Banning substances one after another has proven to be quite useless or even damaging approach. Another, less studied and potentially worse chemical compound will always substitute the banned ones. It’s an endless game of whack a mole to keep banning a substance for next random one to spawn.
More correct approach might be that if you want to use a chemical in food packaging or children’s equipment, you must first do long-term studies that prove its relative safety to other studied compounds. In time the world would start accumulating safer products. I won’t hold my breath though.
There was a time--not too long ago actually--when the standards were waxed paper, parchment paper, and glass. Paper being biodegradable, glass being highly inert, and neither causing as much ecological devastation or endocrine disruption as plastic.
So technically speaking, it's a solved problem. But from a market perspective, for the people who eat the glyphosate-dusted insulin resistance that's wrapped inside the plastic, i'm willing to bet the pseudoestrogens are the least of their worries.
Personally speaking, I would prefer to use a little more fuel, and "waste" a little more food, if that meant having fewer microplastics circulating in my blood stream.
After all, if they're in my bloodstream, they're probably everywhere, and if we happen to discover anything more harmful about that than endocrine disruption, good luck pulling all of that plastic back out of the environment.
Glass uses very little energy, creates very little waste, when it is re-collected & washed--a common practice as recently as the early 1980s.
I quote the word "waste" because I remember how things were. In the glass & paper days, we didn't waste nearly as much food as people do today. No one did. The fast food / fast casual dining experiences--which have popped up everywhere--are monuments of food waste. If you don't believe me, ask any of the employees how much food they throw away on a daily basis.
You are arguing that the weight difference between the containers (not the contents, which usually--rationally!--far outweigh their container) is going to wear more rubber off the tires and into the environment than the truckload of plastic containers themselves. That is ridiculous.
It’s a fun calculation, glass is more than an order of magnitude heavier, multiply that by the $200B food packaging industry and you get some big numbers :)
When those materials were the standard we also didn't have a lot of the medical and technological equipment today that arguably reduced both mortality and morbidity across large swaths of a much, much larger population. Plastics are used widely in electronics and all of the accompanying tech improvements too it isn't just simple as packaging, so it isn't a "solved problem" if you want to go back to those materials and replace everything plastic has become standard for in today's technologies.
> the largest gain in life expectancy occurred between 1880 and 1920 due to public health improvements such as control of infectious diseases, more abundant and safer foods, cleaner water, and other nonmedical social improvements
The plastics, which might as well be considered solidified gasoline, are also a tremendous hazard in home furnishings[0]. The flame-retardants slow the burn a little, but still highly combustible compared to traditional materials. The science is pointing the finger at the same flame retardants for raising cancer rates among firefighters around 10% higher than the general population[1,2].
Same plan we use for drugs. Test if it's safe, if it's safe we allow it's use, if not we don't.
Initially it will probably need to grandfather stuff in but having a whitelist will make it easier to ensure unsafe things aren't replaced by even worse things.
The problem is you can't practically do that for many compounds either because of ethical reasons or because it would take far too long and would in the mean time impede progress significantly.
Take plastics for example, they're as acutely non-toxic as you can get you're not having any readily measurable adverse health outcomes from handling it, touching it, and even consuming foods directly in contact with it. And yet there are still things we would have missed even if we adopted this whitelisting approach. We would have never captured the problem of microplastics that we see today, the mechanical and chemical breakdown of plastics in the environment leading to far higher consumption and presence of it in our bodies could not have realistically been studied or predicted even if we took a whitelisting approach.
Now you have to consider what the effects of whitelisting everything would mean for productivity and progress. Imagine how much more everyday things would cost if plastics had to be whitelisted before being allowed in any products. Even now knowing about the existence of microplastics, it isn't clear that the effects they have decisively outweigh the benefits of plastics.
First of all I am mostly talking about plastics in the context of food packaging.
I would be more inclined to agree with your argument regarding progress/innovation if there were more novel plastics coming to the market for food packaging but that isn't really the case and there hasn't been anything ground-breaking since PET.
Whitelisting at this stage of maturity isn't just the right thing to do, it's also easy and beats playing whackamole if you decide something needs to get phased out.
>I would be more inclined to agree with your argument regarding progress/innovation if there were more novel plastics coming to the market for food packaging but that isn't really the case and there hasn't been anything ground-breaking since PET.
disagree. there are new plastics constantly , and using bio-degradable plastics in packaging is getting a huge push within the industry for the past few years.
