PFAS Forever Chemicals Present in Some Plastic Recyclable Bottles | Hacker News Reader

PFAS Forever Chemicals Present in Some Plastic Recyclable Bottles

bloomberg.com

61 pointsmartey49 comments

This is one thing that makes me not want to use recycled stuff... There is a much wider variety of contamination in it.

Sure, we hopefully test for known-poisonous contamination, but there are all kinds of not-yet-known-to-be-poisonous contaminants, and recycled stuff has a much higher chance of having that than things made from new ingredients.

Treated sewage is used for fertilizing crops. They line "compostable" goods (straws, plates) with PFAS and it goes into municipal compost. And where does that go?

For a long time we lived mostly avoiding the consequences of our pollution, but now it's everywhere in our food and water.

> For a long time we lived mostly avoiding the consequences of our pollution, but now it's everywhere in our food and water.

To expand on that, there are places in the USA where you breathe in forever chemicals when you take a hot shower.

It IS pretty cool to think that we are probably drinking water that was also drunk by dinosaurs millions of years ago.

It tastes different I’m sure.

Mixed with a small amount of chemical made by the 3M company that will make you grow tits and balls, when you probably wished you had only one...

Who the hell wishes for one tit and/or one ball? /s

And some said human civilization had mostly escaped natural selection. Humanity's evolution to coexist with its own pollution sure will be interesting, if global warming doesn't kill it first.

I was thinking the same recently. Being able to survive through a lot of environmental pollution is likely a major driver of evolution.

Over what time frame do you believe global warming has a non-negligible chance of causing human extinction, as opposed to crashing populations, dramatically reducing quality of life, and/or destroying our current civilization?

>Humanity's evolution to coexist with its own pollution sure will be interesting, if global warming doesn't kill it first.

Naturally you would have to figure by definition that cave men lived in caves, but I would imagine with a population explosion there was an eventual housing shortage like we have never seen.

Plus with diasporatization lots of early humans would have ended up or even started out in places without any caves to begin with. Not all of them would be unhoused, and I think it was the ones with robust shelters like caves who were most likely to have "indoor" fires and breathe lots of smoke of various kinds for generations. And after thousands of years of natural selection I would think those possessing such stable (rent-controlled?) dwellings would be the ones most resistant to the damage caused by smoke inhalation, if not other pollutants.

It could happen.

And how do you think these people felt about global warming when their Ice Age started melting down?

> This is one thing that makes me not want to use recycled stuff

You should avoid plastics in general if you (rightfully) worry about forever chemicals.

You simply cannot avoid plastics in the US, or probably anywhere in the world at this point. The water we drink, unless we have sourced it ourselves from a spring or well will come into contact with some kind of plastic tube, pipe, component, or bottle.

Avoid completely? No, but you can limit exposure. Even if you were living in the 60s when everyone smoked in public/at work/on planes, it was still healthier to not smoke and sit in non-smoking sections where they existed.

In the case of plastics, filtering water helps. Even simple charcoal filters can catch a lot of it. Store your food in glass containers as opposed to plastic. Don't use non-stick cookware, some type of metal + fat works fine once you get a practiced technique. Use a stainless steel thermos, and minimize the amount of time hot liquid comes into contact with plastic components/containers. Heat breaks down plastics more easily and generally results in higher levels of contamination. Cold water passing through a plastic tube in your fridge is probably fine.

These are all good suggestions, and I have incorporated many of them in my life.

Even still, food is often grown with and amongst contamination. Your friends and family probably don’t care or know as much as you do, so you get a nice dose when you are over for dinner. So much food is transported in plastic because it is cost-effective. It’s in the water at this point.

Furthermore, in my personal experience, I can get obsessive about avoiding plastic/PFAS. People do not like to be lectured about plastic and PFAS so it is socially draining sometimes.

Well, right. Avoiding is different than limiting.

FYI There are still options for nonstick pans without PFAS: https://www.consumerreports.org/home-garden/cookware/best-fr...

Its true that you can get nonstick pans without PFAS, but the suggested nonstick pan on that link is one of the "ceramic" nonstick pans. Those pans get their nonstick property from a silicone coating. The parent and GP comments were discussing avoiding plastics and jumping from plastic to silicone is barely making any progress.

IMO ditch the concept of nonstick pans and just use fat on stainless steel.

Or carbon steel or cast iron, both of which can effectively become non-stick.

> IMO ditch the concept of nonstick pans and just use fat on stainless steel.

Amen. One would be best advised to stick to the tried and true.

It suggests the new plastics have the PFAS. Any that are fluorinated by Inhance. To your point, the recycled may have them too, as a consequence.

I just went down a rabbithole of googling Inhance Technologies, seeing an article mentioning a lawsuit against them by both the EPA as well another group, seeing an employee quoted in said article, googling them, and thinking about how it would be to work at a company that manufactures a PFAS product.

Do they feel any guilt? Do they believe their use of carcinogenic substances that do not biodegrade and become dispersed globally with no cleanup mechanism is just....moral? Do they believe anthropogenic industrial activity is just justified by the Good and Benefits it can bring to the world? Do they just assume these small messes we make while advancing Science and Progress will be easily cleaned up by smarter, more powerful humans in the future? Do they just consider the health effects to be worth whatever marginal improvement in waterproofing we get to our fucking disposable plastic cups in return, like smoking a single cigarette being no big deal?

