PFAS are known as "forever chemicals" because they do not break down in nature. They are also quite bad for most animals, including of course humans.
The 3M plant has been illegally dumping significant amounts of PFAS in the environment, both in the air and by dumping it in a river.
During a test, over 90% of the 800ish people living within a 2-mile radius of the plant had amounts of PFAS in their body exceeding safe limits, with 60% reaching levels which could have health effects.
An area of about 3 square mile around the plant is contaminated significantly enough that 3M has been made liable for sanitation.
The government has of course ordered 3M to cease dumping PFAS, which I guess is the reason they are now cutting output. The story is made even more complicated because it's happening a few miles upstream from the Belgium - The Netherlands border so it is cross-border pollution - and The Netherlands is currently working to turn some land near the border into a wetlands nature reserve.
It's been one of the dominant news items in Flanders for the past year, to the extent that I'm surprised I haven't seen it mentioned in the English-speaking media until now. Entire towns have been placed under emergency health orders: don't eat the garden vegetables or chicken eggs, don't even drink the well water. For a long time after the contamination was discovered, 3M was denying responsibility, saying it wasn't coming from their factory, and thus they wouldn't pay for remediation, even when it was totally obvious.
There is some news about it but it tends to be pretty local. The US is gigantic. Where I live there is tons of PFAS in the ground from air force fire fighting practice at a nearby airport. In the past few years its only recently got attention after being detected in ground water samples.
"It's not us", "we have no idea", "our tests show we're clean" works for a shockingly long time in modern Western societies - the government has to prove that it is indeed 3M or whoever else who causes the pollution, and government agencies usually tend to take time until an investigation is complete. And even then, offenders can file a lawsuit... and until that lawsuit is finished and unappealable, it can take many years if not decades. And during that time, everyone claiming that a specific company is an offender is under severe risk of a defamation lawsuit.
We definitely need reforms both in staffing of regulatory agencies as well as in defamation lawsuits in cases of environment or labor offenses.
The companies can also try to do creative things through bankruptcy courts to avoid any negative consequences, like Johnson & Johnson is doing right now:
> J&J, which also makes products such as Tylenol and Band-Aid, assigned legal liability for the complaints to the spinoff company, which immediately filed for bankruptcy — a maneuver dubbed the "Texas two-step."
FWIW this is the exact kind of thing that the plebs are told that bankruptcy courts will see right through - as an individual you have to be very worried about "piecing the corporate veil" of an LLC or corporation, to the extent that setting up an LLC doesn't actually make sense for many business activities. Yet a large company can pay enough lawyers and buy a corrupt Texas law to openly abuse the dynamic with impunity. It's bad enough that large entities can set up such fine-grained liability shields a priori while common individuals effectively cannot, but allowing them to be created a posteri is a slap in the face.
(This is an American perspective, but) I wonder how much a punitive strict liability regime could help with such stonewalling. Say after an environmental problem is discovered and publicized, the clock starts ticking on a hefty amount of penalty per day (irrespective of remediation costs and other tortious damages) for whomever is eventually found responsible for causing it. So the strategy of deny deny deny would end up accruing a very large penalty for willful pollution that could have been stopped earlier if the offender had chosen to act in good faith.
They are in an industrial park in the outskirts of Antwerp, the second-largest port in Europe. There was a chance it could have come from someone else. But theirs was the factory specifically making the stuff in bulk, so the chance it wasn't them was very, very small.
Lawyers did their jobs and sought alternative explanation where possible, exhausting the explanations until it wasn't reasonable or plausible. 3M is a huge corporation, and corporations run on algorithms coded as laws, regulations, and company rules, which are executed by employees.
It's not surprising or even noteworthy for 3M to deny culpability until they can't. Not that it's good or right or ethical, but corporations are rule based non human entities that shouldn't be viewed as equivalent to or extensions of humans. They often behave inhumanely and despicably because the rules allow them to do so. That's a failure of the rules and system in which they operate. Bad actors, like the Sackler family, can direct a corporation down a legitimately evil path, but usually the negative externalities aren't the fault of companies.
If 3M takes responsibility and cleans it up, or puts resources into figuring out how, I would see that as a good thing. If they shuffle things around, draw out the resolution, screw people over, then they'd be joining Nestlé and their ilk.
We need better corporate models and incentives. "What we can get away with" is not a great lower limit on behavior, but since it's what we have, we should assume that and account for it when regulating business.
> corporations are rule based non human entities that shouldn't be viewed as equivalent to or extensions of humans.
