Could the world go PFAS-free? Proposal to ban ‘forever chemicals’ fuels debate | Hacker News Reader

Could the world go PFAS-free? Proposal to ban ‘forever chemicals’ fuels debate

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320 pointsmfiguiere274 comments

I was visiting my family a few weeks ago in my childhood town, and the topic of our small local river came up. It's about three minutes away, and both the streams that feed it and the larger river it feeds into were fairly big parts of my childhood, including fishing, crayfishing, exploring, and generally playing on the banks. It turns out that there's a fishing advisory in effect this year, advising folks not to eat any fish caught in that river.

The reason is PFAS pollution, where the levels in the water table now indicate the potential for bioaccumulation above the recommended level for human toxicity. The people living in that area are now denied access to clean water and not having to worry about eating toxic fish, and I'm sure the otters and herons in the area haven't gotten the notice. Millions of state tax dollars have now been allocated to try to just estimate the contamination level in drinking water wells throughout the state as well.

Frankly, the producers and users of these chemicals have proven to be, at the minimum, so grossly negligent and potentially actually malicious, that they can not be considered to be acting in good faith, and "reasonable compromises" should be looked at with extreme suspicion. I feel the responsible organizations fined for both remediation and damages, the individuals responsible made criminally liable for the harm they've caused, and once that example has been made, we can talk about compromises once the "free market" has factored in the actual cost of using these chemicals when they can't just dump risk onto the public.

[1] https://ctmirror.org/2021/08/29/how-widespread-are-pfas-chem...

PFAS is one of the most common causes of fish advisories by me as well.

The story changes a little when you get to Lake Michigan, which is more heavy metals, fecal coliform, etc. The heavy metals coming from the steel refineries who periodically have oopsies and dump a few tons of waste into the lake.

Last I looked, the entire Green Bay side of Lake Michigan (from Green Bay up to Escanaba/Garden area) was under a PFAS advisory, as was the south western 1/3 of Superior (from Duluth to the Keeweenaw).

The stuff is everywhere. At least the raw sewage overflows from Milwaukee/Chicago mostly dilute and turn less toxic in the matter of months versus generations as is the case with PFAS.

Chicago almost never dumps sewage into the lake anymore. Haven’t yet this year even with all the major storms.

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

Unfortunately that's not true. While not entirely raw sewage, Chicago opened the locks at Navy Pier in July of this year...not all the water in the city can flow to those reservoirs unfortunately, there was just so much rain around 4th of July this year.

Swimming advisories were only in effect for a few hours after the lock was open for nearly 8. Things are getting better but we still have work to do.

Here in The Netherlands, a large DuPont/Chemours factory has been dumping waste products for over 30 years.

The maximum safe concentration of PFAS/PFOA has been reduced in the past years, due to better understanding of health concerns.

As a result and due to more public attention, water surfaces are now seen as harmful up to 10 miles away from the factory. The factory is located right between a medium sized city and a national park. Within a radius of a mile around the factory, people are advised not to grow vegetables.

I think many countries have similar stories and clean up costs are going to be huge.

> The heavy metals coming from the steel refineries ...

Steel mills or petroleum refineries. We have both.

I thought that mercury in the environment came mostly from coal fired power plants. The mills have their share of pollution issues but I think that's more air pollution. Well... There was the issue with killing a bunch of fish a couple years ago. IIRC that was cyanide.

I think if we actually did more of the latter portion of your statements things could actually change for the better. Hold companies fiscally responsible for cleanup and actually criminally charge the decision makers for cases of negligence. Similar for the railway disasters like East Palestine.

The protections provided to corporations are intended to shield hands-off investors, not executives and board members that drive profit above safety and common sense. I'm not in favor of a lot of heavy handed regulation, but I'm all for corporate liability.

History has shown that it is difficult to hold parties liable because they find creative ways to eschew the obligations via spin-offs, bankruptcy, or both.

We manage to do it for poor people and students.

I wish we could do it for officier of corporations. Now that they enjoy free speeches privileges.

Laws are only as defensible as the lawyers we sic on them. Turns out, we have some really creative lawyers in our ranks.

Statist and capitalist society is built on rules for thee but not for me. Good luck voting and waiting to solve this.

I always like to come up with human analogies for the mental gymnastics that Big Business tries to pull off:

"Wait a minute your honor, here's my newborn child; he's the legal owner of that truck, and therefore he's the one that should be locked up for running over the old lady."

It's basically the sovereign citizen movement, but judges and politicians take it seriously because it enriches them and their cohort and friends and family and economic class.

If you gently poisoned millions of people, entirely on accident, as a private citizen, you would never see the outside of a prison. If you incorporate and claim it's a standard part of your business, you won't even lose your private mansion. Judges have significant leeway in piercing the corporate veil and depriving bad actors of their ill gotten gains, but they don't. The US DOJ has significant leeway to go after companies aggressively and really push for seizing assets of criminals, a cop literally doesn't even need a real justification to do it, but they haven't since Enron.

We've had forty years of the only "punishment" for doing anything wrong as a company being a 1% of ill gotten gains fine, even though none of the actual underlying laws have changed to cause this reduction in punishment. This has been an entirely internal choice. Of course this results in companies largely not giving a fuck about anything that isn't profit.

US feds steal more than burglars do, by dollar value. State and local police do too, but we don't have accurate oversight numbers for these departments.

Tangential but related :

Imagine a bunch of college kids running around water sources with unclear intentions.

Oh wait, you don’t have to imagine. Look at the saint Soline movement in France. Those people try to keep rain water accessible for all. ( as oppose to massive rentension basin for corn only )

Result : they are eco terrorist and should be meet with large deployment of hostile police force. ( thousand of flash ball and tear gaz grenade fired in one single night )

See for example Chemours, who was spun off from DuPont essentially so that when the lawsuits start to hit, they can go bankrupt and DuPont can keep marching on.

I’m all for corporate liability.

Unfortunately, even what happened in East Palestine was just a slap on the wrist compared to the damage it caused to the affected communities.

Corporate liability needs to be ratcheted up several orders of magnitude before we’ll see any actual change. As it stands, most governments have no teeth against corporate greed and exploitation.

A lot of that comes from prosecutors being a largely political office, beholden to contributors for getting elected. It's almost the worst of every angle in terms of how a justice system should work.

As an aside, I sometimes think public defenders and prosecutors should come from the same pool of attorneys, held to account for striking balance instead of just W's to one side or the other.

Another issue is even when companies are held liable they're able to nickel and dime the people they've harmed and just drag their feet through the process because the company can survive but the people they've hurt have usually lost some significant portion of their livelihood and can't fight the company for half a decade. So people are forced by necessity to take a lower payout than they actually should get because they just can't afford to fight any more. For a small infuriating sample post-Valdez Exxon argued against many tour and fishing businesses' claims saying there's no indication that those industries wouldn't have collapsed on their own in the absence of the spill so the court shouldn't take into account previous seasons' revenues for the calculation of damages.

It's arguments like that where I wish judges and the court system as a whole could do something like finding that an argument was in complete bad faith and fine the companies and lawyers just for having the gall to make it. ( I know it's a pretty bad idea in reality but that and some of the lies told to get mergers through are just infuriating)

It is worse than that. The conservative legal movement made corporate torts a big target in the 90s/00s and won a lot of victories limiting the size of judgements and the ability of affected people to sue. Even legislatures followed along based on the idea that torts were getting out of hand.

Even if you have dedicated prosecutors who are able to oppose moneyed interests, the law gives corporations huge tools to wriggle out of suits.

I'm almost to the point where I think the law shouldn't allow the government to fine corporations in criminal cases, they have to prosecute the officers.

Perhaps fines should be levied against those that held voting rights.

For corporate liability to really mean something we almost certainly need to reconsider the very foundational concept of what a corporation is. Because at it's heart, in granting the legal concept of a corporation we assume that it's a good idea to give a large group of people the ability to act with limited liability, for reasons of economic efficiency.

What you see in industries such as mining where corporate liability is technically far less forgiving is that this concept of limited liability implies that a network of corporations can play musical chairs with hard-to-predict risks - essentially abusing bankruptcy and the general difficulty in enforcing liability via the courts even in the best of times to achieve not merely limited liability, but intentionally reduced liability. Since much of this is just a bunch of man-made rules, of course we're all going to game them to find the particularly profitable loopholes; this is inevitable. If it's not pollution, it's lobbying. If it's not lobbying, it's privatizing infrastructure at exploitative cost. If it's not physical infrastructure, it's owning social infrastructure, i.e. platforms. If it's not platforms, it's an incomprehensible spaghetti designed to evade or avoid taxes.

Regarding corporations as equivalent to natural persons for many legal questions was a huge mistake, and needs to be reversed. I'm not particularly hopeful we'll get there without a literally bloody revolution, or by losing a war, or some similarly horrifying discontinuity of modern life.

Allowing people to cooperate under some legal entity is a great idea; allowing capitalist incentives to optimize those a reasonable idea with some risks (but hopefully manageable ones). But doing all of that at essentially no cost, little oversight, lots of loopholes, very little transparency, very limited liability, legally not just unrestricted but even protected "speech" and with arbitrary nesting has to be one of the most idiotic things we've come up with in centuries.

>Unfortunately, even what happened in East Palestine was just a slap on the wrist compared to the damage it caused to the affected communities.

Isn't it a bit early to make that conclusion, especially since all the legal action hasn't concluded?

> Hold companies fiscally responsible for cleanup

3M is filing for bankruptcy due to PFAS litigation, and even then they can't cover the costs [0] This doesn't work, the damage is already done, and the profits have been pocketed. What's worse with PFAS for environmental pollution is that no mechanism for clean up currently exists.

> criminally charge the decision makers for cases of negligence.