One example would be bovine-gelatin-films which are a new replacement for 'saran-wrap' style wrapping plastics.
a push for biodegradable plastics has been active since the U.N. listed it as a goal.
one imagines it would be hard to fully vet every proposed idea, there are thousands. Time will tell which will be human-kind.
Bovine gelatin is made from the animal’s brain tissues and it was a major transmission vector in the UK CJD disaster. At least that was the story then, apparently the truth is not so.
First, do the mother of all grandfathers. Start with a very big list of allowed things, so that every product currently on the shelves can be sold without any issue. And then plan to both add and remove things as time goes on.
>New technologies should be approached using a precautionary principle.
But what happens in reality is:
When we apply the precautionary principle, it's because technology is dangerous and The Responsible Thing to Do is to be careful. When our opponents apply the precautionary principle, they're luddites who hate change and just want an excuse to drag their feet. Here are some examples to illustrate that effect
Nuclear power was plenty dangerous in its first iterations and there was in fact too little precaution. Chernobyl and three mile Island really shouldn't have happened. Fukushima was much later in the game but was also bad design.
I think the tech is safer now but the nuclear industry really has itself to blame. It's no wonder anti-nuclear sentiments increased after each disaster.
Leningrad 1, in 1974, was the first RBMK reactor ever (though, like most reactors, the general principles date back further). Chernobyl 1 was 1977, so the design was only 3 years from first online. Chernobyl 4, the one that exploded, was actually built in 1983, 12 years after Fukushima 1 (one of the 3 that melted down).
Fukushima 1 was a GE BWR-3, 2 and 3 were BWR-4. These were introduced in 1965 and 1966 respectively. Both RBMK and BWR have they origins in the 50s.
So, in terms of newness of the specific model, the RBMK was a little under 10 years newer than the BWR-3/4. That said, the RBMK failed due to an internal reactor design issue, the Fukushima BWRs due to reactor support system failure.
Appropriate laws for appropriate circumstances. Given high standard of living in EU they can afford to take the long road with many improvements to food security favoring safety over reduced cost or expediency.
As a result of GMOs the carrying capacity of the world increased. Isn’t it the case that the population tends toward the carrying capacity? If so then the delay of GMOs would only mean that the world’s population today would be lower and not that the amount of overall starvation would be higher. We still have episodes of starvation in the world even with GMOs.
>As a result of GMOs the carrying capacity of the world increased. Isn’t it the case that the population tends toward the carrying capacity?
This model assumes that human population will grow forever. Carrying capacity is one constraint on total population, but it's not the only constraint. Nowadays population growth is slowing down because demographic factors (ie. falling fertility), not because we've reached the earth's carrying capacity and famines are killing people off.
Sure, those factors come into play and are dominant. It seems to me that one can’t assume there would have been more starvation had GMOs not been invented. And the factors you mentioned haven’t yet had an effect in India and Africa. The population of there has greatly increased alongside the rise of GMO. I’m not saying GMOs are the cause of sad increase but I am suggesting that the population in India and Africa might have been lower today without GMOs without being the result of starvation.
Then what you end up with is Prop 65 - everything causes cancer.
The right response is a risk-based approach. Nothing is every 100% safe, so it's not a reasonable filter.
Basically each new product should be judged for the risk versus the benefit. If it can be easily substituted with a known safer product, then it's forced to go through testing.
If there is no known substitute and the benefit is high, then it can tentatively be approved with follow up tests later.
No, rather long term and large scale peer reviewed studies would have to show that lead in gasoline does not cause harm in humans.
Real world is not black and white and we definitely should ban clearly poisonous or otherwise harmful (e.g. hormone mimicking) chemicals from food products and children’s utilities.
Point is if we keep going like this we might not ever arrive in a situation where everyday life is mostly free from dangerous compounds
That's an element. These are compounds. There are a lot more compounds than elements, and it's a lot easier to find one you can sub in to do the same thing.
(yes, the lead in gasoline was part of a particular molecule, too—which just proves my point, if we'd outlawed the specific molecule/compound that would have opened the door to finding other technically-different ones that still included lead—but you can't exactly outlaw carbon, so that approach won't work this time)
They didn't ban lead, they banned Tetraethyllead, an anti-knock compound used in gasoline.
