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It's all a ruse to maximise profits and minimise expenses. They'll do anything to protect the status quo — they've used the tragedy of the commons to manufacture dangerous chemicals on an industrial scale for decades, and banning them now would impact entire industries and product segments; probably to the tune of tens or hundreds of billions.

No multinational corporation is ever going to voluntarily support a change that will kill its profits.

My favorite was white phosphorus, which caused Phossy Jaw in the employees making the matches. Switching to red phosphorus would mean a 1% increase in cost or reduction in profits (wasn't sure which based on the article). Doing so would mean your employees' bones wouldn't dissolve. It took regulation to force them to switch.

Asbestos is genuinely a wonderful material. It's heat-proof, it's a wonderful insulator, it's one of the best filters for gas masks, it's wonderful for use in brake pads and clutches, etc.

It's just a damn shame it causes cancer in living things.

Also back then, we didn't have massive populations. Most of the world struggled to survive. Finding food was a all-day activity. Should we go back to that?

I am so not understanding all the comments on this post that are literally defending their right to be given cancer by large corporations.

Wtf are the responses to this comment? "No, I like being poisoned for profit!" Jfc.

We also survived thousands of years without any of the creature comforts our society has taken for granted. Unfortunately, all the scientific advances we've achieved for the betterment of mankind involved these forever chemicals in one way or another.

I'm not saying they're not terrible, but at least some of the voices against these restrictions aren't in bad faith. It just speaks to the importance of finding alternatives, and we have to accept the fact that some things might not be replaceable with biodegradable solutions.

One of their uses is in firefighting chemical fires.

When an electric car is on fire, you need PFAS to stop the lithium fire. Water just can't stop it.

Of course, before batteries we used gasoline.

I imagine their might be more of these cases where modern technology relies on unsustainable practices.

If that means we'll have to forfeit the use of, for example computer systems, or some actually vital modern infrastructure - I don't think we'll agree to the ban.

On the other hand if their use is unavoidable, for any valid reason - there should be sufficient effort in recycling them...

Often, the replacement will just be a derivative that isn't necessarily better. The narrative that will then go out through the media is: "We're no longer using this evil thing. Full stop." The replacement ends up just being something similar with similar problems. People stop paying attention because they assume the problem is solved, when it really isn't.

Example: there was that whole BPA plastic stink years back, now most bottles and food containers are "BPA Free"...but if you look into the chemical they used to replace BPA, it has the same synthetic estrogen problem BPA did. (Arbitrarily searched source: https://www.plasticstoday.com/study-says-bpa-free-plastics-still-show-estrogenic-activity )

In the case of replacement for water bottle or food container plastics, the best answer is to just not using them anymore, although glass and metal have their own difficulties, namely fragility and weight.

I remember the horrible transition period of the terrible "energy saving" lightbulbs back when EU banned incandescent bulbs. Expensive, took minutes to warm up, had terrible colour rendition, filled with mercury and saved barely any energy. It felt like such a moronic decision.

Now with over 50 LED bulbs all using like a tenth of the energy they used to with lifespans so long I can't even remember when I last had to replace one, it feels totally worth it. Sometimes someone has to make you suffer before it gets better.

Though with chemicals in contact with food, hopefully they take it just a bit slower to make sure they are safe first.

It's not about survival. Manufactures are just letting people know if we ban these chemicals they will need to stop producing some products.

The situation is much more nuanced than that. PFAS chemicals are in (almost literally) everything. Your nonslip shoes, your water proof jacket, your stain resistant table cloth, and your fire retardant mattress. On top of that the list of PFAS chemicals that the EPA is looking at is around 70 compounds long and only scratches the surface of all the compounds. The test to detect PFAS is in its 4th draft and can't reliably detect low enough to reach the levels of concern, except in nearly pristine waters, so you can't even detect if you have it in most water. The levels of concern that are being discussed are in the single digit PPT for individual compounds or 70 PPT total PFAS for some health advisory levels. Detection levels on normal waste water are generally somewhere between 50 and 4000 because the test is so sensitive other compounds fry the machine and it has to be diluted.

Another problem is that the thresholds are so low that it's hard to draw any conclusions definitively. It's associated with so many things you could write a novel: altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, cancer, decreased birth weight for infants, infertility, and more. The thing is that the only way to make a more conclusive connection is observing high exposure areas where people were drinking it at thousand times higher than the risk levels, so interpolating down smaller values has a lot of theoretical connections, but few smoking guns.

In general industries are trying to move away from PFAS, but the areas where they can't include things like AFFF foam used for fighting jet fires. Some areas, particularly the military, are unlikely to make concessions as they want the best option available even if a close substitute is available. Your average PFAS using company; however, is moving away from PFAS in general.

EDIT: also the quantity of PFAS in most items is so small that it actually is below the threshold on an SDS for requiring it be reported, so trying to find out if a product you use has PFAS means you have to call the manufacturer. Maybe they can tell you, maybe they don't want to tell you, or maybe they don't know because it's not listed on the SDS for the raw ingredients they use. In the industry it's gotten into a near legal situation where companies are telling their suppliers and vendors to look for PFAS and certify that their products don't have it, only for the vendor to turn around and do the same for their vendors and suppliers. The portion at the end of the article captures this well, an example would be, "Well we don't use PFAS, but our machine has gaskets which probably have PFAS. This doesn't touch the final product so are we able to use it?"

Expensive more like. Profit at all cost.