Might work as a weak extrinsic motivator, but there's plenty of "hot potato" going in this kind of work. It's also hard to prove negligence when the "decision makers" are ignoring the environmental costs through either wilful ignorance, burring their own research, or through optimistic interpretations which give them plausible deniability - combine that with shared responsibility and it gets hard to point the finger at individuals unless you were in the room. It's hard to pin down a "decision" of inaction.

We either need some kind of intrinsic motivators, i.e make it in the interest of corporations to protect the environment. Or really heavy legislation that requires extensive proof of ecological safety for every new chemical dumped into the environment rather than the current "we'll figure it out later" model.

[0] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/3m-head...

> 3M is filing for bankruptcy due to PFAS litigation, and even then they can't cover the costs [0] This doesn't work, the damage is already done, and the profits have been pocketed. What's worse with PFAS for environmental pollution is that no mechanism for clean up currently exists.

Are you suggesting that 3M should continue to operate as if they didn't poison the world? I'm fine with them being bankrupted by the lawsuits. Let it be a warning for the next company.

No, he is suggesting that the executives in charge during the production and sale of PFAS products already pocketed their salaries, bonuses, and wealth. It won't be clawed back.

Some of it can be clawed back in the form of work inside penitentiaries.

No, I'm suggesting that even with the worst possible fiscal punishment (even when it causes bankruptcy) it's still not enough, for two reasons:

1. If the damage done is so severe that it's impossible or impractical to reverse, then even in the case of recovering 100% of the profits ever generated, it still won't be enough to fix the damage. A larger long term environmental cost for the many has been traded for a far far smaller short term financial reward for the few.

2. As the sibling commenter pointed out, companies can be used as a financial liability shield, just pay yourself an absurd salary, keep liquid funds and reinvestment low (especially when the game is up), and all that's left is a functioning but otherwise empty husk.

What about the owners and C level execs, are they reduced to zero personal assets yet? This infatuation with letting rich companies go with a slap on the wrist because of some "prove willful negligence" is silly. Certain actions, including polluting the entire world, should be proof enough on their own. You shouldn't get away with something just because you CHOSE not do enough research beforehand to be aware of dangers.

>We either need some kind of intrinsic motivators, i.e make it in the interest of corporations to protect the environment.

You do this by deleting any company that shows itself to be poor stewards of the environment, and making sure it really really really hurts, financially, for the ones who profited from it, including high level management. "Just doing my job" shouldn't suffice when your job is overseeing a chemical of unknown danger.

When involving yourself in an unethical company means you lose your fortune, the incentives will be aligned. If that means rich people do extensive due diligence before involving themselves in anything, surely that's a good thing right?

> What about the owners and C level execs, are they reduced to zero personal assets yet? This infatuation with letting rich companies go with a slap on the wrist because of some "prove willful negligence" is silly. Certain actions, including polluting the entire world, should be proof enough on their own. You shouldn't get away with something just because you CHOSE not do enough research beforehand to be aware of dangers.

That seems like a nightmare in from a regulatory compliance point of view. You could do all the required research that the government wants you to do, and still get personally punished a few decades later if it turns out the product was harmful.

I don't see a problem with new compounds/techniques/technology in general being forced to comprehensively prove it's utility and safety before being put out in the world.

But what counts as "comprehensively"? The whole point here is that 3M got all the regulatory approvals before launching their product, but it turns out it was too little, so we should punish them anyways. If the law isn't comprehensive enough, it should be made comprehensive. We shouldn't be prosecuting people after the fact for complying with all laws at the time, and then it turned out it wasn't comprehensive enough.

I'd agree with your position if regulatory capture wasn't a thing. It is. Bankrupt literally everyone involved.

In what hypothetical world is there enough corruption/incompetence for regulatory capture to be a problem, yet at the same time there isn't enough corruption/incompetence for arbitrary and retroactive punishments for legal behaviors to be a good idea?

Even putting aside the problem of implementation, you also need to consider the second order effects. Specifically, impact on the development of new technologies. Why would anyone want to commercialize any new technology when it can set them up for unlimited personal liability in the future? Remember, the whole point isn't that just the company has to pay for their damages, it's their shareholders and corporate officers will personally held liable for damages as well. How are you going to get innovations in fusion/ai/superconductor when all of them will be subject to the threat of arbitrary and retroactive punishment in the future? For instance, you create an generative art AI startup today. Presently there aren't any regulations, so you do the bare minimum of due diligence. This seems reasonable, given that it's not really like chatgpt so the chance of AI takeover is low. Three decades down the line generative art AI becomes a hit and millions of artists around the world are unemployed. They lobby the government to prosecute you and your shareholders for putting them out of work, arguing that you "CHOSE not do enough research beforehand to be aware of dangers". Does that seem like a fair risk to subject the founders to? Do you think this is a worthwhile trade-off between innovation and conversation?

You're going to handwave past contaminating literally the entire surface of the planet with some of the most difficult to remediate chemicals we've come up with to date, a multi-decade effort the bulk of which was conducted well after evidence that this shit caused any number of harms began to surface and the best you can come up with is "because capitalism"? If innovation truly isn't possible without these kinds of catastrophic outcomes what the fuck is even the point? Is society so utterly dependent upon the creation and maintenance of a handful of hyper-wealthy individuals that these outcomes should not only be expected but rewarded? Seriously?

That's too bad. I'm not sympathetic. The buck has to stop somewhere.

This wouldn’t affect the people who did the research. It would only affect the C levels. C levels at companies this large receive extremely high pay and have relatively little risk associated. This would bring their risk/reward ratio closer (but still nowhere near close) to what 99% of humans have. What exactly is unfair about that? If a C level “finds out” they should have spent more on research because their choices harmed a lot of people, is “learn to live with the assets 90% of humans have” really such an awful, unthinkable consequence?

Yes, in my world companies willingly choose to do more than strictly legally required minimum so that they have good evidence that they are good stewards of the environment. If you want to run a business and make billions of dollars, you should be required to do negative harm to the world, and be punished if you attempt to violate that social contract.

The onus should ALWAYS be on you PERSONALLY as someone being PERSONALLY enriched by the company you own and or run, to not poison the world. If you are worried that it will eventually come out one of your products is harmful to the environment and yet you've basically dumped it everywhere, maybe do enough diligence to convince yourself that you will be safe, or DO NOT SELL A DANGEROUS OR POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS PRODUCT TO PERSONALLY ENRICH YOURSELF TO THE TUNE OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS

Why should businesses exist solely to enrich their owners at the expense of the average human? Doing so should be one of the most heinous crimes.

Substantial fines to domestic businesses create resentment from voters who lose their jobs due to such fines. That's why governments does this to foreign companies (e.g. US fining VW and EU fining big tech). I wonder if there is a way to structure these penalties such that doesn't cripple the domestic economy such a forcing companies to issue new shares that immediately get acquired by the government.

Capital punishment for executives would do it.

Our society has been totally captured by corporations.

Employees need corporations to generate profits, otherwise there are layoffs or closures and people lose their jobs. This is bad for the people because we have limited social safety nets and joblessness can devastate people.

People who hope to ever retire need corporations to generate profits, otherwise their 401ks can never grow. This is bad for the people because without investment growth it is unreasonable for a most people to generate the sums needed to retire with dignity.

We've generated a system where the people will complain when corporations are held to any account. We've tied ourselves to the success of big business and can't get off the ride.

Your point about the real cost of those chemical is so crucial.

Maybe I would have more respect to whatever free market proposal if the real cost were factored in.

And yes, it’s including not polluting or cleaning up fully after yourself if you do.

If you pollute in a non cleanable way, you either pay a lot, or it’s illegal.

Kinda tired of freeloaders.

It's not considered alarming to publicly state you believe those guilty of murder should face capital punishment - that is - to be executed by the state. Certainly not a view held by all but it's within the Overton window to state you hold the view.

I believe it should be normalized that we speak about the most egregious, permanent, impossible to reckon with environmental pollution in the same way - that is - it ought to be a crime to pollute in the most serious ways and that crime out to be punished with state executions.

Thinking of it this way just as an exercise also leads you directly into how constructed the entire idea of crime even is.

All these articles in mainstream papers the last few years fomenting a panic about rising crime, calling it crime waves, etc. They are not talking about this. Because they don't mean this. We don't, for the most part, consider these to be crimes. Sometimes we may use that word, but you don't see the same flood of op-eds and public official press conferences calling for retributive justice.

Similar shit elsewhere. Shoplifting is a crime but hundreds of millions in wage fraud is just bad accounting, etc etc.

I agree. If somebody from Iraq did this to a US river, it would a catastrophic act of bioterrorism, an act of war warranting death by drone without trial.

Maybe calling it corporate bioterrorism (though a bit hyperbolic) could shift the overton window into somewhere closer to reality.

This is a somewhat one-sided perspective. The end polluter is often the US government itself. Do we hold the government officials to that same standard? How about the citizens that elected them?

I think the only real answer we can have is, yes. Unless something really fundamental changes, where egregious forms of pollution of forever chemicals is seen the same way things like incest, rape, or murder, then nothing will change.

The problem is the GOP has spend the last 40 years trying to kill the EPA (Which, ironically, was created by Nixon).

When Congress continually undermines and rolls back the agencies rules, who actually is to blame? The regulator? Congress? The voters?

Should we lock up fireman who use pfas and all of our local governments that instruct and allow them to do so? Should we equivocate putting out apartment fires with murder?

The point I'm trying to make is that this scenario isn't as black and white as one might think. It's easy to be an absolutist about it when it's not your child burning to death.

If it is a horrific crime to produce the pollution in the first place, the US government could not buy that product on the open market. I don't care who WANTS to buy bad shit, it is on you as a company to not make that bad shit.

For some reason, even though plenty of people are ready and willing to buy and sell murder, we still don't allow it.

Both can be bad and disallowed.

