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“Forever chemicals” is intellectually lazy nomenclature.

Flonase, Lipitor, Xanax are all PFAS.

The range of half-life for untouched PFAS ranges over many orders of magnitude in hours. For long half-life components, energy (like this anrticle) and catalysis can break them down in seconds.

Smart waste management is all that is required to minimize risk. Fear of manufacturing will just move the tech to China where the environment will be worse off.



Lipitor and Xanax don't even have a fluoride atom, how can they be PFAS?



I think they mean that Xanax and co are unaffected by sunlight and oxygen once excreted by the user and are showing up in rivers.


yeah, they must be metabolized to be broken down. there are a few drugs like this.


> Smart waste management is all that is required to minimize risk.

ok, but if you're the fire department and you want to put out a fire, are you going to stop and carefully seal up a catchment so that no firefighting chemicals get into the ground, or are you going to immediately put out the fire?

ignoring the impossibility of sealing the ground around a burning structure well enough to prevent soil contamination in the first place, you are going to extinguish the fire and deal with the contamination later, if at all; there may be another fire.


We will have to be smarter about the risk reward for fires. It may mean fighting fires with sub fire-optimal chemistries to help mitigate waste.




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