Thanks for this phrasing. Any books, essays or videos that you would recommend on this perspective? How about the Citizens United ruling in the U.S.?
> We need better corporate models and incentives. "What we can get away with" is not a great lower limit on behavior, but since it's what we have, we should assume that and account for it when regulating business.
What are some best practices or successful case studies for this approach? Could smart contracts and DAOs be regulated?
They already are: contracts and companies have legal definitions and processes. If you shoehorn a blockchain in the middle it doesn't change that.
The law generally doesn't get involved in informal agreements, like smart contracts and DAOs usually are, but then you don't get much recourse if you get screwed over (unless it's outright fraudulent or otherwise illegal). Which, a lot of the time is the point of making it a DAO only and not having any actual legal entity.
There are also lots of cases where blatantly illegal activity is gotten away with right out in the open because law enforcement don't even know to look, or how to look. Ponzi schemes, pump and dump shitcoins, fake bids on nfts, and so on. We don't need new laws, we need educated enforcement. If I steal a million dollar painting, a million dollar lottery ticket, a million dollars cash, or a million dollars in bitcoin, the laws are there to protect the victim and require repayment and jail time and so on.
NFTs have some particularly egregious examples of scams and schemes by A-list famous people, and nothing gets done because everyone involved in the transactions are frothing at the mouth crazy over "web 3, omg."
As far as smart contracts go, basic control logic has to be built and a library of modules made available and a system cultivated by which users and developers can test and validate everything. Reversible transactions and failsafe mechanisms have to be the foundation of any investment so that when errors inevitably occur, someone in charge can unfuck things. A board of directors could be given individual keys in a multi-signature scheme, or so on.
Once or twice a month we're seeing crypto thefts in the 7+ figures and it's always because of obscure flaws in the code that could be avoided by developing on tested, verifiable, and validated code. That means a level of rigor only currently seen in international banking, nasa missions, and so on.
The big problem with crypto investing right now is "I wrote this smart contract last weekend at a hackathon, let's invest millions of dollars!"
Decentralization doesn't mean everything has to or should be decentralized - sometimes its enough that the overarching system is not under the thumb of an arbitrary authority. Centralized entities within the bitcoin or ethereun ecosystem will be the first crypto banks and exchanges, and you'll eventually be able to code legal requirements directly into contracts (and vice versa, once the ruling class starts to include people educated in cryptocurrency.)
Right, but all of this is orthogonal to the law. If you want a company that's run using a DAO, you can have one. If your smart contract doesn't contain stipulations disallowed in contact law, you can use it. Stealing and fraud is always illegal, regardless of the vehicle used, and still applies even if there isn't a legal contract. Sure, the police don't know enough to do a good job, but that doesn't make hacking and theft legal, just likelier to be gotten away with then a bank robbery.
Of course, few people actually use crypto as an adjunct to legal system: some specifically don't want the legal processes (and protections) to kick in, and some just want to have used pure crypto for it's own sake even when a existing systems would have sufficed.
They ask the government to prove that it's all because of them, and nobody but them.
Then challenge and obstruct every step of that process.
We don't have magical Stark Trek tricorders, which beep when you stand next to the poisoned river, and beep louder when you point them at the PFAS factory. We have tests that take time to run, that can infer facts about the world - but we need to justify performing them, and then need to reason and argue that their results mean what they mean.
This is really irrelevant and not helpful to the discussion. You are also ignoring the fact that there are totally possible natural sources for a virus like this while there are no possible natural sources of PFAS chemicals.
Link to proof of… any of this? I searched around (not just in English language sites) and all I could find was some news reports from November of 2021 that a study was being conducted. Link to the town health orders?
>Only now have measures been taken, as people living within a radius of 15km from Zwijndrecht being advised not to consume eggs laid in their own or anyone’s else’s gardens, whilst pregnant women and children also have to watch out for vegetables from one’s own garden.[0]
This may not be the story the parent poster is referring to but here's an area near me under similar circumstances. As far as I'm aware of, this has happened in other places in the country. I've heard of similar contamination near military bases in Hawaii and also in Okinawa Japan.
Edit: I just realized the question was about a different comment. Leaving this here because I still think it's somewhat relevant and interesting. Apologies.
I recommend the film "Dark Waters" starring Mark Ruffalo. A true-story dramatisation of a similar case in the US involving DuPont and PFOAs used in the manufacture of Teflon:
3M did the same thing with PFOS (a related forever chemical) on the St. Croix and Mississippi rivers by Minneapolis/St. Paul in Minnesota. Just as the mercury levels were finally low enough to eat the fish the 3M PFOS started piling up and we're back to no fish meals. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2021/11/08/minn-lakes-with-for...
