[xarthna]

It is important to stop the introduction of these chemicals and microplastics into our environment. That should be the number one goal - to stop it at it's source instead of dealing with it after the fact. Depending on how the filtration systems scale, not everyone would be able to benefit - and certainly not wildlife which is affected.

In the meantime, it may be effective to remove these chemicals from your body through regular blood and plasma donation[0]. Although not entirely altruistic, I doubt those in need of emergency blood are asking if it contains PFASs. In the end it helps you and those in need.

I have also recently switched to stainless steel cookware and picked up a LifeStraw home water filter[1] that claims to reduce these chemicals in your drinking water.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8994130/ [1] https://lifestraw.com/products/lifestraw-home

[cyanydeez]

Unfortunately, the EPA, and modern science has no proactive models to predict toxicity.

By the time disclosure occurs, studies are completed, you're 5 to 10 years into mass production. And a ban then gets another 5 years and manufacturing just needs to rotate a few molecules and those studies are now irrelevant.

Until we have a predictive model of toxicity, there's no real ability to do anything but in decadal scales.

[thatguy0900]

Or you can just mandate that new chemicals need the studies before they are mass produced, not after. I really don't see a reason companies need to be able to invent a new type of plastic then immediately start spraying it onto everything I eat.

[colordrops]

Absolutely. We are at a point where we have ore than enough technology to survive comfortably, and any new chemicals introduced into the environment should get approved before use.

[landemva]

Would this ban include EUA vaccines, or would you envision an exemption for Pfizer products?

[vlovich123]

I think EUA would be fine except for the fact that no one is probably introducing new plastics in an emergency situation anyway. Also the EAU authorization has lasted way too long. I think if you ask most reasonable people the emergency is over. Certainly lots of pandemic-era behaviors are over.

[concordDance]

This would basically freeze chemicals at the ones we currently use, with innovation being essentially impossible due to cost.

Continuing to let us experiment with new chemicals may be better.

[thatguy0900]

The "experimenting" taking place right now is pouring it into our body and water supplies. How much does that cost? An unfathomable amount, but it's not paid by the companies, so they don't care.

[asdfman123]

Wait a minute: what if leeching was actually a legitimate treatment to remove blood toxins, maybe like mercury or lead poisoning?

By the way, looks like donation removes 8% of your blood, so you’d have to donate 9 times to halve the amount of any chemical in your blood (assuming it’s not also stored elsewhere in your body).

[swixmix]

"phlebotomy [...] A procedure in which a needle is used to take blood from a vein, usually for laboratory testing. Phlebotomy may also be done to remove extra red blood cells from the blood, to treat certain blood disorders. Also called blood draw and venipuncture."

https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-term...

[0_____0]

I mean the legit way to remove blood lead and mercury is chelation therapy,

[nylonstrung]

I've heard that whatever benefits you get from Thiel's vampire transfusions also just come from removing blood via donation

[amelius]

So does blood donation have an effect on life expectancy?

[Cthulhu_]

It sure does for the recipient!

[amelius]

:)

[Lewton]

Probably yes, but it's hard to tease out how much since there's a lot of restrictions on who can donate, so people who donate are already a healthier demographic

[amelius]

If the effect is likely positive, then isn't it in the interest of bloodbanks to find out?

[guyomes]

Given the long and controversial history of bloodletting [0], this might do more harm then good.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting

[jjeaff]

You certainly shouldn't donate blood in unsanitary conditions and while you are ill and weakened from some other sickness. Which is the conditions under which bloodletting usually occured in the past.

[asdfman123]

I’m not saying people should do it, of course. Just wondering if there’s at least a grain of truth in it.

[Cthulhu_]

I'm sure there's a grain of truth to it, else it wouldn't have been pushed as a treatment; likewise, there's a grain of truth in using ivermectin to treat the 'rona (in that it increases the survival chance of people who also have intestinal worms, see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...)

[rcme]

Any usage prior to the widespread adoption of the scientific method is largely irrelevant.

[copperx]

> picked up a LifeStraw home water filter[1] that claims to reduce these chemicals in your drinking water

Seeing that the LifeStraw pitcher is made of plastic, I wonder whether the amount of filtered chemicals is greater than the ones introduced by the plastic in the pitcher itself.

Civilization is built on plastics all the way down.

[rjknight]

For $20 more, you can get a glass version: https://lifestraw.com/products/lifestraw-home-glass-pitcher

[jutrewag]

It depends. If you buy fresh fruits and vegetables and meat, eggs, milk from a local farm and use only glass/copper/stainless steel for all your cooking and drinking needs you can do pretty well at an individual level. Having water from your own well helps too but that may not be available to everyone.

[revscat]

> It is important to stop the introduction of these chemicals and microplastics into our environment.

This is an unreasonable, although noble, goal. The petrochemical industry is simply too embedded to be meaningfully regulated in the ways that it should be. They have had de facto nation state powers for decades, or, in the case of Saudi Arabia/Aramco, are state actors themselves.

[asdfman123]

There’s already a long list of petrochemical byproducts that are regulated.

Sure, it’s not perfect, but nothing is.

[emodendroket]

The name "forever chemicals" kind of suggests that these things being in essentially every body of water on earth means we still could use a way to deal with filtration even if we never pollute again.

