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Our whole understanding and approach with regards to risks from industrial chemicals is so completely off... We keep churning out new compounds (~2000 every ye

• doitLP 6y ago
  Agreed. The same thing happened with BPA — banned in toys and bottles after decades of harm to be replaced by at least 40 other chemicals that haven’t proven to be unsafe — yet.
• minikites 6y ago
  >It seems to me these things should be considered unsafe by default, tested at small scale for years, proven to be bio-degradable and if used at scale introduced very slowly That's no way to create shareholder value.
  • WalterBright 6y ago
    Socialist countries (without capitalism) have a worse track record.
    • minikites 6y ago
      Oh? I'm sure you have evidence for that, I'd like to see it.
      • WalterBright 6y ago
        Google Volga pollution.
        • minikites 6y ago
          Russia hasn't been socialist for 30 years. If we're dredging up the past, look up "Cuyahoga River pollution". Spoiler alert: it was addressed through government regulation, not the free market.
• aardvarkr 6y ago
  >The other thing is individual accountability: chemical engineers who facilitate this insanity should be held responsible. Hey, I wanted to point out for your future reference that you really should be blaming the chemists. They’re the ones who design the product and intentionally choose this. Chemical engineers are the ones who do the manufacturing of chemical products. I have CE friends and they’re the ones in the plants keeping processes running
  • stfp 6y ago
    Thanks, good clarification!
• bencollier49 6y ago
  The precautionary principle, which is what you describe, is in greater use in Europe. https://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/precautionary_principle_decision_making_under_uncertainty_FB18_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsal...
• dgemm 6y ago
  Probably the best known example of this (who I assume you are referring to) is incidentally responsible for both leaded fuel and CFCs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
  • weaksauce 6y ago
    there was a fun dollop episode about him if you want a little levity while listening to an absolute ecological monster... https://soundcloud.com/the-dollop/393-thomas-midgley https://soundcloud.com/the-dollop/393-thomas-midgley
  • triceratops 6y ago
    He also appears on this amazing list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_their_own_inventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_th...
• zug_zug 6y ago
  I guess my proposal is that new chemicals need to be tested at a 100x dose on 15 different species, up to primate. On lesser species, things such as number of offspring need to be measured (reproductive health seems to be the first to go a lot of times). On primates, we'd look for sperm count relative to a control group (again the first thing to go). If any effect is seen at a 100x dose (of the amount expected to be ingested) the chemical would be dropped.
  • cogman10 6y ago
    IDK, I think disposal and recycling is really where we need to focus. Some chemcials are damn useful while being toxic. I don't think the right thing to do is banning all toxic chemcials because they might cause environmental damage. Instead, let's focus on figuring out safe handling upfront. A good example of this is batteries. Super toxic, super useful.
    • doitLP 6y ago
      Damn useful but at what cost? Unfortunately we often don’t know the cost until 10 to 50 years on. It’s impossible to close Pandora’s box once it’s open. Look at DDT https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground/ https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground... and mercury in the food chain and and and and
      • DennisP 6y ago
        I think GPs point is to keep them contained while in use, with a plan to keep them out of the environment once you're done with them. Batteries are a great example. We really need good battery recycling. We also really need good batteries, since it looks like they'll play a major role in preventing catastrophic global warming.
  • uoaei 6y ago
    Strong acute exposure and slow chronic exposure will show different effects overall. But yours sounds like a decent heuristic as a first pass.
• whatshisface 6y ago
  >The other thing is individual accountability: chemical engineers who facilitate this insanity should be held responsible. How would they be expected to know what the results of their chemical will be? Drug companies focus exclusively on biological effects and can't even get drugs to regularly pass phase 1 trials, and you're asking for a single chemist at Industrial Sealants Inc to do what entire pharma companies can't? Putting lead in gasoline sounds dumb, but so does putting mercury in vaccines. The only way to tell the difference is to do studies, which would take teams of people. It is absolutely not possible to expect individual chemists to accurately predict the biological consequences of their products.
  • tehjoker 6y ago
    Maybe we should have tiered rules for how much testing is done based on the number of tons that are going to be produced and how they are being disposed of. (And if we already do, then the rules for the higher tiers need to be tightened.)
    • whatshisface 6y ago
      Given the extreme differences in badness per ton I'm not sure if that's a reasonable metric. Maybe instead we could mandate yucca mountain level storage for everything that hasn't been evaluated, and then let companies decide for themselves whether or not they will be making enough of the stuff to justify studying how to dispose of it more cheaply.
      • tehjoker 6y ago
        It might be possible to establish categories where if your molecule has XYZ properties it falls into this bucket. I think a category for really novel molecules that haven't been evaluated is a good idea with tight restrictions on how much can be produced. There should also be a presumption that minor edits to known dangerous molecules should be presumed dangerous without testing.
  • mcguire 6y ago
    Be careful about diluting responsibility---if everyone can point to someone else, no one will make a hard (and not immediately profitable) decision. In all of those studies, etc., there is someone at the top who does, and should, make the ultimate decision, just like when building a bridge, there is an engineer who puts his career on the line.
