Why can't we have the government we pay for with taxes help all of us with this? I don't know what products have/don't have PFAS in them, as it's disclosed almost nowhere.
Why not just have them all banned and fined instead of me having to setup a laboratory to test every product I bring in to my house for lead, pfas, asbestos, radioactive isotopes, etc?
With regards to labelling, I 100% agree companies should be making it clear what is in the stuff we buy. Again, though, that can be done by consumers if we actually care enough. Sticking with natural materials is a great start, whole foods instead of processed foods and wool or cotton instead of plastic/petroleum clothing, for example.
Unless consumers have the financial means to test everything, it’s not reasonable to expect the burden of consumer protections to fall on consumers. Consumers shouldn’t have to test all of their food for every possible contaminant.
Additionally, this doesn’t address harms which companies know they are creating but consumers don’t. Companies will lie and cover up the damage they cause, and pollute the information ecosystem with propaganda which confuses the issue. People used to think cigarettes were good for them.
We don't need big governments to save us from cigarette companies because people don't know better. We need consumers saying to hell with cigarettes because they just need to roll a bit of dried tobacco leaves if that's what they're going for.
We lost the scale of our lives in favor of convenience, marketing, and greed. Governments can't fix that.
And more importantly, you can’t deal on a local level for the most part. It’s not possible. You mostly purchase products from national or multinational brands, so good luck getting any consumer protection from them. If poisoning customers lets the CEO buy a longer yacht for his house in Cyprus, he will do that.
The contaminants used in industrial farming generally come down to two main areas, poisons and fertilizers for the growing period and preservatives for the shipping/warehousing process.
Local farmers wouldn't be at the same scale and may very well not need to spray their fields with the same chemicals during the growing cycle. At a minimum, they're local and anyone buying their food that cares can come right out and see how the farm operates, meet the farmer, etc.
All of the preservatives and packaging could be skipped entirely if you as buying local. When the food doesn't need to handle weeks or months of storage and shipping you simply don't need all of that.
> You mostly purchase products from national or multinational brands
My while point is they if consumers cared we could just story doing this. Sure, it'd be less convenient and we wouldn't have products like iPhones or modern cars, but in the context of getting rid of the use of plastics and PFAS those kinds of products go away anyway. It boils down to the fact that we care about the idea of PFAS but we aren't actually willing to give up the novelty and convenience of all the products those chemicals allow for.
And we're supposed to regularly drive out to farms to monitor their use of chemicals? You'd have to spell that scenario out to me because it sounds ridiculous and rather naive. For example, all of us who eat food also have our own jobs and lives to worry about, and we can't spy on every producer of every good we consume, though I'm not even sure what the spying accomplishes.
Tell me what this stakeout looks like and what kind of info it's going to gather.
Sounds like something we'd offload to a representative, authoritative body...
I have visited the farm we get our CSA from a few times, but not often at all. Its much easier than you might think to meet the person growing your food and have a feel for them as people, their farm, etc. They do also often update on their own website and email newsletter, though again I don't really feel the need to watch them like hawks.
I don't think its much of an investment to actually meet the people making one's food if that really matters to them. Granted finding local farms isn't always easy and I'd love to see more people start, but would you really rather blindly trust a massive public corporation driven entirely by profits and almost certainly buying off the regulators meant to keep up safe in such a system?
And again, this ignores the other two glaring issues I mentioned previously: that individuals are not equipped to properly assess the supply chain; and regulations also protect you from your neighbors’ use of dangerous products.
You don't have to go back hundreds of years or vet every part of the supply chain to recognize when a product is wrapped in plastic. Hell, you can effectively assume that all produce in a chain store was sprayed heavily with chemicals and that all meat approved by the USDA was sprayed with bleach and is full of stress hormones due to the way animals are processed.
All I have been arguing for the whole thread is for individual consumers to make decisions that can have a direct impact on what products are produced and what aren't. Are you arguing that consumers should just buy whatever is there and wait for the government to fix it from the top down?
> regulations also protect you from your neighbors’ use of dangerous products.
There's nothing wrong with that when your neighbor's choice is infringing on your rights. I agree that's a reasonable use of government regulation if the damage caused is clear.
I'd say lets have a vote. Do you want to risk autism, cancer, infertility and whatnot for nonstick pans and all the other wonders of PFAS? If the majority doesn't, it will get a global ban.
If people care enough to decide not to use products that contain PFAS, the environmental exposures would disappear pretty quickly. More importantly, if its even possible for governments to effectively coordinate a cleanup process that job would be much easier if consumers pitched in by first using their individual power to drastically reduce the contaminants being added into the system.
> I'd say lets have a vote. Do you want to risk autism, cancer, infertility and whatnot for nonstick pans and all the other wonders of PFAS? If the majority doesn't, it will get a global ban.
That doesn't require a vote at all. Bans are only useful when we have to leverage the power of the state to force people to do something they don't want to do. If consumers agree that nonstick pans have all those risks and they aren't worth it, they stop buying nonstick pans and companies stop making them.
