[kongolongo]

The problem is you can't practically do that for many compounds either because of ethical reasons or because it would take far too long and would in the mean time impede progress significantly.

Take plastics for example, they're as acutely non-toxic as you can get you're not having any readily measurable adverse health outcomes from handling it, touching it, and even consuming foods directly in contact with it. And yet there are still things we would have missed even if we adopted this whitelisting approach. We would have never captured the problem of microplastics that we see today, the mechanical and chemical breakdown of plastics in the environment leading to far higher consumption and presence of it in our bodies could not have realistically been studied or predicted even if we took a whitelisting approach.

Now you have to consider what the effects of whitelisting everything would mean for productivity and progress. Imagine how much more everyday things would cost if plastics had to be whitelisted before being allowed in any products. Even now knowing about the existence of microplastics, it isn't clear that the effects they have decisively outweigh the benefits of plastics.

[jpgvm]

First of all I am mostly talking about plastics in the context of food packaging.

I would be more inclined to agree with your argument regarding progress/innovation if there were more novel plastics coming to the market for food packaging but that isn't really the case and there hasn't been anything ground-breaking since PET.

Whitelisting at this stage of maturity isn't just the right thing to do, it's also easy and beats playing whackamole if you decide something needs to get phased out.

[serf]

>I would be more inclined to agree with your argument regarding progress/innovation if there were more novel plastics coming to the market for food packaging but that isn't really the case and there hasn't been anything ground-breaking since PET.

disagree. there are new plastics constantly , and using bio-degradable plastics in packaging is getting a huge push within the industry for the past few years.

One example would be bovine-gelatin-films which are a new replacement for 'saran-wrap' style wrapping plastics.

a push for biodegradable plastics has been active since the U.N. listed it as a goal.

one imagines it would be hard to fully vet every proposed idea, there are thousands. Time will tell which will be human-kind.

https://sdgs.un.org/goals

[eurasiantiger]

Bovine gelatin is another Creutzfeld—Jakob’s prion disaster waiting to happen.

[legutierr]

You think there are prions in the gelatin? What makes you say that?

[eurasiantiger]

Bovine gelatin is made from the animal’s brain tissues and it was a major transmission vector in the UK CJD disaster. At least that was the story then, apparently the truth is not so.