• consumer451 6y ago
  > It seems to me these things should be considered unsafe by default, tested at small scale for years, proven to be bio-degradable and if used at scale introduced very slowly... It sounds like you are describing the Precautionary Principle, which is unfortunately made light of here due to its impact on GMO food adoption in the EU. I do agree with you, but this idea seems to go against the hyper-growth form of capitalism which is generally accepted as the only option in the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM%3Al32042 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM...
• mdavis6890 6y ago
  The problem with the Precautionary Principal (that you seem to describe) is that it doesn't account for opportunity cost. New compounds are developed for a reason and to contribute some value to society. That could be a very small convenience optimization, or could be for a life-saving purpose. While we're waiting for some compound to be deemed 'safe' for some particular use, society is missing out on the benefits of that use. The COVID vaccine is a very timely example of this. It/they haven't gone through nearly the amount of testing and trials that are normally required. But we're going ahead with it anyway, since waiting would cost more lives. This is a judgement call that some set of fallible humans has made. Easy in this huge, public, major case. But for the thousands of compounds developed yearly, who decides this, and at what cost to society in lives, quality of life and resources? And this doesn't count the resources that society has to spend to make the determination of safety, which have their own opportunity cost as well.
  • stfp 6y ago
    Taking a step back: here, incidentally, they were trying to basically facilitate driving, which is not really in the interest of society / life on the planet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Maybe the vaccine is actually a bad idea? I don't think so. But even if it turned out to have terrible side effects, that would only affect people (the people alive now and taking the vaccine) and not the environment (all the humans and other animals, present and future).
• derbOac 6y ago
  Underlying this all is a sort of scientism issue. On the one hand you have a culture that assumes the framework of a scientific framework is "truth" and that the lingua franca of risk should be demonstrable evidence. On the other is a culture that denies the realism of the scientific studies, and sees risk in misrepresentative evidence. Generally speaking, the latter camp gets labeled as "antiscientific" by the former, and the former gets labeled as "elitist" or having conflicts of interest. It's part of a theme that seems to be popping up a lot in the last several years or so in numerous settings: which is worse, lack of evidence or misleading evidence? This example with the salmon is interesting to me because (if I'm understanding it correctly), the compound in the tire isn't the problem, it's a byproduct of tire breakdown. So I could see a chemist in the lab sitting there saying "ok we ran our tests on X it's fine" without understanding that in the real world, X reacts and breaks down into other compounds that are problematic. It's kind of a prime example of how the scientific model isn't the correct one to be using in the first place. Within the bounds of the model, X is fine, but the model is wrong as a representation of reality, so the conclusions are wrong. I think underlying a lot of this are differing ideas of what is "scientific", or what constitutes the universe of risks. I don't see this dynamic changing until certain cultures surrounding scientific authority change.
  • whatshisface 6y ago
    >It's kind of a prime example of how the scientific model isn't the correct one to be using in the first place. What's your proposed alternative to science for determining the products of tire breakdown? Asking psychics? Polling facebook moms? Voting on it in Congress?
    • hombre_fatal 6y ago
      Unfortunately, alternatives to science are being pushed right now in the current culture war. Google “other ways of knowing”. Worth pointing out just because your appeal to absurdism (which most of us would agree with) is losing steam in the marketplace of ideas.
    • stfp 6y ago
      Look up scientism. The whole point is we need to accept that no single method will give us this kind of visibility and understanding, and given that fact we should be more careful about certain things, especially things we just seem to keep miscalculating and that have long-lasting, terrible effects. That's actual science vs. commercial/industrial marketing masquerading as science.
• fh973 6y ago
  In the EU new substances seem to need registration at least. It's called REACH regulation: https://echa.europa.eu/regulations/reach/understanding-reach https://echa.europa.eu/regulations/reach/understanding-reach
• chrisbrandow 6y ago
  This has lots of practicality problems, obviously. The individual accountability is certainly tough, particularly since we learn about impacts only over time. And discoveries like these are studied, applied and distributed by ultimately hundreds to thousands of people.
• johndevor 6y ago
  Exactly why the covid vaccine is so risky... we won't know long term effects for years.
• ska 6y ago
  > eg. putting teflon or PFAS in literally everything because why not. But it wasn't because "why not" it was because there were very concrete benefits. This is why the fundamental issue is policy, not science - the science can only help you understand a situation better, it can't answer "what is the right amount of risk to take". The precautionary approach you suggest isn't a new idea, but it has very real negative economic effect at minimum, and a complex relationship with other issues. Collectively, somehow (e.g. legislative bodies) we have to attempt the impossible task of finding the "right" position on the scale between don't-trust-anything-new to anything goes. Clearly both these extremes are problematic, but balancing them is really hard.
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  How does one individual remedy this for themselves?
• BeetleB 6y ago
  > chemical engineers who facilitate this insanity should be held responsible. It took decades for a lot of people working on this problem to identify the cause of the salmon deaths. Do not expect the individual chemical engineer to be able to come close to knowing how safe a chemical is.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• throwaway189262 6y ago
  There's millions, maybe billions of different chemicals created by biological processes too. But I get your point and I think there's something to be done advising caution with certain classes of chemicals. For example, ones containing Bromine and Fluorine have a much higher chance of being dangerous because their bonds are so strong