‘Forever chemical’ bans face hard truth: Many can’t be replaced
As lawmakers around the world weigh bans of 'forever chemicals,” many manufacturers are pushing back, saying there often is no substitute.
As lawmakers around the world weigh bans of 'forever chemicals,” many manufacturers are pushing back, saying there often is no substitute.
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.
It's all a ruse to maximise profits and minimise expenses. They'll do anything to protect the status quo — they've used the tragedy of the commons to manufacture dangerous chemicals on an industrial scale for decades, and banning them now would impact entire industries and product segments; probably to the tune of tens or hundreds of billions.
No multinational corporation is ever going to voluntarily support a change that will kill its profits.
The problem is that the industry has already made replacements and the replacements were bad too. Gen X was a replacement for PFOS and PFOA, all 3 are PFAS compounds. Either we have to completely abstain, greatly limit usage, find a magic way to treat it, or replace it. Odds are whatever wonder replacement we invent will be found to be the next super bad thing in 20 years.
Sooo, as a counterpoint lets say we needed to replace "water" with something else for human consumption.
What do you imagine the cost and probability of success for that would look like?
I'm not saying it's the same here - but people seem to think that "scientists" can just magic-up new chemicals for everything.
We can exist without forever chemicals and have, we cannot exist and have not ever existed without water.
Lemme pose another extreme then. If water killed people after drinking it for 20 years would you just say we can't replace it and accept that reality? Or would you at least make a strong effort to replace it?
"Forever chemicals" arent water. We have survived without it. It is currently just really inconvenient to do so again given what these substances are used for. I am a chemist. We have replaced things before and were almost certainly going to do it again. Companies just have to give a shit enough to make use of our inginuity to do so. But unfortunately they dont care unless they have a legal gun to their head so here we are
I'm not saying it's the same here
"I'm not saying the example I just used in this situation is an example that should ever be used in this situation."
And if scientists can't "magic" new chemicals, I wonder how they came up with the ones addressed in this article? Besides, isn't capitalism supposed to "drive innovation" and all that? Amazing how that suddenly goes right out the window the minute anyone questions the status quo or, god forbid, the profit that comes from destroying the earth and the people on it.
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.
Who would have a problem with us returning to an average lifespan of 40 years?
Yeah, me I do, which is why I want to get rid of these forever chemicals because that's how we're going to end up with 40 year lifespans again.
We aren't getting rid of our nutritious diets and vaccines which are the two biggest factors in history that have extended average lifespans. Not Teflon pans and firefighting materials.
My comment was about how if elimination of these materials is impossible, then we should figure out how best to reduce their usage in an acceptable manner.
Jumping straight to black-and-white "So you'd send us back to the dark ages?!?!?!" type of response is kinda wild.
not the people insisting on the chemicals, clearly.
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.
My favorite was white phosphorus, which caused Phossy Jaw in the employees making the matches. Switching to red phosphorus would mean a 1% increase in cost or reduction in profits (wasn't sure which based on the article). Doing so would mean your employees' bones wouldn't dissolve. It took regulation to force them to switch.
Then there's the Radium Girls.
Asbestos is genuinely a wonderful material. It's heat-proof, it's a wonderful insulator, it's one of the best filters for gas masks, it's wonderful for use in brake pads and clutches, etc.
It's just a damn shame it causes cancer in living things.
No country claiming to be communist has banned asbestos btw
And yet somehow we survived thousands of Years without them.
Also back then, we didn't have massive populations. Most of the world struggled to survive. Finding food was a all-day activity. Should we go back to that?
Without the haber process modern civilization could not be sustained. We cannot go back without massive population losses. Dunno about you but I'm not picking which of my friends and family aren't important.
So, but we don't need cancerous materials to do so. If you missed it, that was the point
What a wonderfully unrelated to my post comment you've made. Since you are so kind as to make up what you want to argue against, perhaps you won't mind making up the response so those of us on topic can get on with discussing that topic.
I am so not understanding all the comments on this post that are literally defending their right to be given cancer by large corporations.
Wtf are the responses to this comment? "No, I like being poisoned for profit!" Jfc.
We also survived thousands of years without any of the creature comforts our society has taken for granted. Unfortunately, all the scientific advances we've achieved for the betterment of mankind involved these forever chemicals in one way or another.
I'm not saying they're not terrible, but at least some of the voices against these restrictions aren't in bad faith. It just speaks to the importance of finding alternatives, and we have to accept the fact that some things might not be replaceable with biodegradable solutions.
I thought we were banning forever chemicals in manufacturing, not science.
These chemicals made the creature comforts cheaper, not the creature comforts you wish to claim require 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.
One of their uses is in firefighting chemical fires.
When an electric car is on fire, you need PFAS to stop the lithium fire. Water just can't stop it.