Every house in my area has reverse osmosis water treatment, since you can't filter out PFAS. Renters are less lucky and have to install their own system, if they can even afford it. Everyone who uses the river as the primary water source is in the same boat, and the company upstream keeps dumping it in the river.
You can filter it from food... But you can't filter PFAS from potatoes, orange juice, and other foodstuffs.
For most people, that makes filtering only marginally effective. There will always be parts of your diet from a farm within a few miles of a building where they tested a PFAS fire extinguisher.
Same here in my area. For what its worth one can buy a portable RO system. I found one on Amazon that is decent. I first run my well water through a Britta filter to take most of the sediment and calcium out or the SimPure RO plugs up within 15 gallons. The house has no filter yet The Britta filters last for about 20 gallons each on my water. This allows my RO filters to work for about 300 gallons.
My long term plan is to rip the giant pressure tank out of the underground well room and put in stainless steel tanks and many fine filters, charcoal, UV, etc... and one drill pump and small pressure tank per house so that I have reserve water when the underground pump fails and a way to fill the reserve tanks from a truck.
PFAS is the broadest subset of materials that contain a F-C bond and this includes teflon pan coatings, high-temperature o-rings (all vehicles/industrial equipment), fire-fighting materials for explosive environments (fertilizer, pyro, weapons, storage, etc.), and in this example, solvents that allow the semiconductor industry to function (because the periodic table has no replacement for the properties of a F-C bond).
We know about the bioaccumulation effects because of new sensor technologies, and we are also only now learning how to break the F-C bond effectively for remediation (i.e. nothing is truly ‘forever’): https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181002082417.h...
(I.e. “PFAS are known as "forever chemicals" because they do not break down in nature.” might better be stated that they do not break down quickly in nature; forever chemicals is technically a misnomer).
tl;dr humanity is in the slow learning process of how to best deal with new materials technology.
I find this topic analogous to the topic of ‘nuclear’ which has oscillated between ‘this will solve everything’ to ‘it’s all bad’ in the last century (and is now slowly changing as society is educated and can understand a bit more nuance).
No, PFAS is not like Nuclear. The biggest problem with Nuclear are explosions with extreme risks. PFAS had lead in the past to birth defects - even during "normal" plant operation
That said, until shit had been hitting the fan a lot of facts about PFAS had been kept in secrecy with active manipulation going on. Even today there isn't much authorative and practical information available.
Also the practical benefit of Teflon pans over say Emaille or iron pans is more than questionable. Are professional cooks really using Teflon pans?
> solvents that allow the semiconductor industry to function (because the periodic table has no replacement for the properties of a F-C bond).
A lot (most?) of the usage of these in semiconductors is not as solvents--they are thermal transfer fluids being used like refrigerants. This usage of them is for keeping equipment at exactly some specific temperature. As such, the usage is mostly closed-cycle.
One of the reasons for using these is that they replaced earlier chemicals that were chlorofluorocarbons--a Cl-C bond destroys ozone when it gets loose while an F-C bond simply doesn't come apart.
While the end chemicals tend to be incredibly stable, the byproducts of manufacturing--not so much.
> The story is made even more complicated because it's happening a few miles upstream from the Belgium - The Netherlands border so it is cross-border pollution - and The Netherlands is currently working to turn some land near the border into a wetlands nature reserve.
The EU should start a program to get their nations to put national parks on their borders. This would be generally nice, and also it would improve unity by preventing this sort of thing. Plus, if the EU ever broke up and European countries returned to their combative roots, it would set the stage for some nice woodland battles to break up the monotony (ok the last one might not be a serious reason).
The problem here is that when a corporation like 3M sets up a chemical production system, they want to control costs, and dealing with the pollution stream is a cost they don't want to absorb. Now, ideally they'd run a 'green' process which in practice really means a zero-waste process. If you're producing one molecule of toxic waste for every molecule of desirable product, that's not a green process. Sometimes that's unavoidable with current technology, however.
The thing is, there's always a solution available to the waste problem that doesn't involve dumping the gunk into the water, air and soil. Those solutions are typically expensive, i.e. you have to build a whole backend processing plant to deal with the waste. I'd guess high-intensity UV can be used to break strong C-F bonds, for example.
