‘Forever chemical’ bans face hard truth: Many can’t be replaced

You always hear about how innovative the US is but the moment there is any talk about requiring industry to find an alternative to something youd think this place was as economically crippled as north korea. An economy so flimsy and industry so devoid of flexibility that it will collapse if required to find an alternative to x y and z but simultaneously supposedly the strongest and most resilient economy in the world.

These are critical chemistries that enable modern day life

Then maybe we need to examine "modern day life" with a more critical eye. Some sacrifices may need to be made, because they are worth being made.

There are also measures that lie between "ban" and "use freely". If we cannot eliminate the use of these chemicals in chipmaking, then we need to reconsider the disposability of these chips, or we can even consider if less effective processes result in less damaging chemical use, and accept a bit of regression as a trade-off.

Asbestos. You know how long they knew that was killing people? Lead, they knew that was toxic, kept using it. Business, under capitalism, is designed to find the cheapest path to pull in more money. Regardless of the consequences. Changing might not even mean all that much more, in cost. They would still act like they can't at all, because any back slide looks bad on their charts. They have no financial obligation to the environment and or people. Change that and they'd become innovators overnight.

And yet somehow we survived thousands of Years without them.

Humans existed before these compounds were created. One of the ones mentioned in the article PFAS were first created in the 1940s.

So my question would be, what did we use in their place before that?

And what will happen if we stop using them.

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How did we ever survive without them?

Necessity is the mother of all inventions. When you take away their forever chemicals they will come up with new replacements quickly.

Yet I guarantee you that in their R&D labs they're already looking for alternatives at this point, all the while claiming to the public that it will be impossible to replace or result in inferior products (maybe it will, but hopefully it won't be super noticeable - leaded gasoline's octane numbers haven't been matched cheaply but we can still drive just fine).

You could replace most of this shit with glass, ceramic, cardboard, and some cooking oil to replace those non stick cooking appliances

It feels to me like a missing piece in this conversation is any consideration at all for balancing private profits against public costs when weighing whether or not a particular chemical or technology ought to be sold or used.

Yes, they're better for solving the narrow use case of being a fire retardant now and that'll save someone a little bit of money while it's in use vs. using more water or soaps, but what of the costs thereby put on everyone whose drinking water now has that stuff in it and their increased cancer risks over time? Or what if instead of non-stick aluminum cookware, we used seasoned steel and iron cookware and nobody has to die of cancer because DuPont dumps its manufacturing waste in nearby waterways?

I remember having this conversation about fracking fluids and how "economically important" fracking was to the economy at the time, but those wells are tapped in a matter of a year or two and if the neighbor's water is rendered undrinkable, that's a spoiled resource that will remain spoiled for a long, long time- long after the profit is all gone and the well operators have abandoned those wells. If the mess costs more in externalities to others than it creates in profit and value for the people doing it, the thing has net negative value and probably ought not to be done.

can't be replaced... By something that works as well, is as cheap and most importantly : makes them as much money.

Were without these chemicals before, we can so again.

The article opens by saying something totally different than the above summary. The point is that it's difficult to replace a lot of these chemicals, not that there isn't any substitute.

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These terrible chemicals are just not worth it at all.

The only people suffering from forever chemicals being banned are the people producing these poisons.

You can't even drink rainwater anymore. This is killing us.

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