The most “amusing” example of PFA use I’ve heard of is in waterproofing the compostable paper single-use food containers, and most ridiculous of all, paper straws.
Sibling comment mentions using the stems of grain crops as natural drinking straws. This was done, in the past, and is the origin of the word "straws" for the modern plastic variety.
Historically, straws were also made from waxed paper.
The issue isn't that plastic straws were banned, it is that plastic straws were banned and no additional guidance was provided e.g., mandating paper straws with natural wax coatings. This combined with corporate greed led to companies putting out the most profitable product within constraints of the law-- health and environmental safety be damned.
The first paragraph of the following article describes both types of historical drinking straws:
Waxed straws used paraffin which is made from petroleum anyway, and they still get soaked through and collapse like the shitty PFAS coated straws. I know because they’re still made and I’ve used one, and the attic you posted mentions that draw back.
Straws made from plant stalks simply aren’t suited to mass distribution. They aren’t uniform, can’t easily be sanitized before packaging, they’re fragile, and still leak and get soaked.
The problem isn’t “corporate greed” it’s that there aren’t good alternatives to plastic for disposable straws.
The problem isn't really petroleum. We have more than enough petroleum for straws. And the carbon in paraffin is not in the atmosphere, which is good.
The problem with plastic straws, if you believe their opponents (whose claims I have not evaluated), is that they are persistent pollutants that harm animals. If paraffin-waxed paper straws are not, that's an improvement, petroleum or no.
You ever try eating your fast food on the train/subway/bus. The same situation exists there too.
The problem isn't the cars. The problem is that we don't all live in some fantasy where people have time to sit down and eat their food and drink not on the go. If it wasn't the straws people would be complaining about the plastic coffee cup lids.
The first hot dog man provided nice white gloves for his customers to hold the wieners and toppings with. They were supposed to be returned after use, but evidently they were too fancy and many customers would hang onto them. His wife suggested serving the wieners in a bun instead.
Except you see people drinking through straws while sitting down, too. So weird. I’ve always thought of straws as things only small children and maybe the disabled need. Like if you don’t even have the motor control to merely bring a glass up to your lips. I mean, even while walking and moving I somehow seem to be coordinated enough to sip liquid from a glass. I don’t know, maybe I’m an acrobat or something.
This might be a USA thing but a lot of times in restaurants they’ll bring me my drink with a straw in it and I can’t help but think “WTF do I look like a six year old?”
I used to also but then I started thinking how obscene it is that the piece of plastic will be around for thousands of years just so I can have slightly more convenience for an hour or two.
I guess. It’s a minimal amount of material that’s made from a waste product anyway. Pottery and glass last just as long, or longer.
Something made of cellulose that breaks down more easily would be better, so long as it comes from agricultural byproducts.
*edit I’m saying this might be better because some light plastics like straws end in in storm drains and on road sides, so something that breaks down over time into organic compounds might be preferable.
I am drinking something without a straw right now and maybe I just have a sophisticated technique but I seem to be putting the liquid into my mouth back over my tongue to the same overall place it goes when using a straw?
You said it yourself, there aren't good mass distributable alternatives to plastic straws. I never thought banning them was a meaningful step towards sustainability, but maybe straws should be labor intensive and left for the service industry to figure out as opposed to being mass distribution-friendly.
That'd be preferable to more PFAS, at the least.
Yes. At most they should have levied a tax on them in relation to their (alleged) impact. Outright bans are seldom as economically efficient as an appropriate tax.
> This combined with corporate greed led to companies putting out the most profitable product within constraints of the law-- health and environmental safety be damned
I didn’t expect capitalism to be Fermi’s Filter, but kind of makes sense.
Those still fall apart in liquid after a few minutes and the wax is made of petroleum. I’m not sure plastic straws were ever really a problem worth solving, given the trade offs.
They're definitely usually made of paraffin, and every one I've encountered falls apart quickly. There are two coffee shops near me that use them and they both fall apart within 15 minutes.
I highly recommend Dr Tung's smart floss. The floss is made of polyester fibers, and it is coated with either beeswax or plant wax and activated charcoal. The packaging is all recyclable or compostable. Most importantly, PTFE and PFAS free.
I went with silk floss. I figured if I'm going to try to avoid endocrine disruptors I might as well avoid plastic too. It works just as well for me. It's coated in candelilla wax.
