We know that these chemicals are terrible for human, animal, and plant health. There isn't a debate.
We know which companies are responsible for polluting. They've been doing it for years, knowing the damages in greater and greater detail all along the way.
Why aren't we forcing the polluters to pay for the cleanup as well as the likely-tremendous costs of damage to people's health and the ecosystem? And why aren't these chemicals banned? At what point does the government do anything about widespread problems like this? We don't get much of anything in the way of protection from bad domestic actors (in this case, polluters) for our tax dollars.
It's getting quite tiring to live in a country where the rules seem to be "anarchy for thee, and profits for me".
> Why aren't we forcing the polluters to pay for the cleanup as well as the likely-tremendous costs of damage to people's health and the ecosystem
We are (1), but to be frank the "payment" isn't enough. We need criminal liability for executives and board members. Apparently there's not enough incentive not to destroy public health for generations.
> At what point does the government do anything about widespread problems like this?
>> Why aren't we forcing the polluters to pay for the cleanup as well as the likely-tremendous costs of damage to people's health and the ecosystem
> We are (1), but to be frank the "payment" isn't enough. We need criminal liability for executives and board members. Apparently there's not enough incentive not to destroy public health for generations.
Criminal liability for decision-makers is the way to go, along with some plan that wipes out the shareholders but otherwise doesn't destroy or cripple the company as a going concern. The company itself isn't guilty, and it has lots of innocent stakeholders (e.g. customers, lower-level employees) who would be harmed if it was damaged.
The govt should be able to sue the company for more than it’s worth and simply nationalize it if it wins. Think of it as a death penalty for corporations.
Stock gives control over a company. I would say that is materially different.
ie: suing Apple for cash won't give them the ability to install backdoors, taking over control of Apple would. (This is probably unlikely to happen with Apple, but maybe it could with Comcast, AT&T or even Intel)
Yeah no thanks. The government is the reason these companies were able to do this in the first place. They lack the ability to simply regulate, let alone run a company.
>> The govt should be able to sue the company for more than it’s worth and simply nationalize it if it wins. Think of it as a death penalty for corporations.
> They lack the ability to simply regulate, let alone run a company.
Who says the government would run the company? The meat of the policy is all about wiping out existing shareholders to incentivize them to make sure the company doesn't do stuff like pollute a bunch of groundwater. The policy could (and should) immediately sell the company again via an IPO of reissued shares. The proceeds could go to some cleanup or compensation fund or something.
That's not what nationalize means, you kind of went off on a tangent. Regardless the wealthy would find a way around any scheme like this, I have no faith something like this could be done effectively. Like I said they can't even regulate because of lobbying and special interests (they need money to get elected).
My point primarily being that government is more the problem here than corporations. It's their job to put in safeguards to prevent these things from happening in the first place and they could do that without resorting to pseudo communism.
> That's not what nationalize means, you kind of went off on a tangent.
I didn't actually, but was bending a tangent back to my original idea. When I brought up wiping out the shareholders up thread, I never meant the government would operate the company on an ongoing basis and never used the term "nationalization." Though I could understand "nationalization" being used to describe a brief transitory state.
> Regardless the wealthy would find a way around any scheme like this, I have no faith something like this could be done effectively. Like I said they can't even regulate because of lobbying and special interests (they need money to get elected).
I don't really care. I'm tried of the idea nothing should be attempted because of a false assumption they "would find a way around any scheme like this." It's heads you win, tails I lose thinking. Screw that.
> My point primarily being that government is more the problem here than corporations. It's their job to put in safeguards to prevent these things from happening in the first place and they could do that without resorting to pseudo communism.
Alright then, if that's the case, lets reform criminal law around those lines. No punishment, no deterrence, just 100% prevention. Your friend get murdered? Don't do anything to the murderer, because it's really the government's fault it didn't successfully make murder impossible. I'm sure that would work wonderfully.
But these companies are so big now that it would hurt someone's stock, 401k, and economy as a whole.
Sorry for the sarcasm. But these companies have to be hurting themselves in the market by other means before the govt will do anything about it, besides a slap on the wrist.
> But these companies are so big now that it would hurt someone's stock, 401k, and economy as a whole.