Sure, I just think the majority of the blame is misplaced.

The US government knew it was bad, bought it, and then knowingly created the vast majority of contamination.

They then Sue manufacturers like 3M, while continuing to buy and use it and cause more contamination.

It is like buying a knife, stabbing a bunch of people, then suing the manufacturer while still running around stabbing people. It screams of misdirection.

Yes government should be held to the same standard. They should live in fear of the law, as many citizens do.

The difference is intent. Killing someone unintentionally attracts much less ire than premeditated killing. If you can demonstrate you took reasonable care (eg. someone jumping in front of you while on the highway) you won't even be punished.

I am also curious if it wasn't also toxic back when you were a kid, and people just didn't realize it and were eating contaminated fish.

The major end user and polluter is usually the public government. People can absolutely sue the government, but they just end up paying for it themselves.

> The major end user and polluter is usually the public government.

Why is that?

At least in my city, the Air Force is the major source of PFAS pollution in our waterway, because they dumped firefighting agents into it for decades at their airbase.

Most of the contamination is from firefighting foams. Government agencies decided that the pollution was an acceptable cost for their added benefit to saving lives and property.

PFAS firefoam is still widely used, as governments still deem it necessary. However, training with real PFAS fireform is now more restricted than it once was.

Ah yes, it's totally the fault of the occasional use of firefighting foam, and not the fault of literally every single food package being covered in the stuff.

Do you have numbers to back up your assertion?

Food packaging? Do you have a citation for that? Cookware yes, but packaging?

Absolutely used in food packaging. Even the inside of microwave popcorn bags has it. Just google "PFAS food packaging" and you'll lots of info.

If we're talking about groundwater contamination, then yes, the major contributor is firefighters and US Government facilities based on the numbers I've seen. It's not food packaging making it hundreds of feet underground and leaching out into rivers.

Scroll through these 180 pfas contamination Superfund sites and count how many are government facilities versus private companies.

https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/superfund-sites-...

If you want to get technical, this paper estimates the impact of different sources, Comparing airports and military sites to Major PFA industrial sites. There are ~350 PFA sources from airports and military, and 7 from industry (including 3M!).

The individual military and airports released more PFOS per SITE than industry.

The industrial sites are associated with about 5X the PFOA in the local water. However, we are still talking about 7 industrial sites vs 350 airports and military bases.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c07255

I'm mostly talking about breadth of harm, ie that PFAS is quite literally everywhere, rather than depth of harm, ie a couple hundred rivers have been made into poison. If the damage was exclusively contained to these rivers, the cleanup would be obscenely expensive, but possible. Currently cleanup is basically impossible.

I live on the site of a building rebuilt 13 years after a fire that was attempted to be put out by firefighters. Would that foam have contaminated the well water I drink from?

Maybe it could move to "banned by default" for anything that is sold to the public, and authorized for very very narrow and particular applications that have little risk to contact the environment, although it's hard to study which application, maybe as long as the quantities produced are small enough that they're not a danger.

For example, if it's for space satellite parts, or for nuclear energy application, etc, when alternatives don't exist as long as the quantity are small and as long as they're being disposed of safely.

So in short: if it's a sector that is high value enough, where quantities are small and where safe disposal is mandatory.

Quite simply, any conclusion of this saga that doesn't end with 3M and fellow companies utterly erased and their assets sold off to more responsible stewards to pay for remediation and cleanup efforts, including piercing the corporate veil for a lot of the owners, is a miscarriage of justice. You cannot be allowed, as a private entity, to knowingly pollute.... everything, and still be allowed to conduct business. You have made it abundantly clear that you will harm others for profit, and we should be aggressively destroying any company that does so.

You have no natural right to a profit at other's expense, and we should stop pretending that these companies are following the rule of the law with these settlements. No part of any law says you have to let malicious companies continue to operate because they are big and have a lot of money. Bankruptcy is an important and necessary part of a healthy market.

> You have no natural right to a profit at other's expense

Another thing is that the stock market doesn't work here. It promotes shortsighted trading without an eye for long term side effects. In principle shareholders should be accountable too. If you owned stocks of a company that caused damage during the period when that damage occurred, you should be accountable and at least you should not be able to profit from it. The stock market should be retrofitted with an accountability system. This is the only way shareholders will start caring about our future.

Projecting your wants onto power aside, why would this ever happen? What would drive our government to do that?

If there's no incentive, it's empty desire or based on some fantasy that government would suddenly operate in terms of what's best for society rather than a serious consideration of how power works. Why look to government to do that?

Are examples of government pollution controls effective, or examples of greenwashing? For instance a lot of the Quebec forests that burned already contributed to those CO2 offsets by having someone say they wouldn't burn them, and yet...

Governments are implementing accounting mechanisms for CO2 emissions too, e.g. CO2 certificates, CO2 tax. So why not think of other accounting systems that can help make people accountable for their actions?

Plus, I like to think that IT can save the world :)

The problems caused by power and hierarchy aren't solved by dreaming up rules for them to follow

>Another thing is that the stock market doesn't work here. It promotes shortsighted trading without an eye for long term side effects.

You assert this without elaboration. What makes you think that? Maybe the average wall st trading firm doesn't care, but institutional investors (eg. pension funds, university endowments, family offices, sovereign wealth funds) would very much care if their holdings go up in smoke a few decades from now.

I feel like it's kinda obvious that the burden of proof is not on me here, so I'm not going to explain it further, sorry.

It is very obvious to me that it is on you.

>>would very much care if their holdings go up in smoke a few decades from now.

Nope

Any fund has nearly constant review of their holdings (and certainly scheduled periodic reviews), which would highlight issues with any of their holdings. Moreover, there are many hedging strategies. It isn't like companies with these kinds of externalized risks go poof in a minute. The problems, especially legal liability, become evident over the course of years, and the funds can an do adjust to not take the losses. Anything less would be a breach of their fiduciary duty to their shareholders/investors.

The issue is not the public stock corporation, it is the entire class of limited liability entities.

It allows a one sided bet. Things go well, I’m rich. They go very very badly all I can loose is my investment.

Most individual shareholders (especially those who just buy index funds) have neither knowledge of corporate wrongdoings nor, in practice, power to prevent them. A better model would be holding accountable the particular individuals with power and responsibility, such as in the Volkswagen emissions case where Germany criminally prosecuted executives involved in the fraud.

Why kick the can. Index funds are operated by someone, right?

I don't care. If you want to get %5 yearly gains from stocks, then fucking educate yourself on your investments. If that's too much effort for the average person, maybe we shouldn't design our economy around requiring the average person to basically gamble with their income to hopefully have a nest egg for retirement.

Counter argument: selling off products to smaller businesses creates more limited liability. I.e less to lose more to gain by being bad stewards. A bigger company in fear of hurting their brand has incentive to be good.

I feel like that the same for the fracking companies -- the small no-name companies have more of an incentive to do a poor job because they are under more pressure to make money or go bankrupt and not clean up the sites. Whereas the bigger companies have a brand to worry about and also they will use their muscles to force regulation on their competitors.

Not saying its good or bad - just how it seems. Companies out of the limelight and too small to notice have more leeway to cheat.

Ah yeah that's been working so well. Meanwhile, trading on brand value has been the go-to profit making strategy of nearly every business for at least twenty years running now.

>smaller businesses creates more limited liability. I.e less to lose more to gain by being bad stewards.

Nonsense. A thousand small CEOs have limited liability to not lose their sole home if they do bad things that harm everyone and get shut down. A single Giant CEO has limited liability to go back to his six mansions in his chauffeured lamborgini that picked him up from his private plane.

> You have made it abundantly clear that you will harm others for profit ... Bankruptcy is an important and necessary part of a healthy market

You mean like Big Tobacco? They survived their lies and cover-ups, and are still around and doing well.

I’ve started to wonder whether pollution is the right word and whether we should say it how it is: plain old-fashioned, ugly “theft”. If someone takes something from you without your permission - including the ability to fish for your supper or drink from your spring, then that fulfills to me the definition of theft. And the penalties should be commensurate.

If you wanna go down that road, "ecocide" or "genocide" may be more appropriate terms. The latter word is more difficult to argue, but one could make a point that there's a mismatch between who benefits more from climate change and pollution (the global north) and who suffers from it (the global south). That's one of the many good points Nabil Hassein makes in the talk "Computing, Climate Change, and all our Relationships" which i can only recommend.

Thank you, yes. These monstrous organizations should ripped apart, absolutely gutted, and their leaders imprisoned.

This is corrupt all the way down.

Consumers cannot determine if they have "forever chemicals" in their products and vote with their wallet.

I've tried for ages to find cookware that is healthy, and time and time again the cookware I've bought has these chemicals hidden behind corporate lies.

Even consumer's reports has finally realized:

Because CR’s tests and research show that even products made without PFOA may contain the compound because of how they’re manufactured, we have decided to no longer display "PFOA-free" in our ratings of nonstick cookware. Such claims may not be reliable for PTFE-coated products.

happily there is hope:

A California law that will go into effect in 2023 will ban companies from claiming in online sale listings that a cookware product is free of any one PFAS—like PFOA—if it contains any other PFAS, like PTFE. Those claims will have to be removed from packaging by 2024, when a similar law will go into effect in Colorado.

I wonder if "online sale listings" will just use geoip and ignore the rest of the country.

Why not buy uncoated steel or aluminum cookware? It's all I use. Often need steel wool to clean, but that's much better than buying non-stick cookware.

I like carbon steel, seasoned. doesn't weigh quite as much as cast iron. I also use stainless and scrub.

But are these advisories really meaningful? People volitionally ingest persistent organic flourines every day (e.g., Flonase, Prozac, Lipitor). These chemicals are really useful, and only very mildly harmful. EPA's straight-line calculations for excess deaths are comically overstated -- tens of thousands of deaths, and we struggle to actually point at more than a few high profile incidents. Is it possible that, yes, these chemicals are mildly harmful, but also very useful, and that we have to take a more sophisticated approach to the trade-offs?