It's well known (and documented) that PTFE fumes from cooking can be deadly to birds. I don't think "the most nontoxic" is anywhere near accurate, approximately or not.
Not that that same risk applies to dental floss (I don't think many people heat their dental floss to a few hundred degrees), but your statement was more general than that.
Pretty much anything produces toxic fumes if you get it hot enough. Air produces nitrogen dioxide, for example, water produces ozone, and table salt produces chlorine (and sodium vapor, of course, but that condenses before you have a chance to breathe it). Those fumes, which require temperatures far above cooking temperatures to form, aren't PTFE; they're a cocktail of nasty fluorocarbons which are bad for you too, just not immediately fatal the way they are for birds.
So "the most nontoxic" is pretty darn accurate. PTFE is substantially less toxic than air, water, table salt, cellulose, polypropylene, or pretty much anything else you're likely to put in your mouth.
You would have to heat the PTFE to almost glowing to make it emit fumes.
If you tried that with oil you would have an enormous cloud of smoke - and the smoke from the oil is MORE toxic than the smoke from the PTFE.
So yah, the most nontoxic is completely correct.
And BTW, it is far safer for your birds to use PTFE cookware vs oil because you would have to get the PTFE much hotter vs the oil for there to be any issue.
It's true that any foodsafe oil has a smokepoint lower than the temperature needed to degrade PTFE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_chemistry_of_cooking#S... lists temperatures from 175 degrees for butter to 257 degrees for soybean oil), but in some cases only by a little bit.
I don't think it's necessarily true that cooking with PTFE is safer, even if the smoke is more toxic to birds, because the PTFE fumes are invisible, so you can kill your birds before you realize that there's a problem. It's not likely but it's possible.
I also don't think it's really true that you have to heat PTFE "to almost glowing". WP says PTFE starts to decompose around 350 degrees (science) and is already a health problem for birds above 250 degrees, killing parakeets at 280 degrees (after four hours of exposure, which was longer than it took burning butter fumes to kill the parakeets). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene#Safety. Things don't start to glow until about 525 degrees, or a little hotter if they're very white.
The difference between 280 degrees and 525 degrees is even bigger than it sounds in terms of heat input. It's 145 degrees, yes, but at those temperatures radiation (in the infrared) is the dominant form of heat transfer, and radiation is proportional to the fourth power of temperature; at 280 degrees blackbody radiation is 5300 watts per square meter, while to get something up to 525 degrees you have to pump in 23000 watts per square meter, more than a factor of four.
The summary is that it takes four times as much heat per minute to make your teflon skillet glow as it takes to heat it up enough to kill your parakeet in four hours, which is about the same temperature that soybean oil starts smoking at, so if you have birds you might want to think about switching to cast iron, or at least always using abundant oil on your teflon so you're guaranteed to notice if you go outside the safe temperature region.
None of this is relevant to bike chain lube or dental floss.
I don't think the problem is only with smoke particles; I think gaseous fluorocarbons produced are sufficiently toxic to birds. (In humans they cause polymer fume fever, but the humans recover after a day or two.)
It's kinda funny to say this because one of the early problems with PTFE was the nerves in the hands of people handling PTFE-insulated aircraft wiring dying - due to residues from manufacturing in the PTFE. Sure, the polymer itself is non-toxic and non-reactive as can be. Everything that went into it is absolutely not. The way to minimize that is expensive process and quality control => don't use cheap polymers!
This was also the case with agent orange. Sloppy, rushed production led to it being absolutely full of unintentional contaminants from the manufacturing process.
Microplastics of PTFE, particularly fibers, provoke the same sort of response as similar asbestos, for the same reasons. A smooth PTFE surface, e.g. in a surgical implant, evokes a completely different response.
So, no: PTFE can be safe, but is not necessarily. Convexity matters.
The principle, as I recall, is that when a nanoparticle or nanofiber lodges somewhere, poking a membrane or anyway intruding, immune system cells attack it with increasingly caustic chemicals, trying to break it down. If it is too stable, they fail, but don't give up. It is this inflammatory response that underlies asbestos's toxicity.
A smooth, locally flat surface does not, by itself, provoke that immune response, and chemically PTFE doesn't draw attention. But PTFE happily adopts any shape. So, maybe nobody makes PTFE microfibers or nanoparticles on purpose, but that doesn't mean there aren't any.