I'd think a "corporate death penalty" as a kind of creative destruction. I'm sure demise of Radio Shack hurt someone's stock stock or 401k, so that's tolerable. If it's not, I suppose part of the policy could be to reissue and return stock to certified "unsophisticated" investors (e.g. index funds open to the public and people with net worth below some middle-class cutoff). That reissued stock would still be valuable, since likely few of the company's fundamentals would have changed.
I also don't think such a thing would hurt the "economy as a whole" beyond a short-term blip, unless the company ceases to be a going concern. You'd only we wiping out the stockholders, it'd still service its customers, make debt payments, etc.
Leaving the company intact is dangerous. The company culture that permitted these acts won't necessarily be wiped out when you purge the executives but leave the rest of management intact.
Wiping out shareholder equity will incentivize risk taking (think Bed Bath & Beyond or Hertz), and is very likely to destroy company, harming many stakeholders in the process.
> Wiping out shareholder equity will incentivize risk taking (think Bed Bath & Beyond or Hertz), and is very likely to destroy company, harming many stakeholders in the process.
Explain how you think punishing bad behavior will motivate more of it.
IMHO, the shareholder class puts out all kinds of noise to avoid accountability, and that includes employing people to produce very sophisticated propaganda that makes false claims against holding them accountable (e.g. false heads-I-win, tails-you-lose scenarios).
Similarly we should let burglars off the hook because they're putting bread on their families' tables. My point being is that such a limp response is just more privatization of profits and socialization of losses/costs.
The systemic risk of not putting companies to death when they behave badly is greater than the risk of the less-guilty stakeholders (you can't be a stakeholder in a bad actor and be innocent - only less guilty; that's true of employees and customers).
> Similarly we should let burglars off the hook because they're putting bread on their families' tables. My point being is that such a limp response is just more privatization of profits and socialization of losses/costs.
Except we're not. Unlike a corporation, a burglar is a unitary entity. Everyone guilty in the company (including its shareholders) will be "on the hook."
> The systemic risk of not putting companies to death when they behave badly is greater than the risk of the less-guilty stakeholders (you can't be a stakeholder in a bad actor and be innocent - only less guilty; that's true of employees and customers).
No. That's an unreasonably extreme take that, if taken to heart, would cause the cons to far outweigh the pros. We live in the real world, and the real world demands tradeoffs.
Also extending this to all the costumers is nonsense. Is some dude who buys a 3M N95 mask in a hardware store even a little bit guilty of polluting the water supply with PFAS? No, of course not. You might be able to extend some blame to companies that bought PFAS from 3M, but it would have to a pretty direct connection.
Payment won’t dissuade. What will is getting a conviction of murder with life in jail for every single employee aware of the impacts and complicit. Yes that’s 1000s of lives ruined. But that single act will tell everyone else to fess up or risk similar punishment. Including the lower peons who’d be happy to cut a deal for amnesty.
I might even be willing to get on board with that if a reasonable threshold were in place. Every American with an S&P 500 fund of some sort owns some 3M stock. We’re not throwing the majority of American adults in prison anytime soon.
> We know that these chemicals are terrible for human, animal, and plant health. There isn't a debate.
A statement with neither nuance (no distinguishing the types of chemicals) nor precision (no quantification), either false (because we do not actually know for certain that all of them cause noticeable quality of life decrease even at tapwater concentrations) or trivial and meaningless (e.g. enough of any substance will harm health).
Here's the article:
> High concentrations of some PFAS may lead to adverse health risks in people, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Research is still ongoing to better understand the potential health effects of PFAS exposure over long periods of time.
Simply saying "There isn't a debate." doesn't make a statement true. It's certainly true that some of these chemicals have good evidence for harming human health at concentrations people could actually encounter them in. It's not true that we know this for all of them, nor what concentrations cause issues.
Your post reads like a call to action, rather than a curious and considered analysis. The propagation of these types of posts makes hackernews a worse place as more and more people use it to proselytise rather than explore, discuss and learn.
If you wished to actually contribute you could cite some form of meta study giving a breakdown of the health effects of the various chemicals at certain concentrations.
Not trying to be the troll, but this debate is missing the obvious retort.
> Why aren't we forcing the polluters to pay for the cleanup
Because then the manufacturing goes to China. It doesn't get cleaner, it might actually get worse. The pollution goes somewhere else. Economic anxiety (which is politically explosive, see 2016 election) goes up domestically.
