USGS estimates at least 45% of U.S. tap water contain forever chemicals
usgs.gov
usgs.gov
We know which companies are responsible for polluting. They've been doing it for years, knowing the damages in greater and greater detail all along the way.
Why aren't we forcing the polluters to pay for the cleanup as well as the likely-tremendous costs of damage to people's health and the ecosystem? And why aren't these chemicals banned? At what point does the government do anything about widespread problems like this? We don't get much of anything in the way of protection from bad domestic actors (in this case, polluters) for our tax dollars.
It's getting quite tiring to live in a country where the rules seem to be "anarchy for thee, and profits for me".
We are (1), but to be frank the "payment" isn't enough. We need criminal liability for executives and board members. Apparently there's not enough incentive not to destroy public health for generations.
> At what point does the government do anything about widespread problems like this?
When they stop being corrupt.
(1) https://www.wqad.com/article/news/local/public-safety/3m-con...
> We are (1), but to be frank the "payment" isn't enough. We need criminal liability for executives and board members. Apparently there's not enough incentive not to destroy public health for generations.
Criminal liability for decision-makers is the way to go, along with some plan that wipes out the shareholders but otherwise doesn't destroy or cripple the company as a going concern. The company itself isn't guilty, and it has lots of innocent stakeholders (e.g. customers, lower-level employees) who would be harmed if it was damaged.
(And yes I do believe that governments and/or individuals with power would abuse this for personal gain)
ie: suing Apple for cash won't give them the ability to install backdoors, taking over control of Apple would. (This is probably unlikely to happen with Apple, but maybe it could with Comcast, AT&T or even Intel)
> They lack the ability to simply regulate, let alone run a company.
Who says the government would run the company? The meat of the policy is all about wiping out existing shareholders to incentivize them to make sure the company doesn't do stuff like pollute a bunch of groundwater. The policy could (and should) immediately sell the company again via an IPO of reissued shares. The proceeds could go to some cleanup or compensation fund or something.
My point primarily being that government is more the problem here than corporations. It's their job to put in safeguards to prevent these things from happening in the first place and they could do that without resorting to pseudo communism.
I didn't actually, but was bending a tangent back to my original idea. When I brought up wiping out the shareholders up thread, I never meant the government would operate the company on an ongoing basis and never used the term "nationalization." Though I could understand "nationalization" being used to describe a brief transitory state.
> Regardless the wealthy would find a way around any scheme like this, I have no faith something like this could be done effectively. Like I said they can't even regulate because of lobbying and special interests (they need money to get elected).
I don't really care. I'm tried of the idea nothing should be attempted because of a false assumption they "would find a way around any scheme like this." It's heads you win, tails I lose thinking. Screw that.
> My point primarily being that government is more the problem here than corporations. It's their job to put in safeguards to prevent these things from happening in the first place and they could do that without resorting to pseudo communism.
Alright then, if that's the case, lets reform criminal law around those lines. No punishment, no deterrence, just 100% prevention. Your friend get murdered? Don't do anything to the murderer, because it's really the government's fault it didn't successfully make murder impossible. I'm sure that would work wonderfully.
Sorry for the sarcasm. But these companies have to be hurting themselves in the market by other means before the govt will do anything about it, besides a slap on the wrist.
I'd think a "corporate death penalty" as a kind of creative destruction. I'm sure demise of Radio Shack hurt someone's stock stock or 401k, so that's tolerable. If it's not, I suppose part of the policy could be to reissue and return stock to certified "unsophisticated" investors (e.g. index funds open to the public and people with net worth below some middle-class cutoff). That reissued stock would still be valuable, since likely few of the company's fundamentals would have changed.
I also don't think such a thing would hurt the "economy as a whole" beyond a short-term blip, unless the company ceases to be a going concern. You'd only we wiping out the stockholders, it'd still service its customers, make debt payments, etc.
Not necessarily so.
> The company culture that permitted these acts won't necessarily be wiped out when you purge the executives but leave the rest of management intact.
So throw the baby out with the bathwater, then?
Explain how you think punishing bad behavior will motivate more of it.