Here's an amusing article highlighting the struggle to single out the "bad" PFAS from the truly life-saving PFAS. https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2022/is-there-a-right-d...

In today’s NYT article on e-bikes (i.e. electric mopeds) for teens, the maker says how motorcycle education classes saved his life, but doesn’t want similar classes for the electric mopeds he sells to kids because it would hurt business.

It’s the same all over, companies care about their own short term profits and gladly maim people and things for a buck in their pocket.

My father and his colleague developed a scalable process to manufacture Teflon without the use of PFAS back in the previous century; they had both been recruited heavily by DuPont which made it relatively easy to sell the patents, at which point they immediately disappeared and were never acted upon.

One of the interesting side effects of free markets is that when there are no consequences for mass poisoning / polluting, you will ignore opportunities to manufacture without doing so because there is often zero or negative economic consequences to change your process.

In DuPont’s case, it was more valuable in the near term for the shareholders to ignore this manufacturing innovation and not disrupt supply than to reconfigure with a new process. No doubt there were massive risks involved in trying a new process that made it a “safer” and wiser decision economically to continue to use PFAS.

I think about this every time someone tells us on HN how a freer market will solve our problems.

> My father and his colleague developed a scalable process to manufacture Teflon without the use of PFAS back in the previous century

How is that possible? PTFE (teflon) is itself a PFAS, no? Did they "only" get rid of other PFAS used during the manufacturing of teflon?

I just asked him.

“Teflon is a high molecular weight polymer made using perfluoronated surfactants. Technically, PTFE is a fluorine-containing material but it is not the PFAS pollutants of recent concern. In the conventional synthesis, the real source of PFAS pollution is primarily those surfactants used in its manufacture. Our process made the use of those surfactants unnecessary.”

Why do you DuPont never acted on your patents?

“It was a cost of business decision because they had already invested so much capital in making Teflon with those surfactants.”

Is your dad forbidden from recreating this technology with DuPont in control of those patents? There's probably a tonne of VC money out there for an environmentally friendly disruptor to teflon.

I’m going to link to another reply on this and provide some additional color:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36961328

Getting a product like this stood up is a $100 million endeavor at minimum. That’s before customer #1 presses “buy.”

My father and the colleague I mentioned are both successful serial entrepreneurs (large exits, Sequioa backed unicorn, etc.). There is close to zero appetite from VCs in this.

VCs seem to be allergic to these CapEx intensive businesses and I don’t blame them—the risks are enormous when compared to something like a SaaS.

That said, if you know someone who’s dying to throw hundreds of millions at this problem, he’d probably take the intro. You can email me at super solenoid theory at gmail dot com.

On the other hand, the capital intensive nature makes it a lot harder for a competitor to spin up their version overnight and eat your lunch.

As pg said, "do things that don't scale".

I think Carbon13 and the other "climate emergency" accelerators would be interested in some capacity, at least as a starter. They've got a fairly strong network of Family Houses & trusts.

I think you'd get seed money, and a network large enough to raise some serious capital in future rounds.

One of my patent reform ideas is that patents must be used. If left fallow (production under a certain amount) for too long, bam, it hits the public domain, or back to the originator.

Or just make it a couple years. If you can't profit handsomely off your idea in a couple years, then it's probably more efficient for society as a whole to be allowed to work on it.

Ig you remove the incentive, why would they pay to do the research in the first place?

There is a gulf of value between "literal cure for cancer" and, like, some basic consumer good. Most things do not exist at either extreme end. Not all things worth doing are wildly profitable.

Huh? The incentive hasn't been removed. You only lose it if you aren't producing the patented product for commercial sale.

I'm talking about a hypothetical world where the lifetime of a patent is only, say, 5 years. That's a much shorter window to recoup expenses, and thus many projects that are financially justifiable in the current environment would not be.

I'm pretty sure Teflon is made with tetrafluoroethylene, a gas, not with surfactants?

As I understand it (and I don’t claim to understand it all that well), the processing involved in turning tetrafluoroethylene into a useful form of PTFE involves the use of fluorinated surfactants to get everything into a solution or emulsion.

This remind me of the recent story here, about how tobacco companies knew that radioactive polonium in their tobacco leaves was causing an insane rate of lung cancer, killing 130 out of ever 1,000 smokers over 25 years. [0]

They even had a process to remove the radioactivity, but, it made the nicotine a little less addictive so they didn't do it. Instead, they kept marketing to children with cartoon characters for another 20+ years until forced to stop.

These same companies are still marketing cigarettes to kids where they can get away with it.

At some point we need to start talking about self defense from this shitty system. And I feel like that point was the 60's.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36925019

It's been long enough for the patents to expire, so why not help a competitor commercialize the technology? Do you have a reference to the patent number?

This is no doubt correct. I’m almost certain they’ve expired, though I’m not going to include links here and associate my real name with my HN acct.

But the reason they haven’t been acted upon (that I know of) is that economic difficulty of making a competing Teflon has to do chiefly with issues of manufacturing scale and large up front capital expenditure. This is true across the entire chemicals industry for any new product. Rule of thumb costs were, the last I heard, roughly 100 Million in development to get a single product into baseline commercial viability.

Why compete against an established and “tainted” product like Teflon? Can you guarantee the PFAS free process is cheaper at any of the initial commercial scales you’re likely to achieve? Is there a market for an off-brand substitute?

These kinds of risks delimit innovation in physical manufacturing far more than the possession of IP.

They always ban some specific PFAS structures and then 1 of 3 consulting firms that is in the game is just again going to suggest they should modify the structure and add an H or O somwhere to make it slightly different from the banned specified structure and it's legal again for another 10 years. Happening all the time.

Not sure I agree with the prohibition of these substances... but legislation doesn't have to be written quite so naively as that. You can ban unnamed, similar chemicals at the same time.

They already do this for Schedule I drugs (not that I agree with that either). They finally got fed up with adding new designer drugs to the schedule, and there's an entry that says something like "any similar chemical substance that causes the same pharmaceutical effects as a Schedule I drug or is used for such effects or has a similar chemical structure".

I definitely don't agree with that clause when it comes to drug enforcement, but if a good case could be made that PFAS should be banned, then adding that clause to preemptively block PFAS-alikes that are just a couple atoms away from the original formula doesn't seem excessive to me. And, if somehow it should be excessive (the change fixes all the problems we might have with PFAS substances), then let them argue that to Congress.

Exemptions for producing small amounts for research, obviously.

If Congress didn't do this, if they're not doing that... then they're just bad at the one thing they're supposed to be doing: writing effective legislation.

> legislation doesn't have to be written quite so naively as that

It will be written by think tanks behind lobbyists for industry interests that donate to campaigns.

> the one thing [Congress is] supposed to be doing

. . . is getting reelected. We do not elect them because of competency in law-writing or even in voting for their constituencies' interests. We elect them because they spend lots of money to tell us how monstrous "the other choice" is.

> and there's an entry that says something like "any similar chemical substance that causes the same pharmaceutical effects

The problem is that these PFAS chemicals do things that are useful, and banning any future useful inventions isn't nearly as desirable.

You wouldn't be banning that... You'd be banning substances that have similar harmful environmental effects.

Let industry and the courts argue what exactly harms the environment or is too similar. But industry will think twice about using anything similar because to do so they'd have to take on a court battle to prove whatever they decide to use isn't harmful despite being similar.

And a blanket ban does not prevent you adding a carveout in the future if the next PFAS turns out to be a magical chemical capable of bending space and time.

I’m with Gorsuch in thinking the Federal Analogue Act(banning designer drugs) is unconstitutional nor is it good policy, but if the majority want it why not pass similar legislation?

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

Or instead of outright banning pass onerous taxes so that it’s only used in applications that absolutely must have it and not every throw away piece of clothing and wrapper.

Giving the DEA or another executive agency more authority here seems like a terrible idea but sometimes I’m not in the majority and I understand that.

It’s wild so much money and effort go to policing drugs people want to voluntarily consume while next to nothing by comparison is done to police pollution that entire towns are involuntarily affected by, for far longer, and often to far worse effect.

It's much easier for companies to influence politicians than it is for a diffuse group of people. Companies have a much more direct line between lobbying successes and increased profits so have an easy time justifying the efforts internally where citizen lobbying groups have to draw lines between diffuse harms and losses to the possibility of preventing those for a larger group of people and convince them to support the lobbying operations.

I hope this becomes a reality - we really made an mistake introducing these, I think.

The hard part, I suspect, will be regulating all the different forms of "forever chemicals" and not having it be a perpetual game of whack-a-mole where chemists figure out ways to slightly tweak the structure of the chemicals so that they effectively replicate the function of PFAS without triggering the definition of PFAs. We're already pretty hooked on the usefulness of PFAs for all sorts of stuff (clothes, containers, etc) so going cold turkey is going to require some sacrifice.

Just stop putting them in food packaging and consumer items, please. I don't care if it costs a penny more, or if my paper plates get a little more soggy.

I really hate it when a drink is served with a paper straw. They release 95% of the pfas in the drink. There's no better way of introducing the stuff to my body. Why is nobody thinking of this? Perfectly good bamboo straws exist!

Or stainless steel, or BPA-free plastic, or plant-fiber cellulose plastic, or silicone, or...

I've had a drink or two which came with some sort of large pasta straw.

It's cheaper. More profit. That's it

>They release 95% of the pfas in the drink

source?

Study finds plant-based straws containing PFAS

https://www.foodpackagingforum.org/news/study-finds-plant-ba...