What we need is effective regulation, not bureaucratic us-versus-them regulation. We need more engineering spending and less legal spending. And as a consequence, yes, we need fewer choices in consumer products and higher prices, and we need consumer safety laws that prevent offshoring from undermining all of that.
> What we need is effective regulation, not bureaucratic us-versus-them regulation.
That's easy to say and everyone would agree we need "effective" regulation, but I think the profit-driven corporations that continue to pollute and use a portion of their profits to pay lobbyists and influence public discourse in order to discourage regulation will always take a "us-versus-them" approach.
It needs to be more expensive to hire lawyers (and lobbyists) than to hire engineers to solve the problem. Some companies will fail to adapt and continue to fight legally in lieu of adding filters and complying, and those companies should get shut down.
Corporate lawyers need to be held accountable too. If an executive knows the company's product is dangerous but keeps that secret because he's representing the board/shareholders, nobody thinks he shouldn't be punished for keeping this secret. But if the corporate lawyer knows the product is dangerous and keeps this secret because he's representing the company, this is somehow okay? If lawyers could be held liable for what they knew and concealed, they'd either turn tail and run or would demand far more money to compensate for the risk. Either way, companies would be dissuaded from relying on lawyers instead of fixing their products.
Attorney-client privilege should be severely curtailed if not abolished outright when the client is a corporation.
What are you talking about? You can ban the sale of products containing PFAS, not just their local manufacture.
If you wanted, you could levy fines like 5-10% of gross annual revenue for any company or marketplace or retailer found distributing product containing PFAS.
You don't have to agree it's feasible or worth it, but it's possible.
> You can ban the sale of products containing PFAS [...]
"Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a large, complex group of synthetic chemicals that have been used in consumer products around the world since about the 1950s. They are ingredients in various everyday products. For example, PFAS are used to keep food from sticking to packaging or cookware, make clothes and carpets resistant to stains, and create firefighting foam that is more effective."[0]
Should we ban those uses, outright? Q: What do you suggest we use instead?
We should absolutely ban the use of PFAS in applications where it isn't strictly necessary, like the (relatively recent) explosion of fast-food containers that are marginally more waterproof and/or cheaper because of it. This isn't even an interesting question.
Use of PFAS in (airport) firefighting foam is a more complicated question, but that mostly illustrates that the question isn't well-formed.
Yes ban them. The cookware usage is unnecessary and hard to purchase without. Clothes get replaced so often that stains are not and issue worth dying over. Carpets usage is down. Firefighting foam that is more effective sounds good until the other choice is poisoning firefighters for slightly more effectiveness.
There once was a miracle material that came from an abundant resource, was extremely cheap to manufacture in a variety of forms, was extremely light, and had incredible properties that made it perfect for both industrial and consumer uses. It had one small issue though, which was that it was hard to dispose of.
It was so good, for its purpose it was pretty much the only material you could buy to do its job for a long time.
That material is called asbestos. It turned out to be so hard to work with that it gave millions of people cancer, even though it's pretty much the perfect insulator when left alone.
---
Non-stick cookware is not nearly as bad as asbestos, but it's cheap and easy to use because it doesn't require maintenance like stainless steel, copper, or cast iron. It's not surprising that it's popular and the cheapest to make at scale since you don't need the surface of the material to be very good at all, if it's getting coated with teflon. There's the small problem that you've made a disposable product that probably won't get recycled and everyone who uses it will be eating small amounts of plastic everyday, but they'll thank you for the privilege.
> doesn't require maintenance like stainless steel
stainless steel cookware requires the least maintenance of all types imho and is near impossible to ruin/damage. The issue is its not non-stick and requires a bit more skill to cook with. Most people are too used to coated non-stick and how easy it makes cooking.
> alternative that was as good then it would be readily available
there is cast iron & carbon steel, its just harder to use needing more actual skill and requires more care where coated non stick panes just work.
however that coating will wear off and then you need a new pan, kill birds if overheated, where the stainless/carbon steel will last the rest of your life.
it also comes with an expiry date and will need to be replaced once the coating wears off. stainless steel cookware (or cast iron if taken care of) will last forever
Sorry, but this attitude is too defeatist to accomplish anything.
We can try something, even if it doesn't work, we can still try it. Ban those chemicals. If they want to move manufacturing to china to use illegal pollutants, let them. That's a huge cost to them and no guarantee china will let them keep doing it.
