7 ms·

The problem is not PFAS. It is extreme regulatory capture that got us to the this point. Even if we ban PFAS tomorrow, there are other alternatives that will be

by doitLP 5y ago

The problem is not PFAS. It is extreme regulatory capture that got us to the this point. Even if we ban PFAS tomorrow, there are other alternatives that will be used and another 2 decades of lies and cover ups before we find out what harm those chemicals have. Example: look at what happened when BPAs harms became known. Manufacturers switched to using any of the other 40 chemicals in the same bisphenol family (BPS, etc) many of which had even worse safety profiles, while proudly proclaiming their products were "BPA free". We need to flip the approval process on its head -- from "safe until proven otherwise" to "unsafe until (independently) proven safe". The tally of harm to all life caused by these chemicals is on a massive scale that any mass murderer would be proud of.

ashildr 5y ago
> from "safe until proven otherwise" to "unsafe until (independently) proven safe" That’s about how the EU does it.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  How can you prove anything safe without data on its use? Isn't that sort of a chicken and egg problem?
  - sooheon 5y ago
    Should the data be collected without consent by exposing the public to it for decades or provided by clinical trials funded by the company that wants to bring it to market?
    - qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
      You are asking for the impossible. It can be impossible to tell with things that only have no - to mild effects. Proving a negative ("this is not dangerous") is hard :)
      - sooheon 5y ago
        > It can be impossible to tell with things that only have no - to mild effects. If any effects are unmeasurable with standard clinical trial practices, then it's safe. People care about things that actually are harmful. > Proving a negative ("this is not dangerous") is hard :) Which is why I never asked for it. Safety standards are always phrased positively. OSHA doesn't say "workplaces must not be dangerous", they say "wear a hard hat, the employer shall do ___, employees must not be forced to do ___". It's very easy to regulate that "new compounds must be shown not to affect human hormone levels at X concentration, must be shown not to be carcinogenic in Y model of cancer" etc.
        ironmagma 5y ago
        Even still, PFAS started being used in the 50s. If it took us this long to figure out there is something dangerous about it, chances are a small study would not have found anything either. We’ve had lots of time and a huge N.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    You collect data on a smaller scale, like clinical trials do for medications. There's a big range between "no data" and "we've enrolled eight billion humans in an uncontrolled trial".
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  Which isn't without issues of its own of course, for example the EU is notoriously backwards on the issue of genetically modified crops which may turn out to be a vital lifeline if climate change causes agricultural collapse. Another example I can think of off the top of my head is the atrociously bad legislation to what was then the new technology of vaping, it came in pre-Brexit just when I was considering quitting smoking (which I eventually managed and never could have done without a vape) and it was so poorly thought out I'm convinced the tobacco industry had a hand in drafting it! The precautionary principle has its merits, but I think it's often cargo-culted and its limitations not well articulated. In cases such as GM crops where the stakes may within a human lifetime be "devestating famine" versus "less famine", or cases like vaping where although the harm is unknown it's certainly less than what it's replacing (vaping is uncontroversially less harmful than smoking) the precautionary principle actually has a harmful effect in itself.
  - jszymborski 5y ago
    Sure, banning GMO's outright would be a huge problem, but is it so awful that they be tested first? I don't know if they test for this, but GMOs do run the risk of become invasive or destructive species which could potentially tilt things towards the "devastating famine" side of the equation. I don't think the ecological concern is what most people worry about when they think GMOs, and I'm not of the mind that GMOs = Bad, but I think we owe it to ourselves to study the ecological impact of GMOs we plan to grow widely.
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      I think what the argument comes down to is how much risk we're willing to tolerate as a society. There's definitely a middle ground to be had between an under-cautious world where things like leaded petrol and thalidomide are on the market causing immense human suffering, and an overly cautious world where progress is suffocated by the glacially slow wheels of bureaucracy and endless spurious "safety" objections by lobbyists attempting to kill their competition in its crib. Having said that, the EU is a bit of a unique specimen when it comes to things like this. I'm perhaps being a little unfair to the precautionary principle per se when I suppose it's more the EU's implementation of it that I'm criticising. I don't want this to come across as an anti-EU polemic either, there's obviously pros and cons here and I realise the EU is very much in a class by itself when it comes to political polities which make comparisons quite difficult. My own biases are probably at play here too, for various reasons I'd say my risk tolerance is probably higher than most.