>... if we'd outlawed the specific molecule/compound that would have opened the door to finding other technically-different ones that still included lead
I'm not sure what to make of that. The point of the ban was to keep lead out of the environment and people's blood levels which we did successfully. Lead isn't some sentient being looking to find it's way into our systems regardless of the actions of man.
> I'm not sure what to make of that. The point of the ban was to keep lead out of the environment and people's blood levels which we did successfully. Lead isn't some sentient being looking to find it's way into our systems regardless of the actions of man.
Yes—the "actions of man" might have been to create a different, also-useful-for-that-purpose lead compound, if they thought they could get away with it without someone putting a stop to it more or less immediately, just for the fact that it had lead in it. The trouble with many of these compounds is we can't point to a single easy-to-prove thing they have in common, like the presence of lead, as the cause of the harm—so you're left either testing for harm before the novel compound is included in products, or endless piecemeal bans with harm occurring at every step until, if we're fortunate, industries luck into compounds that are both the most economical and least-harmful of the remaining non-banned options.
That's really moving the goal posts. Who's to say the fuel industry couldn't have chosen a different substance that's poisonous in some other way? It's fundamentally the same argument. Lead being a universally poisonous element just made the decision easy. I agree that bans can and probably often do backfire, but it's not as simple as either never banning things or instead whitelisting things to be allowed.
It's not moving the goalposts, the two actions are meaningfully different. Lead is basically always dangerous, so "no lead" is an easy call and has the desired effect. The lead, specifically, was causing the entire problem, and it'll keep doing so pretty much no matter how you arrange other elements around it. Some other compounds to replace it might be dangerous, but essentially every lead compound is going to be dangerous.
Carbon compounds, meanwhile, are practically endless and there's no one quality you can point to and say "that, that right there is the problem, ban that part". Piecemeal bans won't work.
> (yes, the lead in gasoline was part of a particular molecule, too—which just proves my point, if we'd outlawed the specific molecule/compound that would have opened the door to finding other technically-different ones that still included lead—but you can't exactly outlaw carbon, so that approach won't work this time)
And that wasn't an edit, it was there from the beginning.
Pretty damning that the FDA only issued a report on this after a court ordered them to. I can't really help but believe that this is willful negligence - if some of these have already been banned for use in children's toys, why would it be fine in a plastic bag the child holds food in? I ate a sandwich every day from a plastic bag for ~12 years...
Given the downward quality of life trajectory: including obesity, allergies, mental health issues like autism & depression – I'm highly concerned about the food, air and water supply. We should be more sensitive to possible chemical risks with the horrible health trajectory.
I would expect a specific task force to address chronic health issues , by the FDA & EPA
Over the past decade or two, the FDA has completely and comprehensively abrogated their regulatory duties.
They had an active role in marketing opiates as safe. They cannot keep factories safe enough to feed our nation's infants. They steadfastly refuse to remove harmful chemicals from our food and water supply.
It is utterly sickening, literally and metaphorically.
Since its beginnings the FDA has always genuflected to business. Many people in the department worked hard to document toxins that the American public were being exposed to (e.g. arsenic and coal tar used as food coloring, formaldehyde and borax used to preserve milk and meat). However the department's leadership, and in a few cases the U.S. President, intervened to protect business interests. If you're interested check out The Poison Squad[1].
They already have the evidence- at least on some of these. Three of the phtalates they've already banned previously in children's toys are part of the nine that they're continuing to allow for use in food packaging
Driven by monopolization. It's one of the side effects that's rarely explored in the FTC and DOJ "analysis" of these mergers over the past few decades. That there are only three domestic suppliers controlling 90% of the market seems like it could be the root of these particular issues and is what allows such seamless regulatory capture in the first place.
Yeah, but, there's a certain class of injectable drugs we should always trust them on, no matter what. Always and forever, and never doubt them, because doubt alone is a conspiracy.
I'm not an expert, but it seems like the test only received "clearance", not "approval". Many people conflate these terms even though they represent very different regulatory standards. I'm not sure it even makes sense for a purely diagnostic thing like a blood test to get "approval".
Or we can be a little more nuanced and view CR as an organization that tries to do the right thing but also has some bad calls.