"It's not illegal in another country" isn't a reason for us to keep it legal. We can lead the way.
It likely won't stop but the market is going to become much smaller for anyone doing business with those nations. The manufacturer would either have to change their process, go bankrupt, or at least see profits cut by a huge margin.
Then lets not try anything. That's the alternative right?
If you see trying and failing is seen as a worse alternative to doing nothing and poisoning the environment we all live in then you need to take a step back, be less critical, and be okay with partial or incomplete solutions.
>Then lets not try anything. That's the alternative right
No, considered action is the alternative. If PFAS use is banned, what's the likely outcome? Would it be expected to significantly reduce the global PFAS emissions much or mostly move them somewhere that cares less and even increase other pollution that those places also care less about? Are there important uses of PFAS for which we have no viable alternative? What would losing those mean? Would it be expected that replacements used locally are actually better for the environment? What's the risk that they're actually worse? Would taxing PFAS use instead of banning it have similar outcome but be easier to roll back if needed? How much would it cost to implement a ban, including ongoing costs of ensuring compliance? Are there other environmental efforts that would have better expected ROI and/or less risk?
>Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Don't let "Won't somebody please think of the children!?" be the enemy of effective policy. Not acting has a cost and delay has a cost, but so does acting rashly.
Yes, which is why it is important to try to do the right thing rather than just doing the first thing that comes to mind without regard for whether it's expected to work.
> We could go back to pre plastics, enjoy less sterile things along with more disease
Hint: it's actually about money, not sterility.
A foodstuff packed in a glass jar with a metal screw-top isn't going to spoil any faster than the same thing in a plastic container, but the glass weighs more, and costs more, so if all other things are equal the retailer will of course opt for the supplier with the cheaper and lighter packaging.
> A foodstuff packed in a glass jar with a metal screw-top isn't going to spoil any faster than the same thing in a plastic container,
In fact glass is easier to sterilize; it isn't porous and holds up to high heat and chemical disinfectants like bleach. This makes it superior to plastic for food preservation.
What do we do about frozen foods? (If not plastic, they have plastic linings or coatings). What about the butchers, are we back to newspaper with newspaper inks?
And wat do you do about food delivery, lunch service, fast-food, single serve, sauce packets, airport food, vending machines, etc...
Interesting, I like the idea of pre-plastic. Some hypothetical "solutions" (i.e. brain farts) I'll toss out into the ether:
Ban all levels of plastic for the _packaging_ of food and goods.
Incentivize multiple-use and/or highly recyclable materials metal(aluminum), silicone and glass containers for food, rather than "convenience" and single-use.
Single-use plastics can be regulated and limited to medical/hospital use only.
This could also have a benefit of promoting smaller supply lines for things that spoil. Increasing small town economies, farms, mom & pop shops.
Plastics selling point is convenience and cost-reduction for consumers and businesses.
We could place regulation on the distillation ranges for the barrel oil.
As for the forever chemicals... We (U.S.) can approach the problem similar to the E.U. - Prove first, the safety of the chemical by outside labs (disallow testing by the company who benefits from the use of said chemical) before hitting the market. Whereas the current U.S. model is - I get to use whatever chemical I see fit, unless you prove to me wrong.
I have been, personally, figuring that I should wear mostly cotton clothing and glass / ceramic (as opposed to plastic) dishware. Limiting material choices for household items would be politically impossible, but I would like it to become a popularized "trend", which retailers will then cater to.
Companies should market based on using "traditional" non-toxic materials (still modern and industrial, just not absurd), and consumers can respond by giving their business.
> We know that these chemicals are terrible for human, animal, and plant health. There isn't a debate.
Is that really true? My understanding is that studies show that people with the highest levels of PFAS have increased risk of liver disease. Exactly how much PFAS exposure results in significant risk is still unclear, considering a decent chunk of people eat food from PFAS lined food wrappers, cook in PFAS coated cookware, rub their teeth with PFAS coated dental floss, drink PFAS contaminated water, and touch PFAS coated clothing and other surfaces on a daily basis and do not have any obvious resulting problems.
I'm not saying I disagree that there's a problem, and I personally try to reduce my exposure, but clearly the ratio of usefulness to toxicity is a lot better than with other substances, which have been more tightly controlled in recent history, such as lead and asbestos, and that's why the response has been less urgent. Even now, after decades of study, it isn't clear exactly what the effects are and how likely it is to affect people based on their daily habits.
