As lawmakers around the world weigh bans of 'forever chemicals,” many manufacturers are pushing back, saying there often is no substitute.
As lawmakers around the world weigh bans of 'forever chemicals,” many manufacturers are pushing back, saying there often is no substitute.
Well, then I don’t think it makes sense for an immediate blanket ban on it.
I suspect the best path forward is to set maximum limits and slowly adjust those down over time. I really don’t think we want to continue to be inundated with carcinogens.
I generally agree. The links to cancer are a bit tenuous to be honest. We know at high levels they definitely are bad, but at low levels we aren’t really sure. Looking at the effects to people living downstream of the DuPont plants, and who were drinking high quantities of it in their source water, we known it’s bad. The problem is that it bioaccumulates and we suspect that at low levels, over long enough, it’ll be bad. The low levels we’re talking about are in the single digit part per trillion. It’s really hard to put into context how small 1 ppt is. If we took Lake Superior as an example, 1 ppt would be 32 gallons in the whole lake. Loch ness lake would be 1.95 gallons.
NYC generates approximately 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater per day, that means 1 ppt would be about 5 mL per day in the whole city.
We know that PFAS is bad at high levels, but because the low levels are so low we are having a hard time proving it’s bad. Most studies will say that there are links or that it’s a likely carcinogen.
We definitely need to cut this stuff out, but doing so is going to seriously cripple most peoples way of life or we’ll find a replacement which might not be as safe as we think it is.