[c0balt]

I feel for the people living there and being affected by the pollution. The long term effects of chemical pollution are ugly.

But the CEO in the intro just seems like an odd choice. PFAS were known to cause issues for a long time, if you continued to use them for years then it is in your back too.

Being "surprised" this might eventually affect your own product line just seems naive. You might have trusted 3M but just blindly trusting a supplier is not an excuse at some point.

[JKCalhoun]

"I feel for the people living there and being affected by the pollution."

Isn't it all of us with carpets in our homes that are affected? (Albeit to a lesser degree—but also we are at the least partners in this if our buying carpets are destroying these other people's communities.)

[throwup238]

I think “to a lesser degree” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The degrees of exposure are many orders of magnitude wide. Occupational exposure in a factory is far greater than living downstream from a polluter which is far greater still than being a far away consumer of the polluter’s products.

Your carpet doesn’t contain enough PFAS to create dangerous runoff and contaminate groundwater or entire rivers, but a town that manufactures most of the world’s mass produced carpeting is going to generate industrial amounts of pollution in a concentrated area.

[yojo]

You should probably be more worried about the flame retardants in the rebond carpet pad. Better these days, but older installed stuff had non-trivial PPM.

[pfdietz]

> PFAS were known to cause issues for a long time

Has this actually been confirmed, or is this just the precautionary principle in action?

[SapporoChris]

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10237242/ Our review of industry documents shows that companies knew PFAS was “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested” by 1970, forty years before the public health community.

[pfdietz]

I don't see any mention there of the dosage at which these toxic effects occur. That would be necessary to determine if the amount found in the environment is a concern or not.

[dmbche]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S20462...

See table 1

>The toxicity of PFAS to humans has been linked to several health-related issues such as breast cancer,80 infertility,81 vitamin D deficiency,82 increased cholesterol,83 diabetes,84 altered metabolism,85 thyroid toxicity,86 atherosclerosis,87 osteoporosis,88 and cardiovascular diseases.61 Individually, various PFAS and their associated health-related issues are summarised in Table 1.

[pessimizer]

That's silly. The fact that it is toxic makes it a concern, and the fact that it is a concern means that if you're selling it you should find out yourself about the specifics.

It's like saying that you're not responsible for stealing a wallet because you didn't know exactly how much was in it.

[Filligree]

A lot of things are toxic at high doses, yet have essentially no effect at low doses. The linear no-threshold model is a simplification that rarely matches reality.

[pfdietz]

Silly? There are plenty of substances that are toxic at high dose and innocuous, or even necessary, at low dose. Examples of the latter are vitamins A and B6.

The question of responsibility is of course not what we were talking about, but rather whether the statement "PFAS were known to cause issues" was in fact true. Too often we see possibility of harm being deliberately conflated with actually causing harm. Is it too much to ask for some honesty here?

[WarmWash]

For most people, if you're taking any position with nuance, your not actually serious about the problem and therefore part of the problem.

[braingravy]

The chemical differences between PFAS and vitamin A and B6 are beyond vast.

Comparing them betrays a complete ignorance of the molecular properties that, in combination with biological system processes, make A and B6 healthy at small doses and poisonous at large doses on one hand, and those that makes PFAS linearly poisonous at any given doses on the other. (And yes, you can be exposed to small amounts of toxins and be fine. That doesn’t change the toxicity of a given substance.)

Struggling to see how this could be anything but a bad faith argument.