Not saying they shouldn’t be, but a problem is companies will just move on the the next, likely bad, similar chemical until it is also banned. I’ve seen suggestions to require chemicals to be proven not dangerous before widespread use, but this seems untenable. Perhaps the best solution is not to ban the chemicals themselves, but to obligate containment of waste, regardless of if it’s “bad”.
It feels like a lot of things that are "impossible" in the US work just fine (and often far better) in other countries. I don't know if it's defeatism or a reluctance to change, but it's so strange to me that even when it comes down to something like "Companies shouldn't be able to poison you intentionally for profit" people in the US seem too scared to even try anything different.
There are massive PFAS contamination areas in Belgium (Zwijndrecht) and Netherlands (Dordrecht) both caused by 3M both contaminating large rivers (Scheldt and Meuse) and water supplies.
Irrespective of the spirit of regulations this is very much a problem in Europe as well.
It's in the rainwater everywhere on the planet. There's no escaping it no matter where you are. The US company poisoned the entire earth and everything living thing on it. Seems a bit unfair to say "HA HA Europe! How well are your sane and totally appropriate regulations working for you now! Still got poisoned!". Well, so did Antarctica and every other nation. That doesn't make it a bad idea to want products tested before they're allowed to do what 3M did.
I am not disagreeing with the responsability of proving safety before making it into production much like what you have with medical devices.
My point was that despite stronger regulations the EU is not immune to environmental disasters and is now also struggling with 3M/Dupont PFAS water source contamination.
Why would a robust testing process prove to be untenable? We have a fairly high bar in medicine. For all it's flaws on the care and payment side, the medical research process seems robust without shortage of innovation.
In the US, it seems at the policy level this would be impossible to implement. From a practicality level, it would take very long to validate to the point of stifling innovation (good or bad) and would require international cooperation. Compared to medical research, medical interventions are risk based at the individual level and we are willing to accept marginal improvement with awful side effects. Chemicals apply risk at a societal level and settng by appropriate limits seems difficult vs mandating better waste containment.
> We know that these chemicals are terrible for human, animal, and plant health. There isn't a debate.
Of course there is a debate. How bad are they? Has anyone died from them? How do we how know much compensation people deserve? If they are so terrible then why has it taken so long to pin that down?
> Would be more just to seize them and auction them off for enough funds to do 1-5% cleanup, but that would probably be an uphill battle politically.
I'm guessing that if the American public saw the government actually hold a company and its shareholders accountable for knowingly poisoning their children it'd be massively popular politically. Lobbyists would have it.
Any genuinely terrible idea should be an uphill battle politically.
Do you know how much you, personally, benefit from modern material science? Do you think our nation could even operate with out Bayer, Dupont, 3M and the likes?
We could always keep the company and fry the shareholders and executives responsible. If there ever were a company the nation couldn't do without, the only sane answer is for the government to take it over for national security reasons. Otherwise that company could hold the US hostage, or be bought out/taken over by foreign interests and used to collapse the entire country while we'd be powerless to stop it.
As if that was the one thing that put Venezuela in the position it is in now. Venezuela does a lot of things we already do in the US too, but somehow we aren't identical either. Maybe our situations are more complex than "this one weird trick will salvage/destroy your country"
An honest, basic question for HNers who are much more knowledgeable about this than I am: How much should I care about this? I hear a lot of talk about "forever chemicals" in the news, but I have no idea what the literature really says about what these chemicals are and whether/why I should be worried about them.
My prior here is that human-made industrial chemicals are probably not things I want in my water. But that's about as far as I'm able to go here without a prohibitive amount of research.
Edit: As others here have pointed out, it would also be great to know what, if anything, an individual can do about this contamination.
Concentration is usually the biggest concern- "the dose makes the poison", so to speak.
Unfortunately, the "forever" moniker is earned because these chemicals don't readily break down. Bio-accumulation is inevitable, which makes it that much harder to determine what a "safe" level of exposure is.
Even so, I don't think the jury is out yet on what the effects of exposure to many of them even are, though several seem to influence hormone levels at least.
As an individual, you can donate blood regularly. There was a study done that found that repeated whole blood or plasma donations were both effective at reducing PFAS levels over time.
That is fascinating. Is that true of toxins that accumulate in the body generally, or specific known classes?