IMHO, the shareholder class puts out all kinds of noise to avoid accountability, and that includes employing people to produce very sophisticated propaganda that makes false claims against holding them accountable (e.g. false heads-I-win, tails-you-lose scenarios).
The systemic risk of not putting companies to death when they behave badly is greater than the risk of the less-guilty stakeholders (you can't be a stakeholder in a bad actor and be innocent - only less guilty; that's true of employees and customers).
Except we're not. Unlike a corporation, a burglar is a unitary entity. Everyone guilty in the company (including its shareholders) will be "on the hook."
> The systemic risk of not putting companies to death when they behave badly is greater than the risk of the less-guilty stakeholders (you can't be a stakeholder in a bad actor and be innocent - only less guilty; that's true of employees and customers).
No. That's an unreasonably extreme take that, if taken to heart, would cause the cons to far outweigh the pros. We live in the real world, and the real world demands tradeoffs.
Also extending this to all the costumers is nonsense. Is some dude who buys a 3M N95 mask in a hardware store even a little bit guilty of polluting the water supply with PFAS? No, of course not. You might be able to extend some blame to companies that bought PFAS from 3M, but it would have to a pretty direct connection.
So never, probably.
Stock holders too
A statement with neither nuance (no distinguishing the types of chemicals) nor precision (no quantification), either false (because we do not actually know for certain that all of them cause noticeable quality of life decrease even at tapwater concentrations) or trivial and meaningless (e.g. enough of any substance will harm health).
Here's the article:
> High concentrations of some PFAS may lead to adverse health risks in people, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Research is still ongoing to better understand the potential health effects of PFAS exposure over long periods of time.
Simply saying "There isn't a debate." doesn't make a statement true. It's certainly true that some of these chemicals have good evidence for harming human health at concentrations people could actually encounter them in. It's not true that we know this for all of them, nor what concentrations cause issues.
Your post reads like a call to action, rather than a curious and considered analysis. The propagation of these types of posts makes hackernews a worse place as more and more people use it to proselytise rather than explore, discuss and learn.
If you wished to actually contribute you could cite some form of meta study giving a breakdown of the health effects of the various chemicals at certain concentrations.
> Why aren't we forcing the polluters to pay for the cleanup
Because then the manufacturing goes to China. It doesn't get cleaner, it might actually get worse. The pollution goes somewhere else. Economic anxiety (which is politically explosive, see 2016 election) goes up domestically.
What we need is effective regulation, not bureaucratic us-versus-them regulation. We need more engineering spending and less legal spending. And as a consequence, yes, we need fewer choices in consumer products and higher prices, and we need consumer safety laws that prevent offshoring from undermining all of that.
That's easy to say and everyone would agree we need "effective" regulation, but I think the profit-driven corporations that continue to pollute and use a portion of their profits to pay lobbyists and influence public discourse in order to discourage regulation will always take a "us-versus-them" approach.
Attorney-client privilege should be severely curtailed if not abolished outright when the client is a corporation.
If you wanted, you could levy fines like 5-10% of gross annual revenue for any company or marketplace or retailer found distributing product containing PFAS.
You don't have to agree it's feasible or worth it, but it's possible.
"Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a large, complex group of synthetic chemicals that have been used in consumer products around the world since about the 1950s. They are ingredients in various everyday products. For example, PFAS are used to keep food from sticking to packaging or cookware, make clothes and carpets resistant to stains, and create firefighting foam that is more effective."[0]
Should we ban those uses, outright? Q: What do you suggest we use instead?
[0] https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/pfc/index.cfm
Use of PFAS in (airport) firefighting foam is a more complicated question, but that mostly illustrates that the question isn't well-formed.
Q: If the first part of that statement is true then why is the second part of that statement true?
I would suggest that nonstick cookware is popular because consumers like it ... because "it works".
If there were an alternative that was as good then it would be readily available and frequently sold.
It was so good, for its purpose it was pretty much the only material you could buy to do its job for a long time.
That material is called asbestos. It turned out to be so hard to work with that it gave millions of people cancer, even though it's pretty much the perfect insulator when left alone.