The short story is that tests showing PTFE surgical implants don't evoke an inflammatory response do not tell you much about effects of PTFE in different circumstances. Likewise: people can wear metal jewelry for years, but that doesn't mean you can poke a knife through somebody with no effect.
There was a recent report that those mesh tetrahedral tea bags each release literally billions of plastic nanoparticles into your tea. That cannot have been deliberate. I wonder if those have been banned or recalled yet...
In Denmark the talk have mostly been about PFAS contaminated meat. One of the first places a severe contamination was found was on a building used by the fire brigade for testing and cows were grassing there as well. Since then a lot of other places ha e been tested and many more have been declared as potential places.
I think yesterday the news were about if it was safe to breastfeed while you may have heightened levels of it. The new guidelines was retracted because most of the scientists behind it disagreed with the conclusion based upon newer evidence. So it getting a reevaluation
This is not good. Even if production completely stopped today, levels would continue to rise for years in the environment as the materials are washed away from our modern lives and infrastructure.
>Recently a group of scientists flagged the concerns regarding the inability of scientific analyses to keep pace with the amount of chemicals produced and released into the environment
The top PhDs from the biggest chemical companies can not even keep pace with the analytical needs of their own production units.
And relatively speaking they have a virtually unlimited budget.
There's technical debt in natural science still hanging for decades awaiting progress.
EU regulation is mainly a means to protect the eu’s internal market. For instance you cant buy vehicles made in america due to prohibitive duties because they dont meet euro requirements. But you can buy highly polluting german vehicles, no problem. Easiest way to restrict goods without explicitly doing so.
EU emissions standards are usually more tolerant than USA standards. The problem with American cars sold to Europe is that the EU has stricter pedestrian protection requirements which would require redesigns of American models. It makes sense not to implement those when designing a car for a country where crossing a road is illegal in many places, but inside most of the EU that's unacceptable.
Other safety standards have also been lower in the USA but I'm not sure if that still holds up today.
There's also the space problem: many American cars have trouble fitting onto European roads and parking spaces because the USA has dedicated a lot more space for cars as a result of city design often practically forcing you to own a car. The EU has its SUVs but most of them are small in comparison to the unimportable American ones,
I disagree, the regulations were/are fairly strictly on diesel emissions for all vehicles not just US.
What happened with 'dieselgate' was that many manufacturers got caught in what amounts to very blatant fraud, faking that they were compliant with the environmental standards for tailpipe emissions when they were in fact completely off the charts.
Manufacturers had firmware that detected if the vehicle was in a test chamber (front axis moving but no G forces), if that was true then engine management would enable full emissions control and limit engine performance. If that was false the emissions control would be dropped and you would have all the horse power and acceleration that customers so dearly love.
I will say it explicitly: Whenever you see in the media the discussion on 'defeat devices', what it means is that manufacturers performed large scale fraud, _by_design_. I think people really fail to appreciate how severe this was.
The 'discrepancy' they discuss in the press release you link is just a euphemism to say, we don't want to go bankrupt and disrupt German GDP but we can't sell a car that complies with emissions regulation (i.e. not killing people ahead of time with air pollution) without making it have the engine performance/acceleration of a dead mouse.
If you take "partially fail of regulation" to mean stuff like "a defeat device switching emissions controls off if more than two wheels are spinning is not legally a defeat device", then sure. Otherwise, there are of course issues with testing methodology. At the same time, pretty much the entire car industry used defeat devices on their diesel cars.
Does this mean it isn't safe to live right next to the ocean?
I'm referring to the following sentence in the abstract:
> Levels of PFAAs in atmospheric deposition are especially poorly reversible because of the high persistence of PFAAs and their ability to continuously cycle in the hydrosphere, including on sea spray aerosols emitted from the oceans.
I think they're saying it isn't safe to live anywhere, because the chemicals are continually getting cycled back into all of the planet's water. Whatever falls on the ocean can be recycled back into the clouds by sea spray.
I'm still digesting this one and would appreciate input from anyone else who wants to read it.
As someone who lives close to the ocean, I'm concerned about the long-term health effects. I guess I'm probably breathing sea spray aerosols all the time. I can hear and see the breaking waves from my home.
It's sad because PTFE is the best dry lubricant but you can get close with Tungsten Disulfide nanoparticles. Hexagonal boron nitride is a good bicycle lubricant additive too and it can actually photocatalytically degrade environmental PFAS!