Even if we wanted the ban route, who enforces it? The UN? Some new global government? Or a unanimous agreement by every government in the world, including those who's economies are partly supported by producing the nonstick pans?
I was arguing that more consumers could step up to make similar decisions, in this case avoiding PFAS products.
We don't have direct control over what's in our water, especially in areas where collecting rain water or using a well isn't even allowed if you wanted to do it yourself. We do have control over what we buy though, we just rarely see consumers making decisions that match the values we often argue for (like we need to massively reduce oil/plastic use and chemical exposures).
> any chemical with at least a perfluorinated methyl group (–CF3) or a perfluorinated methylene group (–CF2–) is a PFAS
I don’t think that includes any of those, and Xanax is not fluorinated at all. You might have been thinking of Prozac, which I believe does meet those criteria.
It is a broad category with competing definitions, some of which are even broader, though, yes.
Humans made it very, very long without plastics and PFAS. Are we really to assume that a few decades with them and we'll never go back, by choice or otherwise?
Like I'm growing potatoes but I'm not under the impression that I'm going to be able to feed myself to an acceptable caloric and nutritional level off of what I can grow on a third of an acre or whatever my yard is.
Local food doesn't have to mean growing it for yourself in your own yard. Buying local food is a huge improvement. When the food is grown in your area and doesn't have to be processed or packaged to handle national infrastructure challenges the plastics and PFAS aren't necessary.
When buying locally you can also have the ability to actually see where and how the food is grown, an option that is never possible when the food is grown across the country, shipped overseas for processing/packaging, and shipped back before eventually hitting shelves at your local chain store.
Or you'd have to get a totalitarian government with a plan economy with this issue as a primary focus. Neither sounds realistic to me.
Either situation would also require many people to die as people now live in places which can't support themselves with the nearby farmland.
So what are you, in practice, actually advocating for?
I'm advocating for the fact that consumers could make many of the changes we often hear about happen if we actually cared. We have a habit if many people, even majorities of people, yelling about problems like climate change, deforestation, chemical contamination, etc. But we all still choose to use products that contribute to those exact problems.
We have no idea what the exact outcomes would be if, for example, consumers stopped buying any products that use PFAS and forced the industry to go away. There would certainly be ripple effects, but I'd argue that those effects will always be better handled when consumers decide to enact change rather than waiting for governments to force it on us all at once or for the environmental damages cause to grow so large that we run into real, devastating outcomes.
If we know we're supporting products and companies that are making things worse, we're choosing to kick the can down the road and hope its long enough that its the next person's problem when the pile of damage has gotten too big.
We have 8 billion humans alive, who mostly all want to stay alive and keep eating food. We got to 8 billion entirely because of modern agriculture. But, they are sure, we really don’t need it, we can all just eat local joe farmer’s tomatoes. Nevermind that it’s seasonal and more expensive (and who doesn’t want to can all their food in summer, and who doesn’t have unlimited time and money to devote to food?) we’ll all be just fine.
It’s the same with PFAs. They think they just do nothing that can’t be easily replaced, but if you ask them what those PFAs do (must do something if there are that many of them) or how else you’d accomplish those tasks, they’re not quite sure other than they know we should just ban them all tomorrow and everything will be ok.
It’s easy to criticize a system you don’t understand and assume it’s all just rigged against us.
I do in fact know how industrial ag works. I have a small farm that I'm still in the process of building up, but have meat in the freezer and produce on the shelves that we grew and processed here. We work with farmers in the regenerative movement and go to events by our local extension office that usually cater much more to the industrial ag process.
I spent two summers interning with one of the big oil companies working on software for their upstream research department. I obviously don't know everything about the industry after two internships, but have seen how the companies operate including how proud they are of all the random products they jam petroleum byproducts into (they were particularly proud of having petroleum wax in Hershey's bars).
We're simply coming at the problem from different angles. I look at many of the issues raised like PFAS, plastics in the ocean, water contamination, etc and see unsustainable systems. I totally get that we have built societies around those systems, but that doesn't make them functional or sustainable long term.
We're going to have to deal with the consequences and limitations eventually. Would you propose that we wait for the damages to pile so high that we can't avoid it anymore? Or peg our hopes on some massive government intervention to find a top-down solution that manages to avoid all the pitfalls of political and economic considerations that likely run against the solutions needed for these unsustainable systems?
I'm simply pointing out that consumers can make choices that help push solutions in the right direction. Companies only produce PFAS because we either don't know or don't care, and we collectively prefer the convenience and novelty of the products. If that's the case, why would a government push a solution down our throats? If we'd support a ban on PFAS, why wouldn't we just do that ourselves by avoiding those products?
If you go to countries where there was never any government intervention relating to cigarettes do you know what you'll find? A lot more people smoking cigarettes.
In other words, the solution can be additive where we only bring in products we're confident in rather than having to learn everything and remove items from there.
If you think that many of the inventions over the last couple centuries are the culprit and would have to be rolled back, that sounds miserable but it also sounds like we at least would have a better chance being proactive rather then waiting for everything to come crumbling down.
