After watching Dark Waters and becoming fearful of PFAS, I don't understand how these PFAS aren't completely eliminated from production. Is it because they help reduce spoilage/leakage which allows food to travel further and increase shelf life? Do the lobbyists argue that this reduces food waste?
How is it legal for Sweetgreen, Cava and other restaurants to use PFAS in "compostable" food packaging and make it seem like a "sustainable" alternative to plastic packaging? [1]
It's difficult for me to contain my emotions whenever I read about PFAS being found in yet another common material and certain government bodies trying to deregulate safety inspections [2].
The one that recently shocked me was modeling clay. My elementary school kid loves playing with clay, so I bought him some Fimo, which is proudly marketed as “non-toxic.” On a lark I looked it up anyway. It’s 11-14% phthalates by weight![1]. All the polymer clays are necessarily high in it - they’re made by compositing clay, PVC, and plasticizers. Blew my mind, and we’re giving this stuff to kids!
You can make play dough at home by cooking a flour and water mixture till it thickens up, add lots of salt (to discourage eating) and colouring to taste.
When I was a child my mom would cook me a fresh batch every month or so during my frequent clay phases.
Polymer clay and modeling clay have very different properties compared to play dough. Play dough is something that kids grow out of in the first year or two of Elementary school.
Yep, my kid is into making very detailed little animal sculpts that endure. Playdough fails on both of those dimensions. We've switched to air dry clay (Crayola Model Magic), which is closer to the polymer clay, but still doesn't work quite as well for fine-detail, and is far less durable.
I don't sadly. I did it empirically (my oil-based modeling clay would separate and become hard, so I started heating it and adding oil, and then started making new modeling clay from scratch).
I used clay powder, but I just looked at some websites for making homemade modeling clay and they use calcium carbonate or talc, so I'm not sure what to suggest. My clay turned out fine (but theirs might be better).
I had the original Warhammer figurines as a kid that my older brother didn't want. I remember bending the metal (I was maybe 4 or 5) and putting it in my mouth for some reason like I did with lego when I couldn't snap a piece off. I ended up swallowing a piece and vomiting up a bit of eldar soon after. Still have pleasant associations with the smell of lead thanks to warhammer.
I mean playing with small amounts of elemental mercury is pretty safe. Yeah it's toxic but if you play with it in your hands once or twice in your life nothing is going to happen.
I'm also feeling quite worried about it. Per your first link, I didn't realize that the compostable alternatives I try to seek out could be just as bad or worse. The article corroborates unfortunately:
>Most of the chemicals leaching from food packaging come from plastics, but not all of them. “Probably the worst one is recycled paper and cardboard,” Muncke said. “And I know that’s a hard one to stomach.” Recycling paper, cardboard or plastic for food packaging leads to nonfood grade inks mixed in next to food, she explained, adding to the chemical risks.
Actual research into this area is needed for us, but I am always left wondering, why are we not doing research into what packaging is better for us?
Are glass bottles OK, or does the coloring leech out? I am guessing clay pots were fine for thousands of years, should I be using them? What about brown paper wrap? I know the butcher paper has a coating on it... Every time I read something like this two thoughts come into my mind:
- I will never get "mega corp" to stop using them.
- I do not know what the alternatives are.
Depending on the era, clay pots often had led glazing, which could leach out into acidic foods/beverages.
Generally glass is going to be fine, as long as it’s not painted/coated on the surface that touches the food or your lips. That said, the cap is almost certainly plastic/plastic coated.
Plastics are all suspect IMO, particularly in hot liquid applications (looking at you, Pho delivery).
Aluminum seems like it would be fine, but the cans all use internal rust inhibiting coatings (which vary from beverage to beverage) that are also suspect.
Parchment paper is fine, butcher paper is coated, as you point out.
Oh, and your drinking water is probably full of microplastics.
Personally, I use glass storage for leftovers, reverse osmosis filter for drinking water, only buy liquids packaged in glass, and try to buy whole ingredients/cook my own food. But I still sometimes enjoy a can of beer or a take out meal. I figure if there is a hazard, it’s dose dependent, and I just try to be a little thoughtful about where I’m picking up exposure.
There are risks with aluminium causing neurological problems, especially the soft unanodised stuff. I think aluminium cooking pans are banned in some countries.
Ah damn, there goes another one – thanks for flagging. We oven-cook fish packets and recently switched from using foil to unbleached parchment, but that was more about sustainability. Guess there's another good reason to avoid the foil.
Correct! Sorry I did not mean to imply that the glass itself was the problem, just that choosing glass doesn’t mean that the product is phthalate-free. So many foods contain these chemicals because of some contamination during processing.
Glass isn't good enough for extreme non-reactivity, e.g. for containing ultrapure water used in semiconductor fabs. The real gold standard for non-reactive chemicals is PTFE, which is a PFAS. This shows that lumping all PFAS together as "forever chemicals" makes no sense. So long as you never overheat it (easily confirmed with an IR thermometer), PTFE is one of the safest food-contact materials you can get.
Borosilicate glass or soda-lime glass are not good for storing ultrapure water because sodium ions will be leeched from the glass.
This is not something that would matter in any food-contact application.
While PTFE neither is modified by food nor any part of it is leeched into the food, it can retain minute amounts of food in its pores, which may be retained despite further attempts to clean it, which does not happen with glass.
When a PTFE container is used to store different kinds of food, it can transfer the scent of one of them to the other.