It never occurred to me that blood removal would be an effective method, but there is a certain logic to it. Although it also seems like you'd have to do it an awful number of times to make a difference.
Is that true of toxins that accumulate in the body generally, or specific known classes?
I don't know, I'm definitely no expert in this area, and haven't looked for any similar studies for other toxins, so I'm not sure if other similar research has been done.
I see a lot of hate here -- as if most are imagining 'evil' corporate factories with massive discharge pipes oozing onto the landscape.
Let's spare some hate for 'the little people' spread out geographically over large areas whose city and county municipalities have packed trash into landfills over the water table or near surface water sources, for decades.
Styrofoam fast food containers and cups were the industry's 'smart answer' to the grease-stained paper bags and wrappers that were the staple of fast food packaging through the mid-1970s. This was in response to public sentiment that paper products were the death knells of trees. The plastic was forever but could be at least buried out of sight, right?
Not so forever after all. But the latest eco-damage consumer outrage (with a touch of irony) is health-conscious peoples' mass refusal to drink from the tap to favor water globules encased in clear plastic. "As long as it looks clean, it IS clean!"
Or even better, let's not engage in hate at all and simply discuss and share research and facts. We can leave the campaigning to other, higher traffic, venues.
Does anyone have opinions (or even knowledge of actually reliable data) about whether drinking water filtered with reverse osmosis is worse for you than drinking tap water with PFAS, etc? I've seen the argument made that RO water is worse because of mineral loss and that the little remineralizer cartridges and such don't do enough to replace the loss.
I struggle with concerns about mineral depletion when you have 50%+ of your diet which is solid that probably contain a similar proportion of minerals to the water you consume.
Was about to comment the same thing. Constantly consuming solids and liquids from other places that contain all sorts of minerals, I highly doubt I'll be depleted because of my RO system.
More of a concern to me is that it's almost certain that PFAs etc are contaminating those other sources of food.
This is for sure a concern. Also when my RO system was first installed, the filter instruction said to run it to fully empty twice to run out the detergents (?) that the filters came with? I have to wonder what's in that, or lubricants used in construction.
I would not be surprised to find PFAs used somewhere in the construction of the system. Under regulation of this stuff means it's everywhere.
But then again, lots of the pipes, fixtures, etc. in the house ... plastic etc. as well.
Yeah the rubber bladder always concerned me as well. They say it is made of butyl so leaching is not to be expected but what if the production biproducts left on the inner surface are leaching out over time.
Same goes for a random o-ring or the PTFA tubing.
I have a TDS measurement device but these are questions beyond total dissolved solids.
The anecdote I have is that one of my grand daughter's teeth are worse than my other grand children and grand nieces and nephews. She used RO water more than the others when she was younger, and her dentist reinforced the idea that RO water was unfriendly to early tooth health, apparently due to reduced fluoridation. I'm not suggesting that is worse than forever chemicals.
The things I've read about fluoridation make it sound like fluoride applied to the surfaces of the teeth (eg via brushing) has the most benefit. I have to wonder if your grand daughter was also using a non-fluoride toothpaste.
I’m dubious. Millions of people in the country are on wells and don’t use any fluoride, also fluoride isn’t present in every municipal drinking water supply.
If I want to take stock of my available goods, do I count how much cargo vans going in and out of the warehouse are carrying, or do I have to go inside and take a look at what’s actually in store?
Last I looked into this, it seems there's products out there now that offer "nanofiltration" which has more permeable membranes than RO filters so the minerals can pass through but the more complicated molecules like PFAS cannot.
> I see lots of people drinking RO water and not dying
This also holds true for water with dangerously high levels of lead, and even the PFAS which are driving people to RO in the first place. It's really a terrible measure of how safe something is.
We have proven science around what lead can do. We don’t have that with RO water. It’s very fuzzy and like “if you drink only RO water and no minerals this is how it’s maybe bad”… but leaving out stuff like the coffee you make with RO adds back junk.
I wonder how much of the plastic in the RO machine leaches stuff into the supposedly pure water. The same for one's household plumbing --- does it leach into the water?
"since Oct. 15, 2009, no company is allowed to manufacture, distribute, ship or sell any products that leach arsenic in concentrations greater than 5 parts per billion (ppb)" [1]
And bacteria growth is solved by following the manufacturer's directions. For example, Brita filters in use need to be kept in the fridge and changed every 2 or 3 months.