The article states 3M (an ex-employer of mine incidentally, though in a completely unrelated area) will now do this:
> "We have also put in place new controls in Zwijndrecht, including technology to control air emissions, and capture, dispose, and treat PFAS in water. These investments, along with appropriate collaboration with the relevant authorities, help us bring idled processes back online enabling European production of essential products for our customers around the world."
What's ridiculous is that flourinated hydrocarbon waste has been a known serious pollution issue for decades, and yet chemical manufacturers have been allowed to keep dumping without being forced to build such back-end processing plants to deal with it.
And sometimes even when they are banned from doing it they still do it and just hide it in barrels they dump in the port of Los Angeles that they hope just sink to the sea floor and never leak.
When IBM and others did this in the past, the decision basically outsourced the environmental pain to other countries, because those chemicals were going to be made by someone somewhere.
A more advanced discussion on the topic might be along the lines of:
“if we know that this material will be produced somewhere in the world, is it not best to put our brightest minds on how to most effectively deal with the waste stream? The added costs of mitigation should equal additional tariffs on the same product in countries that ignore environmental impact.”
This is one of the observed failures of globalization: the government incentivized manufacturing to make other places suffer forgetting that we all share the same planets, and that the wealthy/educated countries should be leading the way on how to ‘best’ manufacture and deal with waste streams.
A ... or perhaps the central idea of free trade is that we can all be better off and get the most out of our effort by producing the most of a thing in a region that has conditions best suited to produce that thing efficiently. Makes sense, some places have lots of mineral resources, some places are great for grazing cattle, some places specialize and have a lot of expertise in producing textiles or.. whatever else.
These days though a big driver for the cost savings of globalized products are things like lax environmental regulations or ability to mistreat and exploit workforces.
Well, that's the reason why the West doesn't have much silicon or other environmentally damaging production any more - even leaving the obvious question of labor cost and employee rights aside, environmental compliance is expensive. The Silicon Valley as a whole is at the sad top of the Superfund sites count [1] for a reason.
That's not entirely accurate. Chemical industry is still huge in the West (BASF - currently the largest chemical company in the world - for example has the largest contained chemical production site in the world in Ludwigshafen; with smaller sites in Antwerpen and some in the US). The two largest high-purity silicon producers produce their product in the US (REC) and Germany (Wacker). There are still many trailing-node semiconductor fabs left (Global Foundries, ST, NXP, TI, etc.).
It's cute how they focus on the tiny town of Zwijndrecht, but conveniently forget to mention the large (by Belgian standards) city of Antwerp, which is within spitting distance from the plant, and which sits by the river in which 3M dumps its waste. Political shenanigans have prevented widespread testing of people and soil in Antwerp, but the results are pretty much guaranteed to be bad.
This is akin to writing about pollution in Union City, while conveniently forgetting to mention that NYC is on the other side of the river.
This is really good, but may turn out to be a waste of time if nothing is done to reign in the fast food industry, which puts PFAS in food wrappers at a level approaching 1 part per thousand (876 ppm in the article):
In 2020 (yes, not sooner), the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) announced regulations for testing for PFAS in driking water, forcing towns to start testing for PFAS. It turns out, it was there for year, and people were drinking it unknowingly.
https://www.sierraclub.org/massachusetts/pfas-mass-water-par...
I wonder how 3D printers factor in. For example, Bowden tube, feeding the plastic filament, is made entirely of PTFE. There's often PTFE liner in the print head itself.
PTFE can give off harmful fumes if overheated so if you wanted to be careful you might consider printer setups that keep the tubes away from their overheating temperature (i.e. inside the printhead can be a concern, bowden tubes not so much)
PTFE landfilled though is as far as I know pretty inert. The manufacturing process involves chemistry which is harmful if not properly done, but the finished product not so much unless burned.
Production has been shut down. The article says "The materials supplier halted production of PFAS at a plant near the Belgian village of Zwijndrecht on Mar. 8."
These chemicals are incredibly potent endocrine disruptors. So much so that new measurement methods were needed to quantify the tiny parts-per-trillion level of health hazard.
This article is vague about which per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) were made at the Zwijndrecht factory. After some digging, I believe it's chemicals in 3M's Novec and Fluorinert product lines:
Here's what 3M says about Fluorinert for semiconductor manufacturing:
Semiconductor manufacturing requires precision. Very small temperature variations may have big impact on yield. Compared to aqueous coolants like deionized water, Fluorinert electronic liquids offer wider operating temperatures, require less maintenance and will not damage electronic equipment or wafers if a leak occurs.