From the article:

>Thirty-six of the investigated brands contained detectable PFAS, among which perfluorobutanoic acid (PFBA; CAS 375-22-4), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA; CAS 335-67-1), and perfluorohexanoic acid (PFHxA CAS 307-24-4) were the most frequently detected species.

That's not the same as "They release 95% of the pfas in the drink".

I'm generally pretty pro-chemical in moderation. I haven't fried a decent egg on cast iron yet, and I enjoy breathable waterproof fabrics.

I understand the concern, but I guess I don't understand the risk yet. My understanding from chemistry class was that PF- compounds are so useful because of how inert they are. Their indestructibility is what makes them mostly harmless - if you eat a pile of (room-temperature) Teflon, it just goes right through your body.

You need other, more dangerous, short-chain PFAS to make those inert PFAS polymers. Costs would greatly increase if manufacturers weren't allowed to release any to the environment. I think enforcing this and increasing prices is a better idea than a ban.

I suspect then the reason seafood is becoming the chief source of PFAS is that most of this is made in China and lax environmental rules means most of it is getting dumped down the Yangtze.

Getting a $20 Teflon pan instead of a $15 one but they actually dispose of the chemicals properly seems like a no-brainer here.

Teflon is not a PFAS anyway, so that's not really the issue.

It's waterproofing that's the problem - for example paper straws.

> Teflon is not a PFAS anyway, so that's not really the issue.

No but PFASsen are used (and typically discarded poorly) in the production of Teflon.

Fried eggs on Teflon pans are rather soggy in my opinion…

My preferred pan for fried eggs is stainless steel. With plenty of butter the eggs crisp up and release from the pan with no stick at all. The only real trick is to not flip too soon.

> The only real trick is to not flip too soon.

Do you manage to get a runny yoke?

I legit went through 2 dozen eggs trying to get a perfect fried egg on stainless steel. I tried everything - hot pan, cold pan, oil, butter, swirling the pan, a touch of vinegar. I could not find any combination that worked - I suspect that you either have to have very particular equipment.

Try more heat. It needs to crisp at the bottom while staying runny at the top. Don't let them sit in there once done, get them out to stop the heat transfer. I only do one side.

So it only works for a specific type of egg? My wife prefers over-easy - that's basically impossible on stainless?

Over easy is easy on cast iron. I tend to put a spoon of butter, spread it a little, and crack the egg into it. The butter should sizzle but not brown too quickly. You should be able to slide the egg in the pan like on a nonstick.

I would support more heat argument.

SS easily heats but easily cools.

You can cheat with a lid - just seconds the whites would be in your preffered condition (ie with/out crust) cover the pan, sing aloud 'We all live in the yellow submarine, yellow subma' and move the pan off the stove, but don't let it rest under the lid too long! In 20-30 seconds it would catch to be the nice, yet runny one, but anything longer and it would be more thicker, though if you like subs/burgers with eggs - it's a way to it.

PS you can sing something more palatable for you, if you wish *grin*

The trick is to let the pan get to the right temperature. You don’t want it super hot, but you need it hot enough for the Leidenfrost effect. You can tell the pan is hot enough by splashing water on it. The water should not boil, but rather bead up and roll around. It takes a few minutes of heat to get the pan to this temperature. Once you reach this temp, the pan is basically nonstick as water in your food instantly vaporizes and creates a barrier between the food and your pan.

Most range levels can get to this point, even medium-low, but you need to leave the pan on the heat for some time before starting to cook.

Yes, I am familiar with this effect and can recreate it in my stainless steel pan. But I have yet to successfully retrieve a over-easy egg from it.

I suspect that equipment is a huge factor. My $20 stainless steel pan might not have the right surface characteristics.

Yes you need a thick pan. But also I would try using a lower heat.

> Do you manage to get a runny yoke?

nit: yolk

The scrambled eggs my girlfriend cooks on the $10 stainless steel, well greased pan blow any eggs I have ever made on any "nonstick" or "seasoned" surface so out of the water that I no longer consider nonstick pans to be anything more than a mild convenience. I have one nice one that I use for general cookery and only rinse out, and it has stayed super non-stick.

I fry a fair amount of eggs over easy on my cast iron and get good results so it's definitely doable. I think preseasoned cast irons are fairly cheap these days although I picked mine up on Craigslist with a set.

For the most part, cleaning the cast iron is two seconds of chain mail scraping under the faucet because not much really sticks to it and there's just the small leftovers that weren't worth scooping, then I put it on the stove for a minute or two while I wipe up other things and just let the water evaporate off so it doesn't rust.

I got nicely seasoned cast iron at Target for cheap, was very surprising.

I like sticking mine in the oven and letting it preheat to dry them, plus it's genuinely pretty convenient to store them there when unused anyway.

Long chain like PTFE is fine. The issue is short chain fluorosurfactants (think PFOA and GenX) which contaminate the environment around the factories that make PTFE, harm the workers in those factories, and probably end up in trace amounts in the final products as well. These are very chemically stable in that they don't react well with most things, making them long lasting in the environment, but they do interact (but not react) with animal endocrine systems, which makes them so dangerous.

I have used ceramic nonstick pans for eggs and pancakes and the like for years. Also, trying to cook completely without butter or oil, unless you have highly specific dietary restrictions, is unnecessary.

staub enameled cast iron are great for eggs and other things that usually stick to non-enameled cast irons or stainless

I make eggs every morning on a stainless steel pan - I find it just as easy to clean as Teflon. Most restaurants use stainless steel.

Stainless still is only hard to clean if you suck at doing dishes. After you cook something, let them soak (really just let them sit with water and dish soap in them) for like an hour and you can almost just rinse them out. Even dishwashers with modern soaps have little problem with them once you soak them.

I use stainless steel and it works fine.

I hate frying eggs on cast iron. I need to wait so long for it to come up to a reasonable temperature, it always seems to overcook the whites and leaves the yolks cold. Every time I mention having trouble with cast iron, people jump out to tell me I'm holding it wrong and it's so easy, but it's really a finicky way to cook.

However, a seasoned stainless steel skillet is a lot like an aluminum teflon skillet except that it doesn't care if you heat it too hot, in my opinion.

The 15" version of this pan is magic. It is super easy to season (apply some oil / butter, get it really hot a few times, wipe it off with a rag, repeat) and is very non stick with just a light coating of oil. Of course never clean it with soap. Water only if necessary. Afterwards I always just pour some oil on and wipe it clean with a paper towel.

https://www.lodgecastiron.com/product/carbon-steel-pan?sku=C...

> never clean it with soap.

This is a myth. I was struggling with getting a good non-stick-ability on my Lodge, until someone pointed out the 'patina' is really just burnt carbon and does nothing for non-stick. The non-stick seasoning comes from polymerized oils, which aren't affected by lye-free soaps. I haven't had any sticking issues since I've started washing my pan with soap after a messy meal and leaving a microscopic film of Crisco on after drying.

It was years before I understood this and got a good patina on mine. Give the pan a good clean and do a lot of gentle frying dishes in a row.

The soap myth harkens back to the day when soaps were actually pretty caustic - they were lye based formulas that you had to use gloves to wash dishes with. That stuff would eat through enamel.

I feel like ceramic enamel cookware is underrated.

Non stick, easy to clean, durable, good temperature properties.

Ceramic micro-fractures over time. So while it can stay pretty easy to clean, but the non-stick degrades drastically over time. Especially the ceramic on steel or copper - metals that want to expand under heat.

I have this enameled cast iron pot that I cook just about everything in - but it just destroys eggs.

Cast iron on the gas stove is fine (by me). Cast iron on the electric with a cast iron tops is PITA for making something fast-and-once like fried/scrambled eggs. With something which takes a long time to make (like a stack of pancakes) you manage, mostly because they are made at the max t° anyway, but quick things suffer.

If you care about your health, you wouldn’t use a cast iron. Normally seasoned with unsaturated vegetable fats which produce polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at high heat which is required for the seasoning process. These compounds are carcinogenic.

But to what level? The seasoning usually don't go into the food. Once the process is done, it should stick to the pan as a polymer, not as something you eat like overcooked food.

And from what I've seen, while charred food is carcinogenic, eating an entire course of badly charred food is like an order of magnitude less carcinogenic than smoking a single cigarette.

Teflon pans are also mostly harmless unless you overheat them by a lot (i.e. forget it on the stove, empty and on high heat), it is the large scale accumulation of manufacturing byproducts in nature that is the problem.

Pre-heating is essential for cast iron. I primarily cook with it for everything these days on an induction cooktop. Induction is pretty fast at heating the pan and has excellent temperature control.

I mean there’s a reason commercial kitchens use stainless steel (or aluminum)

Stainless steel pan + butter + a stainless spatula + chainmail or steel wool. I cook can egg on stainless everyday and it's easy to clean. Teflon pans are not inert. The fumes from a hot teflon pan can kill birds.

Don't call for the meme that saturated fats are bad. Butter is safer than unsaturated fats which change when heated.

not to distract from your central point, but while the saturated fat in (unclarified) butter doesn't smoke like veg oil, the proteins in it do seem to burn up

> The fumes from a hot teflon pan can kill birds.

Thank you, I was unaware of that. Important to note that it happens only when the pan is grossly overheated (280C/580F) [1]. For reference frying an egg is done at 300F.

Still a concern, it's not that hard to imagine being distracted and leaving an empty pan on a coil set to high, it will likely reach 600F after a few minutes.

1. https://vcacanada.com/know-your-pet/teflon-polytetrafluoroet...

PFAs just needs to be regulated, not banned. We absolutely should/must be able to buy an outdoor jacket that lasts decades, provided you traded that last one in to be recycled (sort like mandatory battery core recycling). Long lasting goods are far better for the environment then short-lived "recyclable" ones.

Do you fast fashion Nikes or bicycle chain lube need PFAs? No.