I assume this is true for 1) filters that are NSF certified and 2) wish to not display a prop 65 warning.
A majority of the water filters purchased on Amazon are not NSF certified and ship with a prop 65 warning. In fact, it's difficult to purchase water filter components that do not have a prop 65 warning.
The problem is that there's really not much to do. It's like when we had leaded gasoline. "What should I do about it?" Well you should go back in time and destroy the company that chose TEL over a more expensive but not lead based alternative, but nobody can do that.
What you do now is have the government punish the people who did this to us for money, and prevent this in the future. Some things can't be reversed or counteracted down the line.
Ymmv and you need to do your own research on specific chemicals of concern but I end up installing a reverse osmosis filter for tap water whoever I live now. It not 100% but from what I saw on the chemicals I was concerned about it did drastically reduce the issues.
I started doing this long ago when I lived in the Bay Area. So many super fund or near super fund sites that I was concerned about the water pollution.
A common household reverse osmosis filter would greatly reduce PFAS concentrations in drinking water in general. However, some PFAS may be small enough to slip through some RO filters, so it kind of depends.
I'm on a well, quite a deep one, that taps into a very deep aquifer below the niagara escarpment, with plentiful clean water, and I was always confident in the cleanliness of our water.
But I just put in a reverse osmosis system for cooking & drinking water because of this whole PFA thing. I suspect it's highly likely that given their use in fire retardants, lubrication, omniprescence all over the place, they're probably deep down in aquifers at this point.
There are other potential health upsides too. Regular blood donation has been found to be correlated with healthier blood pressure, and in men it can also prevent you from accumulating too much iron in your body, which can prevent heart problems down the line.
I'm not sure if it's concentrated in blood or not but as I understand it it's mostly protein bound which means it probably moves into and out of tissues easily but not out the kidneys or into stool.
Someone else's already replied with the Australian fire fighter study which shows that blood levels fall with donation. If movement isn't free into and out of the "compartments" then it's possible end organ damage continues unabated even as blood levels dilute.
But it seems likely that donating does reduce concentrations in organs as the PFAS move back into blood.
This is one of those issues that are, fundamentally and at the very core -- non-partisan. There's no doubt in my mind that those in power -- both in government and big business -- want us divided so that we won't hold government and big business accountable for the atrocities they perpetrate and permit on the public.
But with all that lobbying money, why would they care? Like Murray Rothbard once said, "It's not the left vs. right. It's the government vs. you." Today, I would include big business in the category of government.
Exactly why I haven't drank tap water regularly in decades. I don't trust that disgusting chlorine flavor that no one besides me seems to detect, I don't like conversations around the importance of fluoride in the water (never had a cavity anyway). I drink glass bottles and aluminum cans of mineral water and flavored seltzers and feel that I'm probably better off health wise.
Are there specific chemicals with proven harm to humans in this category? If not, why do I care about their "forever" status, my body does not need to break down every chemical right? And not every chemical is reactive to something in my body. Why won't they be more specific?
Incredible map of PFAS hotspots in the article -- very notable applying the "is this just a population map?" test, specifically look at the West coast in comparison to the rest of the country. It seems dramatically lower out west.
I am skeptical of reports published by the cities. There is incentive for the reports to skew positive, since otherwise individuals can lose elections/jobs/contracts.
So I looked back at the 2014-2016 reports from Flint, Michigan to see if they correctly predicted the water crisis.
Also note that while in the US the lead concentration limit is 15 ppb, Canada has recently reduced its limit from 10 ppb to 5 ppb. Nearly every US city I've looked at exceeds 5 ppb.
I would take their data with a grain of salt. It's basically a viral marketing site for filter manufacturers and they're biased toward showing scary numbers. My city has two water sources depending on where you're located and they don't break down the figures to that level of detail but the county water quality report does.
We know which companies are responsible for polluting. They've been doing it for years, knowing the damages in greater and greater detail all along the way.
Why aren't we forcing the polluters to pay for the cleanup as well as the likely-tremendous costs of damage to people's health and the ecosystem? And why aren't these chemicals banned? At what point does the government do anything about widespread problems like this? We don't get much of anything in the way of protection from bad domestic actors (in this case, polluters) for our tax dollars.
It's getting quite tiring to live in a country where the rules seem to be "anarchy for thee, and profits for me".