---
Non-stick cookware is not nearly as bad as asbestos, but it's cheap and easy to use because it doesn't require maintenance like stainless steel, copper, or cast iron. It's not surprising that it's popular and the cheapest to make at scale since you don't need the surface of the material to be very good at all, if it's getting coated with teflon. There's the small problem that you've made a disposable product that probably won't get recycled and everyone who uses it will be eating small amounts of plastic everyday, but they'll thank you for the privilege.
stainless steel cookware requires the least maintenance of all types imho and is near impossible to ruin/damage. The issue is its not non-stick and requires a bit more skill to cook with. Most people are too used to coated non-stick and how easy it makes cooking.
I will say though that cast iron and stainless are the only things I want in my kitchen because I like metal whisks, forks, and spoons in my cookware.
"Was"? Here on HN we do sometimes forget about "the rest of the world" don't we?
Asbestos is still mined in Russia, Kazakhstan, Brazil and China[0] and is still widely used in India[1], which imports more than any other country.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264923/world-mine-produc... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/dec/19/w...
there is cast iron & carbon steel, its just harder to use needing more actual skill and requires more care where coated non stick panes just work.
however that coating will wear off and then you need a new pan, kill birds if overheated, where the stainless/carbon steel will last the rest of your life.
The standard legal remedy is distributor liability, for importing unsafe products. This has been part of EU regulation for more than 30 years
We can try something, even if it doesn't work, we can still try it. Ban those chemicals. If they want to move manufacturing to china to use illegal pollutants, let them. That's a huge cost to them and no guarantee china will let them keep doing it.
"It's not illegal in another country" isn't a reason for us to keep it legal. We can lead the way.
Apart from the minor issue that they won't be illegal in China, so production will continue.
As an aside, "Net Zero" isn't going to happen in China, either[0].
[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
Q: Why would the rest of the world stop making/selling/buying these products just because the US/Canada/EU/UK were to ban them?
We only need to look at the regions that are expanding use of coal .. and even still mining and using asbestos!
At a national policy level, trying something that doesn't work can have terrible and long-lasting consequences.
If you see trying and failing is seen as a worse alternative to doing nothing and poisoning the environment we all live in then you need to take a step back, be less critical, and be okay with partial or incomplete solutions.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
No, considered action is the alternative. If PFAS use is banned, what's the likely outcome? Would it be expected to significantly reduce the global PFAS emissions much or mostly move them somewhere that cares less and even increase other pollution that those places also care less about? Are there important uses of PFAS for which we have no viable alternative? What would losing those mean? Would it be expected that replacements used locally are actually better for the environment? What's the risk that they're actually worse? Would taxing PFAS use instead of banning it have similar outcome but be easier to roll back if needed? How much would it cost to implement a ban, including ongoing costs of ensuring compliance? Are there other environmental efforts that would have better expected ROI and/or less risk?
>Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Don't let "Won't somebody please think of the children!?" be the enemy of effective policy. Not acting has a cost and delay has a cost, but so does acting rashly.
We could go back to pre plastics, enjoy less sterile things along with more disease, etc. someone’s gotta make the calculus.
Hint: it's actually about money, not sterility.
A foodstuff packed in a glass jar with a metal screw-top isn't going to spoil any faster than the same thing in a plastic container, but the glass weighs more, and costs more, so if all other things are equal the retailer will of course opt for the supplier with the cheaper and lighter packaging.
In fact glass is easier to sterilize; it isn't porous and holds up to high heat and chemical disinfectants like bleach. This makes it superior to plastic for food preservation.
And wat do you do about food delivery, lunch service, fast-food, single serve, sauce packets, airport food, vending machines, etc...
Ban all levels of plastic for the _packaging_ of food and goods.
Incentivize multiple-use and/or highly recyclable materials metal(aluminum), silicone and glass containers for food, rather than "convenience" and single-use.
Single-use plastics can be regulated and limited to medical/hospital use only.
This could also have a benefit of promoting smaller supply lines for things that spoil. Increasing small town economies, farms, mom & pop shops.
Plastics selling point is convenience and cost-reduction for consumers and businesses.
We could place regulation on the distillation ranges for the barrel oil.
As for the forever chemicals... We (U.S.) can approach the problem similar to the E.U. - Prove first, the safety of the chemical by outside labs (disallow testing by the company who benefits from the use of said chemical) before hitting the market. Whereas the current U.S. model is - I get to use whatever chemical I see fit, unless you prove to me wrong.