[philosopher1234]

regulated by who though? the GP was making the argument that the government is captured by the oil industry. regulation by a captured government is not legitimate regulation.

[asdfman123]

That kind of black and white cynicism is incorrect and the opposite of a solution. It impedes people who actually want to fix problems, and who occasionally succeed.

I’ve found my own pockets of cynicism is motivated fundamentally by laziness. If it’s impossible to succeed, you don’t need to try, don’t need to risk failure. But it is possible.

[vlovich123]

What successes have you seen here / been involved in?

[abecedarius]

Saying there's an ubiquitous failure of a certain approach to a problem doesn't mean "give up". I think it means you should step back, question your assumptions, think more broadly. A nice example of people doing that: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-... (not to endorse their specific policy proposals, necessarily).

[asdfman123]

Got it. That’s not cynicism, but saying “all progress must stop until my favorite solution is implemented.”

Centralized authorities are even less accountable to private interests.

[cyberax]

Most of the “bad” microplastic pollution comes from clothes and disposable bags and utensils. Bags are clearly on their way out, being replaced by cardboard bags.

Clothes are trickier. Polyester is extremely versatile and durable. But newer formulations of nylon (which is biodegradable) or PTFE (aka "teflon") treated fabrics are comparable.

[awestroke]

> Bags are clearly on their way out, being replaced by cardboard bags.

In your city, maybe. Absolutely not globally

[concordDance]

Disposable bags in the west contaminating the water? I would be immensely surprised if that's even 1% of clothes and shampoos/beauty products. We don't normally put plastic backs in running water for ages.

[cyberax]

Yes. Thin disposable bags are easily degraded mechanically, resulting in lots of microparticles.

For clothes it's even worse, they produce microparticles at all times, especially during laundry.

[concordDance]

Thin plastic bags in the west have a very short lifecycle that goes mostly shop->home->bin->landfill (segregated from water table). There is almost no opportunity for it to actually contaminate the water.

[colordrops]

Your argument could be used against doing anything about climate change as well.

[humanizersequel]

Moreover the tradeoffs that would come with an actual meaningful reduction in, say, microplastics, are drastic QOL downgrades that many people would not accept, forever chemicals be damned.

[dbsmith83]

> In the meantime, it may be effective to remove these chemicals from your body through regular blood and plasma donation[0]

slight distinction: remove these chemicals from your blood

I only mention that because there are most likely places in the body where doing this will not do anything to help remove them from that organ

As far as removing it from the blood, I wonder about the efficiency of blood donation. It seems to me that simply stopping the intake of new PFAs by drinking purified water from your pitcher should help considerably, because water consumed goes into the bloodstream regularly. Additionally, red blood cells are constantly being cycled in the body as well, with their byproducts excreted.

[Cthulhu_]

Does the lifestraw also remove essential minerals from the water?

I mean that's the primary reason we got a water filter ourselves, filter out some minerals so our cats get less urinary stones.

But we've switched to stainless and/or 'plain' steel ourselves as well, we still have some non-stick pans for e.g. frying eggs but we try to avoid them. Even before PFAS, I never liked the teflon pans because they wear and sometimes flake off after a while.

[datavirtue]

I won't cook eggs on anything but cast iron. I wonder what the hell people are doing that drives them to use cheap, thin, pans coated in hormone disruptors. My eggs never stick. In restaurants your eggs are cooked on steal...hundreds of eggs each shift.

[emodendroket]

It's too late. They're everywhere. They're even in rainwater.

[BaculumMeumEst]

too late to remove them completely, sure. too late to reduce their abundance, probably not. thank god everyone doesn't have such a short-sighted, nihilistic outlook that makes them immediately give up when presented with a difficult problem

[empressplay]

nobody's giving up, but the priority must be in mitigation / removal not prevention (since for the reasons outlined prevention is going to be a steeper hill.) Mitigation isn't a replacement for eventual prevention though...

[BaculumMeumEst]

i agree with you, but certainly you can appreciate that what you just said is very different from expressing doomsaying sentiments like "it's too late" with no mention of pursuing a solution

[emodendroket]

How is it “giving up” to disagree with the suggestion of trying to shut the barn door after the horse has bolted rather than trying to chase it down? If we never polluted the water ever again we’d still be left with contaminated water.

[BaculumMeumEst]

> How is it “giving up” to disagree with the suggestion of trying to shut the barn door after...

the submission is about engineers filtering forever chemicals from the water. the response was "it's too late." that's giving up. if you want to be intellectually dishonest and pretend it's not, that's your choice.

> If we never polluted the water ever again we’d still be left with contaminated water.

sometimes in life you find yourself in a position where there's a mess and you need to clean it up. i don't know what else to tell you.

[emodendroket]

The post I was replying to said "That should be the number one goal - to stop it at it's source instead of dealing with it after the fact." Who's being dishonest here? The gratuitous condescension seems rather unwarranted if you're not going to figure out the context of my post before attacking it.

[Apofis]

I definitely don't understand why post-use regulation and cleanup fees aren't baked into the cost of doing business for these companies. We need to stop being reactionary in our capitalism and be proactive.

[empressplay]

mitigation #1 goal.

stopping #2 goal.