Or do they just choose to ignore the headlines because its uncomfortable to think about how you might be one of the bad guys and their education and skillset is a sunk cost and acknowledging the environmental destruction they wreak would mean giving up a lucrative income, sort of how a FAANG employee might see a headline about IG being bad for teens mental heath and telling themselves 'whatever I'm sure it's not that bad'?

it's very easy to ask questions sitting on a chair of privilege. most people just take a job to survive.

I don't really believe that, for the case of a chemical engineer who was able to complete at minimum a four year engineering degree who works in Texas (where said company is located).

This article was not about recycled plastics. It's about plastics that can be recycled. Subtle difference, there.

We need to greatly improve consumer education around recycling best practices. We also need to add more regulatory pressure for businesses to comply (and probably eventually consumers too.)

Currently, in the United States at least, recycling rules can vary so widely based on locality. Sometimes, several authoritative sources disagree. There is therefore rampant and conflicting misinformation which adds to a sense of hopelessness and apathy.

All of this adds to increased chances of contamination, and lower profitability for recycling companies.

What if we (the US, or most states) simplified recycling to cardboard and aluminum.

Frankly, we should be composting organics rather than the wastes on most plastics.

Transparent glass, white paper and certain thermoplastics (PE, PP, PET) too.

I feel like the real environmental problem we have is chemical pollution we are generating throughout the world, and I feel like these companies are diverting people's attentions with carbon and global warming. Yes, that is a problem but I feel like the chemical pollution in our waters and in our food supply is a much more immediate issue. Yet almost no focus is done on it. It very much feels like what the sugar industry did back in the 1960s to divert attention away from sugar and onto fats, which lead to decades of wrong advice and bad food habits.

I definitely agree with this, though it seems like the EU has stricter standards on a lot of chemicals (like dyes and such). I really wish a movement would pick up to start fixing this.

What is the solution to recycled plastic? Asia is no longer buying it from America (1) and it's more carbon polluting to use recycled plastic (2) so.. what is the answer?

1) https://www.npr.org/2019/08/20/750864036/u-s-recycling-indus...

2) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/sep/24/lego-ab...

The answer is to stop using plastic where its material properties confer no functional advantage. More metal, more paper, more glass, perhaps more high-quality plastic. Of course, this makes everything currently packaged in cheap, mildly toxic plastic more expensive.

It's the defining trait of the 21st century, our global economic pursuit of the lowest prices possible for everything is starting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The solutions are all inflationary, whether paying for decontamination/medical treatment after the fact or using higher quality materials, so if we do fix the problem people will generally bitch about the increased cost and poor people will be stepped on yet again through cost inflation; because a financial asset can go up and down automatically with inflation, but inflation-matching salary increases are only extracted at economic gunpoint. Maybe the would-be Neo-Aristocrats will wake up and realize it isn't the 90s anymore, and keeping the herds healthy is in the ranchers' best interest; but they're stubborn enough to force that realization to be a violent one, so it'll be a while yet before we truly turn the corner.

We also need to somehow prevent those alternative materials from being coated in plastic, as many metal and paper "replacements" for plastic often are.

Or, in some cases, just less packaging in general. Plastic is so cheap that it's seemingly used "because we can" in many instances. How important is it that nobody else's fingerprints are on the case of your brand new DVD?

Careful, the 'Reduce' and 'Reuse' part of the 3 R's are deeply unpopular. How dare we not cover everything in useless plastic wraps? It's practically a jobs program. Do you wanna make the plastics workers unemployed???

Here in Germany at least, I see less plastic packaging than there was when I came 10 years ago. For example, locally, you can take your container to the supermarket deli counter and they will fill it with cheese or meat. This is a big national chain (Edeka). I assume awareness is better in most countries than it was, and companies follow demand.

The vast majority of plastic is in packaging industrial purposes, i.e. moving stuff through factories and warehouses. It's not the brand new DVD that have the majority of it, it's the plastic CD-transporters, plastic dvd-case molders/holders/transporters, plastic wrap holders, etc.

> How important is it that nobody else's fingerprints are on the case of your brand new DVD?

How important should it be? Zero.

How important is it to your sales, when your competitors product on the shelf has zero fingerprints and yours does? Critical.

This can be educated/advertised. A label saying "finger prints on our dvds prove they are safer for you(r children) and the environment" would be enough I suppose.

If only marketing were so easy.

And yet that kind of thing is done all over the place all the time

Who is buying new DVDs?

What do you mean you don't find joy in thrice unwrapping your printer ink cartridge from a sealed plastic bag inside a cardboard box inside a thick plastic clamshell case?

Sequester the carbon in properly lined and maintained landfills.

It is better off there than being shipped to the other side of the planet just to be kicked into the Yangtze when the bail has too many dirty peanut butter jars in it.

"Reduce, reuse, recycle" is in priority order. Recycling is supposed to be the last resort

https://archive.ph/wkUOL

What plastics are still safe to use? Polycarbonate is made from phthalates (BPA and others), an unknown portion of HDPE contains PFOAs, PET plastic bottles leach antimony when hot...

What a surprise to see antispeciesism show up here!

David S. Oderberg, "The Illusion of Animal Rights"[0].

[0] https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7SKlRTfkUiecnJuOWpJSzFOaDg/...

Went through a few pages - it's quite weak argumentation, to just state without support that animals don't have rights or that they historically have them, when it's trivial to show laws on the book giving animals rights or looking up trials in which animals were involved, especially historically.

Edit0: it's also very weak in that it doesn't name the rights that are to be "pushed by activists", simple things like the right to life and the right to freedom (cannot be sequestered), which have little to do with animals capacities.

Edit1: This philosopher is also against contraception and fights against it, for the rights of sperm and egg it seems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com