Companies should market based on using "traditional" non-toxic materials (still modern and industrial, just not absurd), and consumers can respond by giving their business.
If we cut plastic use to just medical devices and food storage that would be a massive win.
Is that really true? My understanding is that studies show that people with the highest levels of PFAS have increased risk of liver disease. Exactly how much PFAS exposure results in significant risk is still unclear, considering a decent chunk of people eat food from PFAS lined food wrappers, cook in PFAS coated cookware, rub their teeth with PFAS coated dental floss, drink PFAS contaminated water, and touch PFAS coated clothing and other surfaces on a daily basis and do not have any obvious resulting problems.
I'm not saying I disagree that there's a problem, and I personally try to reduce my exposure, but clearly the ratio of usefulness to toxicity is a lot better than with other substances, which have been more tightly controlled in recent history, such as lead and asbestos, and that's why the response has been less urgent. Even now, after decades of study, it isn't clear exactly what the effects are and how likely it is to affect people based on their daily habits.
Not saying they shouldn’t be, but a problem is companies will just move on the the next, likely bad, similar chemical until it is also banned. I’ve seen suggestions to require chemicals to be proven not dangerous before widespread use, but this seems untenable. Perhaps the best solution is not to ban the chemicals themselves, but to obligate containment of waste, regardless of if it’s “bad”.
I know they have issues with PFAS, but I'm unclear whether that's just because they were grandfathered in, or enforcement is lax, or both.
Irrespective of the spirit of regulations this is very much a problem in Europe as well.
My point was that despite stronger regulations the EU is not immune to environmental disasters and is now also struggling with 3M/Dupont PFAS water source contamination.
Of course there is a debate. How bad are they? Has anyone died from them? How do we how know much compensation people deserve? If they are so terrible then why has it taken so long to pin that down?
Would be more just to seize them and auction them off for enough funds to do 1-5% cleanup, but that would probably be an uphill battle politically.
A good portion of the companies behind superfund sites, in the US no longer exist, or are the US government.
At this point, subsidized reverse osmosis systems would probably be cheaper than cleaning up the mess.
I'm guessing that if the American public saw the government actually hold a company and its shareholders accountable for knowingly poisoning their children it'd be massively popular politically. Lobbyists would have it.
Do you know how much you, personally, benefit from modern material science? Do you think our nation could even operate with out Bayer, Dupont, 3M and the likes?
Needless to say, when someone claims there is no debate, there is in fact a debate.
My prior here is that human-made industrial chemicals are probably not things I want in my water. But that's about as far as I'm able to go here without a prohibitive amount of research.
Edit: As others here have pointed out, it would also be great to know what, if anything, an individual can do about this contamination.
Unfortunately, the "forever" moniker is earned because these chemicals don't readily break down. Bio-accumulation is inevitable, which makes it that much harder to determine what a "safe" level of exposure is.
Even so, I don't think the jury is out yet on what the effects of exposure to many of them even are, though several seem to influence hormone levels at least.
Just FYI, I believe that you mean "I think the jury is still out..."
It never occurred to me that blood removal would be an effective method, but there is a certain logic to it. Although it also seems like you'd have to do it an awful number of times to make a difference.
I don't know, I'm definitely no expert in this area, and haven't looked for any similar studies for other toxins, so I'm not sure if other similar research has been done.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...
Let's spare some hate for 'the little people' spread out geographically over large areas whose city and county municipalities have packed trash into landfills over the water table or near surface water sources, for decades.
Styrofoam fast food containers and cups were the industry's 'smart answer' to the grease-stained paper bags and wrappers that were the staple of fast food packaging through the mid-1970s. This was in response to public sentiment that paper products were the death knells of trees. The plastic was forever but could be at least buried out of sight, right?
Not so forever after all. But the latest eco-damage consumer outrage (with a touch of irony) is health-conscious peoples' mass refusal to drink from the tap to favor water globules encased in clear plastic. "As long as it looks clean, it IS clean!"
More of a concern to me is that it's almost certain that PFAs etc are contaminating those other sources of food.
