"The authorities currently favor one explanation for the pollution: the use of paper mill sludge as fertilizer on farmland near drinking water catchments."
You have to be incredibly greedy and stupid to use industrial waste as fertilizer
You have to be incredibly greedy and stupid to use industrial waste as fertilizer
That's when a compost company started processing so-called paper sludges. These are waste materials from the paper industry and are believed to have contained PFAS. The company mixed these wastes with compost and spread them on fields—until a regulatory ban in 2008. According to reports, the PFAS eventually entered the drinking water via soil and groundwater.
"authorities currently favor one explanation for the pollution"
Tells me that they don't have proof this is the source of the PFAS pollution. If they did, they wouldn't "favor" the explanation, they would just say that's the explanation. I don't support making wide changes based on hunches. Sure - replace the fertilizer with something else for a while and see if that changes the PFAS levels. If it does, sure ban the paper products from being used as fertilizer. But there is a cost associated w/ doing that and that cost has higher-order effects.
Or, just ban things with high levels of pfas being used as fertilizer, and test the paper slurry?
For all we know, the the critera being used for "is this suitable as fertilizer" did not go beyond "has it got what plants crave", and "and also doesn't contain poison" didn't make the list.
Just more carefully.
"Should" here is doing a lot of work, it makes the argument circular imo.
Landfill is precious and sacred and must not be used.
“We didn’t know that used stuff was toxic.” Does not hold as an argument because stuff for recycling is often toxic it’s something we know, everyone should know, it’s obvious, assume it, don’t keep coming back saying “hey didn’t realize this or that was toxic and should be in landfill instead of recycled”.
Don’t recycle plastic and paper and use it for food and drink.
Don’t recycle car tires into roads and playgrounds and later realize they leach microplastics and are cancer causing.
We need to stop recycling toxic shit then saying “we didn’t know”.
Recycling is nice too, if it works out, which isn't as often as we'd like to think.
And of course we have even added industrial waste directly to our drinking water, on purpose: https://origins.osu.edu/article/toxic-treatment-fluorides-tr...
It's probably quite common.
> Toilet paper should be considered as a potentially major source of PFAS entering wastewater treatment systems
> The PFAS levels detected are low enough to suggest the chemicals are used in the manufacturing process to prevent paper pulp from sticking to machinery, Thompson said. PFAS are often used as lubricants in the manufacturing process and some of the chemicals are commonly left on or in consumer goods.
> In a statement to WSVN in Florida, a trade group representing the toilet paper industry said no PFAS is added to toilet paper. Thompson said “evidence seems to suggest otherwise” though it may be true that PFAS are not intentionally added.
> Researchers detected six PFAS compounds, with 6:2 diPAP representing the highest levels. The compound has not been robustly studied, but is linked to testicular dysfunction. The study also found PFOA, a highly toxic compound, and 6:2 diPAP can turn into PFOA once in the environment.
This is a big big part of the industry, as it's worth a lot by weight compared to other paper products
I'd bet there.
PFAs are everywhere in food packaging too. It’s disturbing.
But I'm personally not too worried about ingesting pfas from pfas lined products!
First off - the water cycle has already been infiltrated by them, you can look it up, but rainfall all over the world contains significant pfas, I think the strong image people keep is that it's raining pfas in the Himalayas. This has been going on a few years if I recall right.
So it's already pretty bad - you're ingesting them in water( water treatment does treat those away in most of the US and Canada (from what I'm aware of)) But also in everything that ingests that water, like plants and the ground. This also means that any food that is transformed has a good chance of concentrating PFAS into itself.
Second reason is that the reason we use PFAS is because they are very strong and hard to break down. It's unlikely that your coffee cup will infuse a large amount of pfas in the coffee because it was put there to be a barrier, if it shed material easily it wouldn't be a good surface treatment.
The issue is what the article talked about : PFAS in waste breaking down into very small particles that are tough to handle and are very mobile in the environnement. By using more and more PFAS in manufacturing, we're creating more waste that will emit PFAS particles into the environnement - meaning the water cycle, and then we poison the whole world.
We need regulation! People don't even know they are participating to the problem.
The fact that we've poisoned the rain wouldn't make me feel any better about the PFAS I'm getting from packaging. There's research showing that the chemicals do leach into food from packaging and that it causes significant increases in the amount found in people's blood. Look up the findings on PFAS and microwave popcorn for example. It not looking good for coffee cups either https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...