The hysteria surrounding PFAs is going to be a net harm, and some politicians need a wedge issue to vault themselves forward in the media spotlight to buy votes.

Reading the HN comments today is sad. I thought this was a science based community.

Right, it all begins with studying where they're coming from since they're in everything from fire suppression foam to floss. I'd imagine companies like DuPoint are dumping insane amounts of them as byproducts of industrial processes, and would love for us to go all plastic straw on goretex shoes to let them squeeze a couple more billion of profits out of their established processes.

RE: HN, it has grown and been redditified a bit, rash downvoting, sarcastic non-sequiturs all abound.

> We absolutely should/must be able to buy an outdoor jacket that lasts decades

There is no possible way a durable water repellent (DWR) coating will last decades on a jacket, with or without PFAS. Modern outdoor apparel simply isn't designed for long term durability - it's designed for flashy marketability, because the externalities don't have to be priced in. There are a few exceptions (e.g. "true" softshells like Buffalo jackets) that have never, and will never, see mainstream adoption.

yeah my first thought was, "have you ever resealed tent seams?

I recall some years ago a discussion we had with an environmentalist at a time when the rules governing the use of PVC insulation in household power wiring were being changed in that PVC was being replaced with another plastic that was usable but not nearly as good as the PVC.

During the discussion the environmentalist said to the effect "we're working towards eliminating (banning) chlorine from the planet". We were so shocked at what she said that we decided never to mention the element by name again and only referred to it as element 17.

This experience was a salient lesson what can happen when ignorance and popular notions mix. No doubt PFAS-type chemicals have been grossly abused as were CFCs and they need tight regulation but as we saw with the Montreal Protocol simply banning most CFCs outright rather than introducing strict regulation caused many problems. This led to certain chemicals becoming unavailable that had no effective but 'safer' equivalents and this has been problematic. Even now, I know of people who still have drums of CFCs which they almost guard with their lives—they won't even part with an ounce of the stuff for love nor money because when gone it's the end of the line.

It doesn't end there, in recent years we've seen certain CFCs being released to the atmosphere from illegal manufacturing in countries where monitoring isn't strictly controlled. Like illegal drugs, if there's sufficient demand people will supply them. Banning over 12,000 chemicals outright without a full and detailed investigation is certainly to cause similar problems.

We should learn from the CFC experience and take a carefully measured approach. Careful and strict regulation is likely a much better way of dealing with the problem..

I wonder how long it will be before we'll have to start whispering 'element 9' in hushed tones for fear of those who would wish it banned from the planet.

How is this even debatable? Nobody wants these chemicals anywhere near them.

> Nobody wants these chemicals anywhere near them.

Don't we? I've got a bunch of non-stick pans that I love cooking on (I checked the brand I use most, and their pans are coated in PTFE, a PFAS). I've also got a roll of PTFE tape for plumbing around the house (basically ubiquitous for that purpose), and some PTFE tubing for hobby use (PTFE tubing is in the majority of 3D printers).

I think the bigger risks are in anything resembling disposable. Also, maybe getting people to understand how to care for their cookware better so it lasts 10+ years instead of 3-5 or so. I actually prefer stainless steel myself, my SO prefers non-stick. Before I was with my SO, I had a single 8" non-stick I would use just for eggs.

I'm as or more concerned about the plastics in food packaging myself. Hard to avoid with so much processed food in most grocery stores though. Wouldn't mind taking a few steps back. Considering we grow well more than enough food to actually feed the world at this point.

Ya, was even thinking the other day that I should just toss a few glass containers in my backpack when I'm going out to restaurants. I usually carry a backpack anyways, I'm not sure there's much value in me carting away leftovers in disposable containers. The amount of plastic everywhere is staggering when you start to take it into account every time you toss a piece of it out.

Your tape and tubing scenarios make sense. I'm not sure anyone can seriously require a non-stick pan though. Cooks managed without them for thousands of years by just paying more attention to their eggs, and comparably unsticky materials existed before the invention of non-stick coatings. The long-term negative impacts of teflon just doesn't seem to be worth the incredibly slight convenience they offer.

I wasn't talking about "require", I was talking about "want". The subjective experience of cooking on (and cleaning) a non-stick pan is an absolute delight in comparison. I don't want those chemicals in me, but I sure do appreciate them in my kitchen.

The heroin user doesn't require more heroin either... But he does want some more...

Maybe I'm just missing an implied "/s". Surely I don't need to spend too much time addressing how silly a comparison is between "I just need my next fix of heroin" and "I like scrambled eggs".

Maybe a little too much PFAS on that slippery slope.

I don't even understand what convenience they offer. I cook a lot and find stainless steel just as easy to clean. Let it sit with some water in it after you take out the food, and by the time dinner is done it wipes clean with a sponge.

At the same time I don't have to worry about nicking or overheating the teflon, and stainless steel pans tend to have better heft and thicker bottoms.

And gore-tex clothing is a godsend in countries where it rains almost every day like Ireland :)

I've had pretty good luck with wax cotton from fjallraven...

There is a literal canary in the coal mine: People with birds don't use PTFE because if they burn a pan it will kill their birds.

Wasn't aware of this, do you have references, instances?

https://wagwalking.com/bird/condition/teflon-poisoning https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/teflon-polytetrafluor... https://www.petinsurance.com/healthzone/pet-health/pet-toxin... https://www.ewg.org/research/canaries-kitchen

I know we live in an AI post-search-engine world but...

I feel this issue is over exaggerated. The study at EWG says that toxic chemicals are released in Teflon pans at 464 deg (C or F? article doesn't say), versus 680 deg for non-Teflon.

I don't think 99% of people ever get their cookware that hot.

Pretty much any gas cooktop could burn an unattended pan and heat it way above oven temperatures. A gas flame is about 2000 deg f.

You can't make a claim, then get asked for sources, and tell them to do a Google search to find the sources lol

Wait. Really?

Thanks for that info. I was aware that birds were sensitive to many chemicals but not to that degree. However, it likely explains an incident that happened some years ago. We saw a canary aimlessly hopping about on the nature strip outside the factory where I was working and we figured it was someone's pet bird that had gotten loose.

Anyway, a colleague caught it in his hands which was surprising given he wasn't that nimble. The bird didn't appear the least bit sick and he likely caught it because it was used to having people around. The aim was to return it to its owner if we could find the person (it was an industrial area but there were many homes in the street). Incidentally, we weren't bird owners so managing a lost bird was a new experience.

We borrowed a largish birdcage that hadn't been used for years, cleaned it up and bought special canary feed and a cuttlefish etc. from the local pet shop, and we hung the birdcage and canary in a partly-shaded area without direct sunlight just outside the factory door with a sign on it to the effect 'do you own this bird?'. Every night we brought the cage in and covered it with a sheet just as I'd seen my grandmother do with her canary when I was a kid.

This went on for about two weeks or so and the bird seemed well and healthy—and we'd gotten quite used to the bird happily chirping away outside the front door. One day I noticed fruit flies around a garbage can inside the factory area and sprayed inside it with normal household pyrethrin-type insecticide which is usually pretty innocuous (at least to humans). Moreover, I was well aware that the canary was in the factory albeit 40/50 feet away so I was careful and deliberately confined the spray to inside the garbage bin.

Next day when I came in I found the canary dead at the bottom of its cage and I was considerably upset over its death as I'd not only gotten used to having this cute little creature around but it was immediately apparent to me that my spraying could have been the cause although I just couldn't see how such little amount of spray would have traveled that large distance.

It would be interesting to know exactly how sensitive canaries are to pyrethroids and how others manage to keep their pet birds safe in these circumstances.

Not to mention waterproof clothing, non-fogging safety goggles, temperature-resistant wire insulation, dielectrics, separators in Li-ion batteries and countless biomedical applications.

Fluoropolymers and fluorosurfactants have unique properties that make them very difficult to substitute. I'm not sufficiently informed to comment on the possible health impacts of fluorinated hydrocarbons, but I can say that a world without them will be poorer in countless small ways. That might well be a price worth paying, but we shouldn't pretend that it's an easy decision.

PTFE is not a PFAS. PFAS are used to manufacture it.

Do you have a source for that? I'm trying to find anywhere that agrees with you, and every source I can find says PTFE is itself also a PFAS.

I am wrong.

What I was thinking of is the claimed "PFOA-free" on some new cookware is the same as "PFAS-free" which it clearly isn't.

Though PTFE is so inert, I don't think it faces the same problems as PFOA and other PFAS used in firefighting.

There's no good substitute for PTFE cookware. The modern "non stick" alternatives are stickier even when new and degrade quickly. There's no good substitute for PTFE in rain clothes either. PTFE itself is harmless, but the precursor chemicals are dangerous. I'd happily pay a lot more to cover the costs of their safe containment and disposal. Despite people calling them "forever chemicals", PFAS can be destroyed by processes such as supercritical water oxidation.

We've had perfectly serviceable non-stick cookware for ages - carbon steel cookware treated properly easily replicates teflon with a little oil or butter.

Before someone claims to the contrary - I basically only use TWO pans now for all my cooking - both 14" carbon steel pans I initially conditioned that have only gotten more non-stick as I've used them. I regularly cook over-easy eggs, scrambled eggs, and other foods that are apparently only possible in teflon non-stick pans if you believe the literature.

I can't even be arsed to season a pan properly and nonstick ceramic is fine. It won't last forever, but it works for upwards of 10 years.

I've watched so many people scramble eggs every morning and leave half the egg stuck to the pan day after day. You don't have to live this way!

Before putting in your eggs, heat up the pan and put in some oil/butter. A spatula that can scrape well (flat-nosed, or moderately flexible plastic/silicon) is also helpful.

For a spell some years back, I had a game of "find the worst pan in the kitchen and see if I can cook my eggs without them sticking". Not quite a 100% success rate, but pretty close. (That was mostly scrambled, though. Fried eggs and omelettes are more difficult.)