I support CR for their work on testing products, I also support GMO as I feel it is one of the best ways we can feed people in the future. I also hate the over use of pesticides and hate Monsanto for many reasons.
Anti-GMO is tantamount to being against the extreme overuse of pestisides and herbicides, being anti-GMO is actually rooted in evidence as well as common sense... I don't want my strawberries or my corn bathed in round-up ready. Even if the corn does grow larger... glyphosate is bad.
It really bothers me that anti pesticide & herbicide people choose to place their crosshairs on GMOs. The GMO isn't the problem! It's totally throwing the baby out with the bathwater and serves to muddle and confuse the conversation rather than advance their cause of reduced *icide use. There are real benefits to be had from GMO crops. If GMOs weren't demonized as a whole as a proxy for *icide usage maybe there'd have been more research or investment in more, and more useful GMO crops.
Your own link makes a compelling case that herbicide resistance is ~by far~ the largest application of GMOs. The most commonly cited and largest impacts of GMOs
derive primarily from hebicide application. They are demonized by proxy because they are inextricably linked.
> Your own link makes a compelling case that herbicide resistance is ~by far~ the largest application of GMOs.
I make absolutely no claim to the contrary.
> They are demonized by proxy because they are inextricably linked.
That's like demonizing computer manufacturers because computers are inextricably linked to cybercrime. (cue someone bringing up a real-world example of exactly that, I'm sure)
Is it really so hard to fight the herbicide and pesticide usage itself that's doing the harm that attacking the entire concept of GMOs is necessary in some way? If the use of such chemicals was disallowed in the first place, there'd be no incentive to use roundup-ready crops.
The only things that I can think of that fighting against the GMOs in general instead of against herbicides and pesticide usage directly gets you is a target that's easier to scaremonger against from what I've seen.
It bothers me because it's dishonest. The problem isn't the GMO crops. The problem is companies dismissing customer harm in the face of increased profit. Fight the usage of the chemicals. Fight the companies harming their customers for a buck. Heck, fight the specific usage of roundup-ready crops. Leave GMOs as a concept and a field out of it.
> That's like demonizing computer manufacturers because computers are inextricably linked to cybercrime.
Is the vast majority of computer use for the explicit and sole purpose of cybercrime? If so, this is news to me. It's more like demonizing the dark web since its main function is to facilitate crime.
The primary purpose of GMOs is to increase herbicide usage. This isn't some philosophical argument; this is how GMOs are actually used. How can you separate a tool from it's primary usage? To me, an honest discussion of GMOs requires one to leave abstract notions behind and consider the context of GMOs in modern agriculture. This context is overwhelmingly centered around herbicides. If you remove herbicide-resistant GMOs for the discussion, there's barely a point in having it all because what remains is so insignificant.
If investment into non herbicide related GMO crops is avoided by investors, universities, etc. because the social optics are poor because GMOs have a bad rap, we are missing out on progress we might otherwise obtain.
Again, is choosing to be fully accurate and saying "herbicide resistant crops" instead of "GMOs" really so much of a problem? How the crops gained that resistance is besides the point.
So if you're anti-roundup why not just be anti-roundup? A genetically modified organism is just that, it doesn't make any commentary on whether or not pesticide is used. We've been 'genetically modifying' organisms via selective breeding as long as we've had agriculture...
Herbicide-resistant GMO crops account for over 80% of total GMO crop area worldwide. There's a reason why people usually talk about both at the same time :)
It should be obvious that no one plants a glyphosate-resistant crop without the express intention of spraying more glyphosate than the equivalent non-GMO crop can tolerate.
We're not allowed to know if food has Roundup in it. The only clue is that if it is not GMO it probably doesn't have Roundup. If you're pro-GMO you should be pro-labeling of agricultural chemicals in foods.
I have a feeling that payed bots/shills operate on this forum because each time a comment like this is made it gets downvoted asap.
As the poster above said: modern GMO doesn't mean "no need for pesticides": modern GMO is instead "we made plants resistant to PESTICIDES so they can withstand MORE toxins before they die so that we can kill more pests by increasing the pesticide dosage without killing the plants first".
The result is a huge increase in the amount of this toxic chemicals in the plants.
More correct approach might be that if you want to use a chemical in food packaging or children’s equipment, you must first do long-term studies that prove its relative safety to other studied compounds. In time the world would start accumulating safer products. I won’t hold my breath though.