I don't personally expect climate change or chemical exposure to destroy us all, life finds a way. But if we can't expect consumers to make purchasing decisions that generally align with what they think is important, why do we even bother with markets or capitalism at all?
The problem is, there are a whole lot of PFAs that do a whole lot of things, and most of them aren’t food-related. You probably interact with them many times a day without knowing. We can’t solve that problem ourselves because we don’t know they’re there. If the path of entry to my body goes firefighting foam > ground water > me I can’t avoid that short of filtration. My water provider can though. I’ve traveled a lot to third world countries that have unsafe drinking water and I really don’t want that here, nor do I want to have to research everything I buy (ain’t nobody got time for that) knowing that even if I do, industrial uses I know nothing about are still causing it to end up in my water.
When we expect common people to solve a problem, we’re expecting everyone to know everything about everything. Again, ain't nobody got time for that.
I have the same criticism about a lot of environmental issues. Just yesterday someone in here was talking about their water use due to r/o filters and how we’d all have to be careful because if we all did whole home r/o we’d double our water use. Which may be true, but right now there’s one almond farm in a drought area in California somewhere that’s used more water this year than the entire HN audience could in several lifetimes.
The petroleum industry really figured this out when they promoted plastic recycling, knowing it wasn’t real, to make us feel like we could solve the problem personally rather than legislatively.
We can't and it is the same here. Your choices don’t amount to anything of significance compared to the large industrial choices you have no control over so the only answer is regulation.
Firefighting foam is a great example of when a government intervention could be needed though. I don't directly interact with that product at all, I don't buy or use it. If its getting into my water then its effectively infringing on my rights. If a majority of people are willing to ban those chemicals knowing that it will make fighting fires more difficult, or impossible in some cases, then a ban makes sense as consumers are powerless there.
How do you buy pasta now?
I do packaged food/beverages professionally, so I know what almost every ingredient I read on the label is there for and what it does, but I don't know the health ramifications of all of them (nobody does), how they're produced, etc. And I could not expect 99% of people to know 10% of what I do. They'd never have time to.
I also don't think we know exactly how it's getting into people. The EPA says the most common source is drinking water, and it's probably getting there through pollution, waste, etc. I'm not even sure they know that really though. That's the thing about large, complex de-centralized systems, especially ones that intereact with environmental factors: there's nobody who knows how the whole thing works.
And even if it's getting into water entirely through people cleaning their non-stick pans, which I'm sure isn't the case, I can't rely on everyone else in my water supply area (literally hundreds of thousands of people) to curtail their use. Probably tens of thousands of people in my area put a Teflon pan in the dishwasher today. I can, however, rely on the water plant to filter it if they're made to do so and there's testing done.
And, also, I'm very much of the "this hysteria is overblown" mindset. When you look into actual evidence of harms caused by the levels of PFAs most people are exposed to, all you find are very weak correlations. Outside of people exposed to very high levels of the stuff, there's no solid evidence of any harm at all. You can't do any sort of controlled test since it's so pervasive and also geographical in nature due to the drinking water issue. (Everyone in a target area is either exposed to it or not exposed, so to compare people who are exposed to those who aren't, you have to compare people in different regions, thus making your study not controlled as any observable effects could be due to some other regional factors.)
That said, absence of proof is not proof of absence, and I feel fairly sure they aren't good for us or 3M would be marketing them as a pharmaceutical. I think there's some chance they're bad, and they can be affordably filtered out with the money manufacturers are going to have to pay in settlements. I'm far from a big government kinda guy (quite the opposite usually) but tragedies of the commons, which this totally is, are very much the thing we need government for.
I don't see it as a process of people having to know everything so they can opt out. As you said, that will never happen in such a complex society. Instead, people can focus much more on opting in when they do reasonably know they trust a product. That can't always be done for sure, but touching the door handle at a store is much less likely to have serious consequences than the food I eat every day.
I may not have much say in what is already in my water but I absolutely have a say in what I spend my money on.
Yeah, sure. Pre-industrial population level with pre-industrial living conditions and life expectancy. I prefer plastics.
I'd also assume that you don't see EVs as a practical solution, or any non-petroleum engine, since plastics can't be made without oil and it'd be crazy to drill enough oil to keep our post-industrial lives without using the refined gas and diesel that we'd be creating anyway.
This says nothing of how impactful the different types of exposures may be, or if a partial reduction is meaningful when we still have other known exposures that we think are just too hard to deal with.
Sunken costs can be a bitch, but I really don't get the argument that removing exposures that we are adding into food, for example, can be hard. Just stop using PFAS chemicals, period. Its not hard or expensive, just stop using them and companies will stop manufacturing them.
Removing PFAS chemicals that are already out there, like in our water supply, is the difficult and likely expensive change. Giving up any process or product that creates more PFAS contamination is the easy one, and would make a huge dent in the contamination problem as part of the issue is that we continue to add even more chemicals into the environment at a faster rate than nature can deal with.