don't you just ask for a drink without a straw instead of removing it later?
In short, industrials chemicals are innocent until proven guilty. That's great for the justice system. It's a complete clusterfuck for Mother Nature and all her creatures, including humans.