It's true that a non-stick pan makes it much easier a beginner, but the downside is that said beginner will destroy a non-stick pan within weeks.

Obviously not for non-stick cookware but the best spatula I own is a $25-30 Victorinox slotted fish spatula. [1] Topped Wirecutter's list too. [2]

[1] https://www.victorinox.com/us/en/Products/Cutlery/Accessorie...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/victorinox-slotte...

> There's no good substitute for PTFE cookware.

There is. Seasoned cast iron.

The problem with cast iron is that it requires work to season it properly and maintain it. People are lazy.

> There's no good substitute for PTFE in rain clothes either.

They used to use oil and wax. They were called oilskin coats. I'm not sure if it's because they are niche, but now such coats are pretty expensive. Problem: Cost.

So you're right in some sense - the alternatives don't provide us with the same level of cost and convenience.

Cast iron is significantly stickier than PTFE cookware.

Oilskin coats are also much heavier and less effective at keeping out water. The main problem isn't cost, it's that they're much worse as rain wear.

I find that I have to use a lot more butter in cast iron. I love the skillet, though, it's fantastic.

I usually cook on stainless steel or cast iron but let’s not be facetious — there’s nothing like non-stick.

In my experience a properly seasoned, oiled, cast iron pan isn't materially different than a non-stick for cooking eggs (which is one of the stickier things you can do). It's much more flexible. You can bring it to 450-500F without killing adjacent birds, and you can put it into the oven. High heat capacity, better sear on meats. And you can use metal utensils. No matter how you damage it, an hour in the oven with a thin coat of oil and it's good as new.

I cook a lot, and I have no interest in non-stick cookware.

Cast iron really isn't difficult to maintain, at least I'm lazy as hell and don't do anything special and mine are fine. I think cast iron gets a reputation for being this whole thing because some of us turbo nerd on it.

Yeah; it's hard to screw up cast iron seasoning once you know how to treat it, and basically impossible to ruin the pan.

The only way I've heard of people screwing up is by to using it infrequently. If you season with canola or vegetable oil, and use it every time you cook, then the patina takes care of itself.

To clean, scrape using chain mail or a plastic scraper, such as the ones from pampered chef or lodge, and be sparing with the soap. Do not put it in the dishwasher.

If you ignore the above, then scrape off as much of the old patina as possible, then coat lightly with oil + bake at 300 for an hour.

Compare the above to non-stick, where getting it near anything sharp destroys the pan, and you have to buy a new set every 1-5 years. Re-seasoning a pan is much less effort (and cheaper / more environmentally friendly) than shopping for a new one!

Yeah! You can pick up a plastic scraper at I think pretty much any grocery and they are so perfect for cleaning up in the kitchen, anytime something gets stuck. I guess the soap thing isn't a big deal these days and that advice came from a time where the soap was more caustic.

Also non stick burn when they get hot which is an awful trait in a pan. I cook some insane fish and beef and it is the most braindread process with a cast iron.

I got a waxed jacket a while back. It was at some trendy designer store I haven't heard of, and overseas. It was ~$80USD, and lasted 5+ years.

I don't think the issues for the well-known brands have much to do with the materials. Instead, I think it's because there are a few traditional brands using traditional (non-optimized) production techniques, then charging large margins.

That's fine if you want to pay for the best of the best, but it would be nice if there were a bargain route too. e.g., for iron cookware, two good brands are Lodge and La Creuset. Heirloom-quality Lodge pans start at $25; La Creuset is many times more expensive because of the [traditional] ceramic coating.

I don't know of a company that's comparable to Lodge, but that makes oiled/waxed outerwear.

Barbour is the main one. Then Belstaff.

Barbour traditionally made "oil coats" for fishermen. Then later waxed cotton jackets for farmers in the UK. They last for generations, you can rewax and repair them.

Belstaff made waxed motorcycle wear.

Both do amazingly high quality, if expensive, modern waxed and oiled cotton or canvas jackets and clothing.

So you would trade Teflon for a known carcinogen that’s linked to lung cancer? Also it’s more work to maintain a cast iron pan, you can’t exactly throw it into a dishwasher.

Cast iron pans don't have a link to lung cancer.

Unless you count the workers in the foundry that is making them.

Heating vegetable oil up so it turns into a polymer creates carcinogens. Why cast iron pans have a non stick surface.

Had to look it up. That claim is truish. However it is only a risk while seasoning and if you are inhaling the fumes.

Needless to say, don't do that and cast iron presents no risks.

At the end of the day, a really silly reason to swear off cast iron.

I have never spent more than 90 seconds cleaning our large cast iron pan. And that's only if it's really egged up. Whatever convenience we're talking about, it's trivial.

Tell that to the entire restaurant industry. The vast majority of cooking done on a stove in a commercial kitchen is done on various sizes of high carbon steel pans, and they are just as non-stick as PTFE.

Enamel cookware is nonstick.

I do! These chemicals are extremely useful and my life is regularly improved by their presence.

Well, nevermind the potential fallout then, if you, the individual is happy.

Consumerism really did kill "us" for "me" didn't it.

I think my experience is representative, rather than unusual! PFAS are probably a net good for all of "us," as you put it.

I found the PR farmer!

It's not technological progress if it kills or sickens large numbers of people and we should recognize and roll back mistakes and misadventures as fast as introduce them.

The world will go on. We will find alternatives that don’t cause pain and suffering.

Are these forever chemicals an actual big deal? Do we have any numbers on how many people or animals they injure or kill every year? How about projections into the future? What kind of benefit do they allow manufacturers?

Based on https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9215707/ and https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/and-polyfluoroalkyl-substances-pfas

>Are these forever chemicals an actual big deal? Do we have any numbers on how many people or animals they injure or kill every year?

One study estimates about 30,000 to 120,000 people killed in America per year, with many more in the rest of the word. The EPA thinks reducing PFAS exposure now could save thousands of human lives per year and prevent tens of thousands of cases of human illnesses.

>How about projections into the future?

We really don't know. However, the numbers seem to have gone down significantly in recent years, perhaps due to a change in which PFAS people are exposed to.

>What kind of benefit do they allow manufacturers?

Calling PFAS miracle chemicals would be an understatement. Short chain PFAS (the dangerous kind) enable us to make PTFE, which makes surfaces almost friction-less, is compatible with almost every chemical, is largely bio-compatible, and lets water vapor through while keeping out liquid water (useful for things like waterproof jackets which don't trap sweat). They have a wide variety of other applications as well.

They act as sex hormone disruptors. Probably the number one cause of plummeting fertility across the entire world. Korea is projected to have a 95% reduction in population within three generations.

There's a lot of space between a ban and "just don't use it everywhere".

Here's some good news: there's a non-plastic, non-forever-chemical, really-compostable plastic straw on the market! https://www.phadeproducts.com/#

https://www.amazon.com/stores/phade/page/7B9D4729-8EDF-4FAE-...

6,000 regular sized straws for $55, so about a penny each.

https://www.amazon.com/phade-Eco-Friendly-Sustainable-Biodeg...

The whole concept of limited liability need to be rethought. The goals were good and it has produced great wins for humanity. But the way it allows one sided bets (the most I can loose is my investment) is outdated. When it was introduced there was not really a way for a limited liability entity to fail in a way that imposed massive costs on others who were not voluntarily involved (employees, suppliers, investors, lenders, customers, etc).

Perhaps limited liability should not apply to negligent harm caused by the entity to non-involved people. investors, officers and directors should be fully personally liable for the harms.

Dark Waters is a relevant movie about a town in Pennsylvania that suffered from poisoning by the Dupont corporation.

Lipitor, Prozac, Flonase are all PFAS as well as about a third of pharmaceuticals being developed. The best solution is regulated waste management, but nimbyism sends the issue to China.

I thought your post was wrong, but this article says you're mostly right: https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2022/is-there-a-right-d...

Let me preface this with: I'm not advocating for continuing to use pfas. That being said, why are we still calling them forever chemicals? Didn't we come up with a way to break down the majority of existing pfas already?

https://www.verywellhealth.com/cleaning-pfas-from-water-6500...

"Forever" is understood to be an exaggeration. And even if we are finding new artificial ways to break it down, the fact remains that there's a lot of it out in nature now and natural processes take a long time to break them down.

PFAS exists everywhere in the biosphere. It's impossible to clean all that up.

Mercury exists everywhere in the biosphere, it is impossible to clean up. Lead exists everywhere in the biosphere, it is impossible to clean up. Freon exists everywhere in the biosphere, it is impossible to clean up. Plastic exists everywhere in the biosphere, it is impossible to clean up. CO2 exists everywhere in the biosphere, it is impossible to clean up.

If we declare the situation hopeless then nothing will change.

I think they were explaining the "Forever chemical" name, not giving up.

That article specifically discusses water filtration plants that are handling concentrated PFAS after filtering them away from drinking water. That the small fraction of them flowing through water treatment facilities can be broken down with special handling (which that article also says will not be ready for the market for some time) does not negate the fact that in the environment / our bodies, they are extremely slow to break down. I think it's obvious even to laypeople that the label is not literally true (nothing lasts forever), but it's still an apt descriptor. Even if municipal water can filter them out and break them down, these chemicals will be literally in our bodies and environments for the rest of our lives.

As others have alluded to, this works fine for municipal drinking water, but we're finding PFAS in our food supply now (they're in lakes, streams, rivers, vegetables, meat, etc). We cannot feasibly clean all the surface water and soil, so the best idea is to stop introducing them in the first place.

> why are we still calling them forever chemicals?

Because it's a useful political slogan for the anti-PFAS advocates.

Because it bio-accumulates and doesn't break down, and there's no way to remove it from entire aquifers or a huge chunk of land and the stuff is still leeching into aquifers?