Tungsten disulfide is enormously more toxic than PTFE. Nanoparticles of anything are usually toxic. Boron nitride might be as nontoxic as PTFE but I wouldn't bet on it.
Its toxicity isn't well characterized, and isn't especially high, but you can generally assume that metal sulfides with access to water produce either hydrogen sulfide, sulfuric acid, or both. In the case of tungsten disulfide it seems to be sulfuric acid, though the reaction is poorly characterized. Sulfate as such is pretty nontoxic (though it does cause diarrhea) but it doesn't take very much sulfuric acid to lower the pH to fatal levels.
That's always possible, but why do you think so? The list of materials considered biocompatible enough for implants is pretty short, and PTFE is on that list.
> The list of materials considered biocompatible enough for implants is pretty short, and PTFE is on that list.
Not to stray from the main discussion but biocompatible has a pretty narrow scope.
Time effects are not always fully captured, it often boils down to quite literally "we injected this stuff in 50x bunnies' bloodstream or implanted under their derme and none of them died after a month".
With any new substance a cautionary principle should be applied, the main issue is Industry is spitting out new substances faster than we can meaningfully study them.
It would be possible for your comment to be farther from the truth, but it would take significant effort. It is incorrect to a degree that demonstrates malicious disregard for the truth, and since it pertains to health risks, people who were to rely on it would be putting their health at risk. You should not have posted it.
I am not sure what was so out of line about my comment. The safety profile you link to itself refers to animal studies.
That profile now looks very complete but before we had all those RCTs and clinical surveilance data, someone had to make a decision on wheather or not we can use PTFE in vascular stents _for_humans_. That decision would have relied on initial animal tests (i.e.literally sticking this stuff in bunnies) and some limited trial data.
My point is not that FDA are somehow clueless bureaucrats but that everytime we introduce a new substances we are taking an educated risk based on limited (animal) data.
The Gore-Tex membrane itself is apparently(?) PFAS-free since some years, however Gore-Tex materials usually have a second waterproofing treatment (a surface coating called DWR, durable water repellent) which, drumroll, contains PFAS. Cheeky buggers, convincing people they had solved the problem years ago. ;)
"Planetary boundaries is a concept highlighting human-caused perturbations of Earth systems [...] The framework is based on scientific evidence that human actions, especially those of industrialized societies since the Industrial Revolution, have become the main driver of global environmental change. According to the framework, "transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be deleterious or even catastrophic due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental-scale to planetary-scale systems."[2]"
The first sentence suggests that the study's authors are concerned that PFAS and its similar cousins represent a non-linear, large-scale environmental threat.
An additional thing to understand here is that PFAS is not a new boundary at all in the context of the planetary boundaries framework - they fall under the already defined category of Novel Entities.
Since that's a catch all category for many things (nuclear waste, other synthetic chemicals, there's even debate with the original authors of the framework if Artificial Intelligence should be considered), the boundary value itself is not currently defined.
One school of thought is that the boundary value for this category should be zero - as any synthetic substance is more than nature generates.
Regardless, papers like this one are helpful to piece together all of the novel entities research amd get a better picture of how this boundary interacts with the rest of the Earth System.
Ah, so a boundary is between continuous "regimes" governed by a single behavior; crossing the boundary means moving into a different, as-yet unexplored regime.
Indeed -- in this case, a large-scale diffusion of a very stable family of waterproofing chemicals into the, uh, global water cycle. The idea is that it's possible for human activity to fundamentally change the nature of some system whose behaviour we think of as stable and inviolable. Considering how goddamn important water is to basically everything in the biosphere, I think of it as more an eaten-by-a-grue "unexplored", rather than enticing-terra-nova, style of thing.
It's interesting how humanity will accept this kind of "experiment" when it's a side-effect of something designed to give a little convenience, or for somebody to make a bit more profit. If a scientist proposed doing it on purpose, just to find out what would happen, there would probably be less enthusiasm.
It's also interesting how it's the political "conservatives" who seems to be most accepting of these kinds of environmental changes, when "conservatism" is supposed to be about preserving the way things are now, or perhaps how they were in some recent "golden age" past, as I understand the term.
"Planetary boundaries is a concept highlighting human-caused perturbations of Earth systems making them relevant in a way not accommodated by the environmental boundaries separating the three ages within the Holocene epoch."
> It is hypothesized that environmental contamination by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) defines a separate planetary boundary and that this boundary has been exceeded.
Talk about cutting off one’s own nose.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33770693/