Of course, before batteries we used gasoline.
I imagine their might be more of these cases where modern technology relies on unsustainable practices.
Another factor that makes lithium-ion battery fires challenging to handle is oxygen generation. When the metal oxides in a battery’s cathode, or positively charged electrode, are heated, they decompose and release oxygen gas. Fires need oxygen to burn, so a battery that can create oxygen can sustain a fire.
Because of the electrolyte’s nature, a 20% increase in a lithium-ion battery’s temperature causes some unwanted chemical reactions to occur much faster, which releases excessive heat. This excess heat increases the battery temperature, which in turn speeds up the reactions. The increased battery temperature increases the reaction rate, creating a process called thermal runaway. When this happens, the temperature in a battery can rise from 212 F (100 C) to 1,800 F (1000 C) in a second.
Sand. You use sand.
The big one is airplane fires, AFFF is the best foam for putting out a jet fuel fire.
If that means we'll have to forfeit the use of, for example computer systems, or some actually vital modern infrastructure - I don't think we'll agree to the ban.
On the other hand if their use is unavoidable, for any valid reason - there should be sufficient effort in recycling them...
recycling, containment, disposal… i’m pretty sure forever chemicals aren’t actually forever: put enough energy into them and we can probably make them no longer forever chemicals… it’s only a problem because we don’t contain and process them
Use your brain for once and realise that there weren't modern electronics in the 1940s, and without these compounds, we couldn't have useful computer systems now.
Yes ideally they should just stop. However, there are things that have changed since the 1940s.
A lot of technology is based on plastics being available and will require a complete redesign to work without it.
Also ordinary stuff f.i. rain jackets, cookware and cleaning products. All of these could be replaced with whatever people used beforehand, but one reason why plastics has been used so widely is because it's a cheap biproduct that could replace more expensive and more energy intensive productions. F.i. imagine if we had to replace all hard plastic casing with ceramics, glass or steel. That would require a lot of furnaces to run on coal. Multiply this with the increased population since the 1940s and it might very well just cause a different environmental disaster.
Cast iron pans work great, you can even use them on your induction stove and they heat way better than any expensive non-stick. Waxed canvas is also excellent at waterproofing. We do have solutions already for many things. Your plastic argument as well. The types of plastics the complaint is about is for specific products, not all of them. I work in manufacturing and the availability of safe materials are plentiful as science keeps looking for new ways. People just have to stop buying new things to throw perfectly good and usable ones in the garbage. It would go a long way.
furnaces to run on coal
If only there was a way of avoiding coal furnaces! I have this freaky idea from this sparky rock I found. It might be related to those times when the sky gets angry and makes loud bangs and flashes.
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.
Often, the replacement will just be a derivative that isn't necessarily better. The narrative that will then go out through the media is: "We're no longer using this evil thing. Full stop." The replacement ends up just being something similar with similar problems. People stop paying attention because they assume the problem is solved, when it really isn't.
Example: there was that whole BPA plastic stink years back, now most bottles and food containers are "BPA Free"...but if you look into the chemical they used to replace BPA, it has the same synthetic estrogen problem BPA did. (Arbitrarily searched source: https://www.plasticstoday.com/study-says-bpa-free-plastics-still-show-estrogenic-activity )
In the case of replacement for water bottle or food container plastics, the best answer is to just not using them anymore, although glass and metal have their own difficulties, namely fragility and weight.
Enough countries use glass instead of plastic containers that I'm sure it isn't nearly as difficult as they'd make us think
I remember the horrible transition period of the terrible "energy saving" lightbulbs back when EU banned incandescent bulbs. Expensive, took minutes to warm up, had terrible colour rendition, filled with mercury and saved barely any energy. It felt like such a moronic decision.
Now with over 50 LED bulbs all using like a tenth of the energy they used to with lifespans so long I can't even remember when I last had to replace one, it feels totally worth it. Sometimes someone has to make you suffer before it gets better.
Though with chemicals in contact with food, hopefully they take it just a bit slower to make sure they are safe first.
Led was obviously on the horizon when those bans were passed, it was bad legislation to ban at that point when fluorescent was the only real option.
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).
Exactly what I thought as soon as i read the title: "These chemicals can't be replaced" "But did you look for substitues?" "Well.. no."
All it took to find a replacement for CFCs was to ban and discontinue them.
Remember your high school chemistry class? What do you think they are going to use instead of fluorine? The thing that makes these compounds useful is exactly the thing that makes them "forever."
Remember your high school chemistry class
Yes I do. I also remember my college chemistry classes. And my work in an industry R&D lab evaluating potential replacements for a fluorinated compound.
What do you think they are going to use instead of fluorine?