When looking into this previously my decision was to avoid introducing yet another potential source of contamination.
I would not be surprised to find PFAs used somewhere in the construction of the system. Under regulation of this stuff means it's everywhere.
But then again, lots of the pipes, fixtures, etc. in the house ... plastic etc. as well.
Same goes for a random o-ring or the PTFA tubing.
I have a TDS measurement device but these are questions beyond total dissolved solids.
In fact it will leave in not only metal ions, but pesticides and antibiotics too.
More info here https://aquaclearllc.com/technical-info/reverse-osmosis-vs-n....
My conclusion of all my research was "I feel safer drinking RO water compared to my cities crappy tap water"
This also holds true for water with dangerously high levels of lead, and even the PFAS which are driving people to RO in the first place. It's really a terrible measure of how safe something is.
For example, https://awwa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.5942/jawwa.2...
This sounds like a woo natural health claim. Is drinking water really a significant source of minerals?
Some plan for what to do in response would be…very helpful.
https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/hazar...
"since Oct. 15, 2009, no company is allowed to manufacture, distribute, ship or sell any products that leach arsenic in concentrations greater than 5 parts per billion (ppb)" [1]
And bacteria growth is solved by following the manufacturer's directions. For example, Brita filters in use need to be kept in the fridge and changed every 2 or 3 months.
[1] https://www.wqpmag.com/water-testing/testing-services/articl...
A majority of the water filters purchased on Amazon are not NSF certified and ship with a prop 65 warning. In fact, it's difficult to purchase water filter components that do not have a prop 65 warning.
What you do now is have the government punish the people who did this to us for money, and prevent this in the future. Some things can't be reversed or counteracted down the line.
https://ncpfastnetwork.com/data
And that's what you're asking for, but for the state of NC. I presume a similar path can be taken for other states.
This allows basically going "I live in XYZ city, so my total PFAS is 50 ppt". What you do with that information is unclear. Share on Facebook?
NIH references them here: https://factor.niehs.nih.gov/2022/4/feature/3-feature-pfas-w...
I started doing this long ago when I lived in the Bay Area. So many super fund or near super fund sites that I was concerned about the water pollution.
That's a surprisingly small volume of water though. I also don't love how private they are about what the filter media is.
https://info.nsf.org/Certified/DWTU/Listings.asp?CompanyName...
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/08/04/rainwater-everywhe...
But I just put in a reverse osmosis system for cooking & drinking water because of this whole PFA thing. I suspect it's highly likely that given their use in fire retardants, lubrication, omniprescence all over the place, they're probably deep down in aquifers at this point.
Sigh.
If you donate blood you can chip away at these forever chemicals.
There's almost no downside.
Are PFAS primarily concentrated in the bloodstream?
https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/02/16/pfas-biology-blood-new-...
Someone else's already replied with the Australian fire fighter study which shows that blood levels fall with donation. If movement isn't free into and out of the "compartments" then it's possible end organ damage continues unabated even as blood levels dilute.
But it seems likely that donating does reduce concentrations in organs as the PFAS move back into blood.
It seems like donating plasma is even more effective.
Also I have small veins, so it's gonna hurt.
The first time is more of a faff to organise, but they do harass you for travel and sexual history each time.
I think subsequent donations are easier but that might be because O neg and men's blood is always in demand (which is what I have).
It's older (2009) but it's scary how little we knew about this stuff even 10 years ago
But with all that lobbying money, why would they care? Like Murray Rothbard once said, "It's not the left vs. right. It's the government vs. you." Today, I would include big business in the category of government.
So I looked back at the 2014-2016 reports from Flint, Michigan to see if they correctly predicted the water crisis.
They did, but only very subtly.
In 2014, there was a single violation of too many total trihalomethanes: https://www.cityofflint.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/CCR-2...
In 2016, there were no declared violations, even though the 90th percentile sample of lead concentration (20 ppb) was over the 15 ppb limit: https://www.cityofflint.com/wp-content/uploads/City-of-Flint...
Also note that while in the US the lead concentration limit is 15 ppb, Canada has recently reduced its limit from 10 ppb to 5 ppb. Nearly every US city I've looked at exceeds 5 ppb.