How are small towns supposed to pay for these treatment processes? How are individual home owners, since in many areas everyone is on a well?

What are all the marine critters (and everything that eats them, and everything that eats those critters, etc.) supposed to do?

All so McDonalds can make a Big Mack container that doesn't get soggy?

After our civilization collapses and is forgotten, scientists thousands of years from now will wonder at what kinds of planetary scale maniacs we were: A layer of lead covering the planet, so we could have cars. A globe-spanning layer of americium-241 from when we tested nuclear bombs in the open air. Etc.

This has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene#Stratigraphy

But won't they also look at skeletons and see that life expectancies also increased during this entire time?

Interesting that there's a correlation between PFAS levels and weight gain.

it doesn't have to be all or nothing. how about we eliminate it from single use items? would probably get us 80% of the way there without any major dent in the average person's quality of life.

There are a lot of uses for PFAS, but banning flourosurfactants from consumer products should be a no-brainier. They aren't needed for safety reasons and they are obviously causing health problems.

See also recent discussion on 3M PFAS settlement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36660751

What debates is there to be?

It's making us all sick. Slowly but surely.

Title should be "Could the world go back to PFAS-free? Proposal to ban ‘forever chemicals’ fuels debate".

We need warning labels. If people knew there are pfas in their pizza boxes and popcorn bags, they wouldn't accept it.

Then, put warning labels and ban it.

If you want people not to accept it so we don't pollute our environment, just prevent the pollution directly. Also, I may not buy things with PFAS but there are millions of situation where PFAS could jeopardize my health (e.g food containers at restaurants, schools, hospitals… neighboring factory producing PFAS, etc).

Maybe (or maybe not - how much attention does the average person pay to California Prop 65 warnings?), but warning labels on consumer products won't do much of anything to curb their use in industry and non-consumer facing products.

We have warning labels and even graphic pictures of diseases on smoking packages but still people choose to smoke.

twenty five years ago there were similar "news items" .. called Green Chemistry and Body Burden at that time..

Debate? Do we even need to discuss it?

Thank god for the EU leading the way. Make the rules and the market will find alternatives.

My uncle said the Replacements for pfas are actually worse. What’s the final word on that?

There aren't any replacements for them, and its unclear what you mean by worse, less efficacious or more environmentally damaging? If the former then yeah, theres a reason those products took off

We used to wrap products in paper or cloth. We could go back to that.

The regulators have taken a whack-a-mole approach to banning this class of chemicals in the past. The result is that the popular ones that are well-understood get banned, and then replaced with ones that haven't been studied. There's no reason to think the replacements are better or worse, though they are often worse.

The organization in the article is proposing banning production of the entire family of chemicals (~ 12,000 of them) instead of doing it one at a time.

Related. I've tried to stick to the major discussions; have I missed any?

3M reaches $10.3B settlement over PFAS contamination of water systems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36660751 - July 2023 (333 comments)

USGS estimates at least 45% of U.S. tap water contain forever chemicals - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617822 - July 2023 (169 comments)

Nearly half of the tap water in the US is contaminated with ‘forever chemicals,’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36616841 - July 2023 (174 comments)

Water heavily polluted with PFAS in 15 km radius around Dordrecht chemical plant - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36520610 - June 2023 (44 comments)

Show HN: PFAS.report – Measure the forever chemicals in your blood via Quest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36509752 - June 2023 (150 comments)

Eating microwave popcorn increases the level of PFAS in body (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36440911 - June 2023 (414 comments)

3M heads to trial in ‘existential’ $143B forever-chemicals litigation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36259163 - June 2023 (250 comments)

Three companies agree to pay $1B to settle 'forever chemical' claims - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36196884 - June 2023 (75 comments)

Many soft contact lenses in US made up of PFAS, research suggests - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35955706 - May 2023 (109 comments)

America’s first high-volume ‘PFAS Annihilator’ is up and running in W. Michigan - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35821128 - May 2023 (168 comments)

Engineers develop water filtration that removes “forever chemicals” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35764476 - April 2023 (226 comments)

Compostable fast-food packaging can emit volatile PFAS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35411919 - April 2023 (155 comments)

PFAS ban affects most refrigerant blends - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34997937 - March 2023 (100 comments)

PFAS can suppress white blood cells’ ability to destroy invaders - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34909058 - Feb 2023 (207 comments)

Magnetic method to clean PFAS contaminated water - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34487079 - Jan 2023 (181 comments)

PFAS found at high levels in freshwater fish - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34411713 - Jan 2023 (41 comments)

3M to end 'forever chemicals' output - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34076685 - Dec 2022 (413 comments)

Pollution cleanup method destroys toxic “forever chemicals” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34047047 - Dec 2022 (80 comments)

Possible breakthrough to destroy PFAS using sodium hydroxide - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32517444 - Aug 2022 (33 comments)

Simple mix of soap and solvent could help destroy ‘forever chemicals’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515511 - Aug 2022 (233 comments)

It’s raining PFAS: rainwater is unsafe to drink even in Antarctica and Tibet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32451024 - Aug 2022 (433 comments)

Study finds link between 'forever chemicals' in cookware and liver cancer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32438368 - Aug 2022 (394 comments)

Rainwater everywhere on Earth unsafe to drink due to ‘forever chemicals’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32365736 - Aug 2022 (72 comments)

US water contains more ‘forever chemicals’ than EPA tests show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32004036 - July 2022 (21 comments)

3M’s PFAS Crisis Has Come to Europe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31809445 - June 2022 (94 comments)

Regular blood donations can reduce “forever chemicals” in the bloodstream: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123477 - April 2022 (204 comments)

PFAS Contamination in the U.S - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28744886 - Oct 2021 (44 comments)

Toxic ‘forever chemicals’ contaminate indoor air at worrying levels - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28367524 - Aug 2021 (144 comments)

Study finds alarming levels of ‘forever chemicals’ in US mothers’ breast milk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27139371 - May 2021 (107 comments)

Forever chemicals are widespread in U.S. drinking water - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25887385 - Jan 2021 (258 comments)

Chemicals called PFAS and PFOS are in the blood of virtually every person - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25557113 - Dec 2020 (226 comments)

PFAS “forever” chemicals found in hundreds more everyday products - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25288978 - Dec 2020 (25 comments)

U.S. drinking water widely contaminated with 'forever chemicals': report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22116696 - Jan 2020 (391 comments)

Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19233284 - Feb 2019 (110 comments)

Scientists cut the tolerable intake of PFAs by 99.9% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19070754 - Feb 2019 (112 comments)

3M Knew About the Dangers of PFOA and PFOS Decades Ago, Internal Documents Show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17680589 - Aug 2018 (151 comments)

Troubling chemicals found in wide range of fast-food wrappers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13541466 - Feb 2017 (69 comments)

Can someone explain where the (suspiciously) scary nomenclature of "forever chemicals" comes from?

Google neutered their normal search engine, so in order to search by date I went to Google Scholar and I have found no use of such term well into the 2000s.

It looks like a journalistic invention, does anyone have am origin story pointing to a scholarly source?

You'll easily find the answer if you search for forever chemicals wikipedia, what's the source of the confusion?

No it isn't. There's no "forever chemical" page on Wikipedia, so I'm not sure where you're getting this idea from.

Disregarding any nomenclature, in just focusing on the terminology in isolation, water could be considered a forever chemical. This is an example of why use of the term "forever chemical" comes off as a scare tactic or disingenuous.

Of course, for dying media institutions, PFAS can't just be a pollutant. It has to be literally forever!

EDIT: Way to go missing the entire point, all of you.

You're fighting strawmen, I didn't say "search for forever chemicals on wikipedia", I said "search for forever chemicals wikipedia". The first result on Google is the article about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances which includes the source of the term.

WP's autocomplete returns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_subst...

Water occurs in nature without human intervention. I don't think the same can be said for PFAS.

For a big chunk of the industrial age we've operated on the assumption that the global environment is big enough and capable enough to just eat or neutralize just about anything we dump into it. I think there is utility in defining a category of human-produced things that we have been able to determine the global environment can't eat or neutralize, and also that cause harm when people are exposed to them.

You could give this category a lot of potential names, but "forever chemicals" conveys the idea pretty effectively IMO.

Typing "forever chemical wikipedia" into DDG gets you this link:

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

into google, gets you this link:

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

"forever chemical" in either Google or DDG gives a lot of good links explaining what they are.

Hey! He's "just asking questions."

I found a couple of news articles crediting the word to this opinion piece (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/these-toxic-chemical...) in the Washington Post by Joseph G. Allen, an assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the director of Harvard's Healthy Buildings Program.

I wonder if they were pressured by the journalist to come up with the buzz word or it was something they used colloquially between peers

Well, we can only speculate. But I would suggest that since the writer themselves is choosing to write an op-ed on the subject, perhaps they themselves have ample motivation to come up with a persuasive word to argue their case? Their goal is to educate normal people on these chemicals and in the piece they explain that the terminology commonly used is so scientific as to be meaningless to the general public. Hence the need for a more direct "forever chemicals" instead of PFAS/per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFOA/Perfluorooctanoic acid or C8/8 carbon chain structure.

And what about the next forever chemicals?

Yes "what about"

PFAS are used in lubricants for nuclear weapons [0]

we'll never get rid of nuclear weapons

ergo, we'll never get rid of PFAS

[0] https://patelder.weebly.com/pfas--nuclear-weapons.html

> Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) defined as: Any substance that contains at least one fully fluorinated methyl (CF3-) or methylene (-CF2-) carbon atom (without any H/Cl/Br/I attached to it).

It sounds at least like they're not going the terrible US route of allowing substances until proven toxic.

Perhaps we've hit enough technological development that any new chemical actually needs to have approval before it can be mass produced (of course giving labs freedom to experiment in developing new materials).

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