Something that's not as good, but good enough. See leaded vs unleaded gasoline for a historical example of industry reacting to regulation. It'll of course take time and money, and there may be limited use cases where there aren't any conceivable replacements, but in a lot of cases these compounds are used as a catch-all because they work so well.
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.
The situation is much more nuanced than that. PFAS chemicals are in (almost literally) everything. Your nonslip shoes, your water proof jacket, your stain resistant table cloth, and your fire retardant mattress. On top of that the list of PFAS chemicals that the EPA is looking at is around 70 compounds long and only scratches the surface of all the compounds. The test to detect PFAS is in its 4th draft and can't reliably detect low enough to reach the levels of concern, except in nearly pristine waters, so you can't even detect if you have it in most water. The levels of concern that are being discussed are in the single digit PPT for individual compounds or 70 PPT total PFAS for some health advisory levels. Detection levels on normal waste water are generally somewhere between 50 and 4000 because the test is so sensitive other compounds fry the machine and it has to be diluted.
Another problem is that the thresholds are so low that it's hard to draw any conclusions definitively. It's associated with so many things you could write a novel: altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, cancer, decreased birth weight for infants, infertility, and more. The thing is that the only way to make a more conclusive connection is observing high exposure areas where people were drinking it at thousand times higher than the risk levels, so interpolating down smaller values has a lot of theoretical connections, but few smoking guns.
In general industries are trying to move away from PFAS, but the areas where they can't include things like AFFF foam used for fighting jet fires. Some areas, particularly the military, are unlikely to make concessions as they want the best option available even if a close substitute is available. Your average PFAS using company; however, is moving away from PFAS in general.
EDIT: also the quantity of PFAS in most items is so small that it actually is below the threshold on an SDS for requiring it be reported, so trying to find out if a product you use has PFAS means you have to call the manufacturer. Maybe they can tell you, maybe they don't want to tell you, or maybe they don't know because it's not listed on the SDS for the raw ingredients they use. In the industry it's gotten into a near legal situation where companies are telling their suppliers and vendors to look for PFAS and certify that their products don't have it, only for the vendor to turn around and do the same for their vendors and suppliers. The portion at the end of the article captures this well, an example would be, "Well we don't use PFAS, but our machine has gaskets which probably have PFAS. This doesn't touch the final product so are we able to use it?"
PFAS chemicals are in (almost literally) everything.
Yes, this is more or less the circumstance we arrive at when the burden of proof for consumer safety is on injured parties to prove the particular thing unsafe, or its use negligent after the fact, in courts against often powerful corporations with lots of money to spend defending themselves, as opposed to the burden being on would-be sellers to prove its use safe and environmentally responsible before bringing it to market.
I appreciate your post, it really is informative, and it explains how problematic it will be to connect injured parties with the people that harmed them, how now that some people depend on those things and will accept no substitute and will continue emitting more of it into the environment, that the rules as they are don't provide real remedy or solutions for problems that were perfectly legal to create and everyone involved did nothing wrong.
That right there, really, prompts the question- would we really be that much worse off if we had consumer safety rules that put the burden of proving a product or technology's safety and sustainability on the seller, or on some sort of product safety testing system?
If that were to mean industrial chemicals had to undergo trials or studies in the way that pharmaceuticals do, sure there probably would be fewer new things. OTOH if there had to be even the most-rudimentary plan for the lifecycle of a product up front, maybe we wouldn't have millions of tons of discarded plastics or forever chemicals in the environment that everyone knows there's no money to clean up (because our system protects those that profit by externalizing costs).
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.
Yes, if you want technological regression.
Yes, if you want technological regression.
You know, when I learned about the problems associated with non-stick cookware, I stopped buying that shit and replaced mine with cast iron, steel, and ceramic-coated cast iron. That might be regression in someone's book but really the cookware I'm using now isn't going to wear out in a couple of years, these things will last the better part of forever- and keeping them seasoned is not difficult once you know how to do it.
I also don't miss the lead in gas or paint, the asbestos in construction material, industrial coolants based on CFCs, or DDT-based insecticides, or thalidomide-based anti-emetics.
What would that be, exactly?
Because from where I'm sitting it mostly looks like we'd end up paying a little more for things, having things that might stick a little more, that sort of thing.
Between that and having pfas in my body, I'll go for being slightly inconvenienced
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.
No, everyone on the planet will be suffering, because PFAS are vital for the manufacturing of integrated circuits, without them, we wouldn't have computers, and by extension, all the products the latter made possible.
Quiz question : when electric vehicle catches on fire what do you use to put the fire out?
Hint : you can't use water
Smother it with the corpses of billionaires
Sand. You use sand.
Nor anything else as the fire creates its own oxygen and thus must be allowed to burn itself out.
You put it in a box and set that box on fire. You have to fight fire with fire.
Use the idiot who's driving it sleeping in the driver's seat.