These products offered lower environmental and health hazards on the then-known dimensions of risk when they were introduced to the market. But the risk assessment has changed as the chronic endocrine disrupting effects of these chemicals (and/or their manufacturing byproducts) has become better understood and regulated. In the long term I don't know whether semiconductor manufacturing processes will substitute deionized water for Fluorinert (with the downsides mentioned above, but zero environmental/health risk) or if Fluorinert use will continue with heightened emphasis on preventing releases into the environment. Semiconductor manufacturing already uses some very toxic materials like hydrofluoric acid and phosphine, but with correspondingly stringent guards against worker exposure.
somewhat (un)related, is there any particularly interesting alternative to cast iron and ceramic as alternative to non stick pans that isn't a new kind of chemical where we don't know if it is as toxic as Teflon?
I don't have much experience with ceramic, but most people that dislike cast iron are using it wrong:
1) put all non cast iron frying pans, skillets, etc in storage, and make the cast iron the default (so the cast iron is used at least every few months and the patina is maintained over time).
2) put a small amount of oil in the pan each time you cook (unless the food is fatty, like ground beef)
3) to clean, scrape with a small rectangular plastic scraper (such as the brown one pampered chef makes for $3), and finish with a stainless steel pot scrubber. Do not use soap. Use hot water and dry immediately (perhaps by heating it briefly on the range and storing it there). Optionally recoat with oil once dry. This should be easier than maintaining Teflon, or you are doing something wrong. Look for more advice.
If you've ruined the seasoning already (or got a "ruined" one for free, hint, hint,...), give it a thorough cleaning, coat in a very thin layer of cheap oil (canola/vegetable is fine, exotic oils often have exotic problems, like flaking) and bake for a few hours at 20-50 degrees below the smoke point of the oil you chose.
When cooking, the first step should always be to start preheating the cast iron.
If you still really dislike cast iron, consider stainless, optionally with a copper core. You might want a stainless sauce pan anyway, since simmering tomatos in cast iron strips the seasoning over time.
Stainless is harder to clean, but is otherwise fine. Make sure the stainless is induction compatible, since a mid-priced stainless set will outlive you (be sure to get metal handles with solid rivets). Induction is the future, and you don't want to toss the set in a few decades.
Using modern dish soap on cast iron is entirely fine, the detergents used are much softer than the sorts of lye-based soap that this advice stems from, and will not remove the baked-on (polymerized) seasoning. (It will slightly slow down the rate of seasoning accumulation by removing the thin layer of unpolymerized oil, but this can be fixed by just wiping on a thin coat of oil after washing and drying the pan. I usually don't even bother doing that much though.)
In general I think that most guidance for using cast iron is overly cautious and makes it sound like more of a hassle than it needs to be. At the end of the day it's a large hunk of metal, and there's very little you can do in the kitchen that will permanently mess it up.
edit: One piece of advice I do have: don't use a plastic spatula, they're a suboptimal choice people are forced into by easily-damaged cookware. Since that's not a concern with cast iron, you should get a thin metal spatula (example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0015R7P6O). The tip will always be exceedingly thin and never deform/melt/get torn up like a plastic spatula, and as a bonus it doubles as a very effective scraper for easy cleanup.
Agreed. Metal spatulas are great. I've found that dawn is a sufficiently good degreaser to force me to reseason every few years. That's not acceptable to me. (Yes, I'm that lazy.) Plus, the Dawn doesn't really help vs. the pot scrubber.
It's also very easy to re-season a cast iron pan if you do happen to screw it up somehow (and like you said, it's difficult to really screw it up in the first place). Oil the pan and stick it in the oven on 450 for a few hours. Re-patina'd!
PFAS are known as "forever chemicals" because they do not break down in nature. They are also quite bad for most animals, including of course humans. The 3M plant has been illegally dumping significant amounts of PFAS in the environment, both in the air and by dumping it in a river.
During a test, over 90% of the 800ish people living within a 2-mile radius of the plant had amounts of PFAS in their body exceeding safe limits, with 60% reaching levels which could have health effects. An area of about 3 square mile around the plant is contaminated significantly enough that 3M has been made liable for sanitation.
The government has of course ordered 3M to cease dumping PFAS, which I guess is the reason they are now cutting output. The story is made even more complicated because it's happening a few miles upstream from the Belgium - The Netherlands border so it is cross-border pollution - and The Netherlands is currently working to turn some land near the border into a wetlands nature reserve.