The PTFE recipients used for chemical experiments may be cleaned by aggressive methods, e.g. with strong acids and/or strong oxidants, which would destroy any organic substances. Such cleaning methods cannot be applied in a common household.
Therefore borosilicate glass or soda-lime glass are better food-contact materials than PTFE, even if they can react with various chemicals that would have no effect on PTFE, but none of those chemicals are encountered in food.
The association of PTFE with PFAS makes perfect sense. Part of the manufacturing process of Teflon (brand name PTFE) involves (involved?) GenX, which is reactive and was being dumped our drinking water supply.
"Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), also known as C8, is another man-made chemical. It is used in the process of making Teflon and similar chemicals (known as fluorotelomers), although it is burned off during the process and is not present in significant amounts in the final products." [GenX is very similar.]
And there's no technical reason why manufacturing PFAS polymers necessarily has to result in PFAS small molecule pollution. The waste could be captured and treated with processes such as supercritical water oxidation. This would of course cost more, but seeing as there's no good substitute for PFAS polymers, I'd happily pay more for them. Pollution, like all externalities, is a market failure, and it's the government's job to fix market failures with regulation.
Gambling with people’s health for a third time to “correct a market failure” is an incredibly grim proposition. Oh it causes cancer? We’ll try again with a new chemical! New chemical in the water supply? Oopsie, we’ll capture it with this next attempt!
Chemical reactivity isn't the only thing at play here, in fact I'd say it's more burying the lead (kekek) than addressing the issue at hand. Sure glass isn't the most inert material, but another piece of the puzzle that is often neglected is mechanical abrasion. Once that surface has been compromised, the microplastics come right out.
Glass has the benefit of very high chemical inertness while also being extremely resistant to mechanical abrasion. Some types of glass are clearly not good enough (eg most 'crystal'/lead glasses), but borosilicate and fused silica are certainly well proven materials.
Another process that is relevant, leaching, while considered a 'chemical process' does not actually involve any kind of 'reactivity'. It's governed by solubility and statistical mechanics.
The main issue I see is that it's impossible to know how hot a pan surface is, and food cooks very differently at the same temperature depending on things like moisture content. So how on earth do you know whether it's at high temperature?
While PTFE (Teflon) is resistant to many chemicals that would damage borosilicate glass, borosilicate glass is perfectly safe in contact with food.
Borosilicate glass is much more resistant to acids (except hydrogen fluoride) than to alkalis, but most foods are acidic or neutral, none are alkaline.
Of the materials commonly encountered, the safest for food contact are borosilicate glass, normal glass, commercially-pure titanium and stainless steel.
While PTFE is much more inert than common glass and even than borosilicate glass, it is not a good material for food storage.
The reason is that PTFE, like any plastic, is porous, so it can never be perfectly cleaned, but it will retain embedded in it some residues of the food previously stored in it. This can lead just to some undesirable smell, but in appropriate temperature and humidity conditions it can also lead to the growth of bacteria.
For food storage and handling, the best food-contact materials remain glasses or metals, which can be cleaned perfectly.
Not fair to consumers. Mega Corp created pretty metal cups and we moved off of plastics ones like nalgene. Vacuum sealed metal containers hold ice much better than glass or plastic.
Jokes on us, Mega Corp sprayed plastic liners and/or PFAS onto the metal for longevity. Same with milk cartons. Most of us didn’t know this until years later.
Glass is not an option for people with young children. I don’t want to pick up glass out of their car seat again.
It is not just convenience. It is also cost. How many customers will be willing to pay a $ or more just for the packaging? Every alternative to plastic is much more expensive. For instance, take glass. Glass bottles break very easily during transport and they are also more expensive to purchase. If you are thinking of recycling them, that too adds cost in the process - from pickup, cleaning, drying etc.
The holy grail for packaging would be a transparent, flexible, glass-like substance that is also extremely inert and which doesn't absorb the contents, doesn't spoil, doesn't allow air in or out, retains shape for a long time.... and yet can be decomposed!! As you can see this is a tall order.
Price is king. Everyone knows glass containers are better and consumers prefer them. However, shipping glass containers has a considerably higher cost than plastic from both a weight perspective as well as a fragility/loss perspective. That doesn't even factor in the cost of the glass containers themselves.
If someone invented a glass that was as cheap and light as plastic food suppliers would switch to it in a heartbeat.
What the world needs is glass foam that's strong enough that it won't break while shipping and smooth on both the outside and inside. Think: Glass foam with a Gorilla glass-like surface on both the outside and inside.
Were clay pots fine? How would we know it wasn’t helping with the 50% child mortality rate?
I object to the idea that the old-times ways were better when we know even in the short history people were prescribe cigarettes and brushed their teeth with radioactive toothpaste.
In Japan, convenience stores have a section where you can buy PET bottles with hot beverages. These bottles are heated by the shelf and just sit there all day. I’ve always suspected there must be so many chemicals leaching into the beverages.
There's going to be an IQ drop for at least one generation if not multiple just like leaded gas (which is still in use and sprayed around every airport)
Have you ever priced avfgas (100LL)? At $6+ per gallon, I don't know of many pilots who would spray their fuel around airports. If they are going to waste their avgas dollar, it would be flying aimlessly around the sky for the sheer joy of it.
How is it legal for Sweetgreen, Cava and other restaurants to use PFAS in "compostable" food packaging and make it seem like a "sustainable" alternative to plastic packaging? [1]
It's difficult for me to contain my emotions whenever I read about PFAS being found in yet another common material and certain government bodies trying to deregulate safety inspections [2].
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/dan...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/28/trum...