- refurb 5y ago
  No, that’s not how the EU does it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfluorex https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfluorex A drug that was highly suspected of killing several hundred to several thousand people stayed on the market for decades. A similar drug with similar risks was pulled from the US market 24 years earlier.
  - Lutzb 5y ago
    Would you say Benflourex is an outlier or the norm regarding the EUs stance?
- wiz21c 5y ago
  If you think about REACH I heard it's not what it does (although it sounds like it does). The lobbies were there...
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
> Example: look at what happened when BPAs harms became known. Manufacturers switched to using any of the other 40 chemicals in the same bisphenol family (BPS, etc) many of which had even worse safety profiles, while proudly proclaiming their products were "BPA free". It's worse than that. I remember when some 10 years ago Johnson&Johnson baby bottles were banned in one market, they were still available in others, and the FAQ on their website said they do this because they don't believe BPA is harmful. It is only after the total ban in 2012 that they stopped doing this.
- qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
  Except that most evidence support the safety of BPA...
toss1 5y ago
>>We need to flip the approval process on its head -- from "safe until proven otherwise" to "unsafe until (independently) proven safe". Totally agree in principle. There is one fly in the ointment - it is impossible to prove a negative, such as "X does not exist" or "there is no possible harm from this to any person ever" (water would not meet that standard). So, this needs to be implemented in such a way as to not completely halt progress. Should be straightforward to require testing to reasonable standards levels of biological harm to humans and ecology, persistence/degradability, etc. the levels need to be set by NEITHER the industry NOR the perfectionist eco-activists. Finding such a panel will be tricky.
- meristohm 5y ago
  What is progress?
  - toss1 5y ago
    I consider progress to be getting closer to technology that gets us out of the unsustainable ecological/biosystems hole which we have dug for ourselves. We are not going to put the technological genie back in the bottle, short of eliminating 98+% of all humans and reverting back to hunter-gatherer tribes. The only solution is to go through this dirty technology cycle and build and implement clean sustainable technologies that allow us to live with something resembling current populations without destroying the climate system, breaking the food web, or poisoning ourselves (& everything else). So, yes, the only thing worse than halting all progress now would be to do it a decade age before solar, wind, etc. became viable, but we need a lot more progress, i.e., better performance for lower costs - both ecological & economical - for most of our technologies, and eliminating those destructive technologies. That would be progress. What's your definition?
kongolongo 5y ago
>We need to flip the approval process on its head -- from "safe until proven otherwise" to "unsafe until (independently) proven safe". The tally of harm to all life caused by these chemicals is on a massive scale that any mass murderer would be proud of. That isn't always practically feasible and its a really tough problem to solve. Consider all the ways a compound released into the environment can break down and how long it might take for any exposure or even low levels of exposure might take to have any adverse health affects. The type of evidence you'd need to gather to demonstrate any compound is fully safe with that bar would make it nearly impossible to declare anything safe. Microplastics, PFAS, and other compounds with potential long-acting health impacts are very hard to predict far in advance. Strong evidence against any adverse health effects would take considerable effort to gather while in the mean time they would offer massive clear benefits and solve so many problems. Plastics have massively reduced costs in almost every industry and have become almost irreplaceable in some applications such as medical equipment (think packaging for syringes, surgical tools, or anything that requires contamination control). Yet how they break down into microplastics in the environment and then eventually bioaccumulate in our tissues through the food chain is something that would've been extremely hard to predict at the onset of their creation. Even now we don't know if they're necessarily harmful.
- just-ok 5y ago
  > Even now we don’t know if they’re necessarily harmful. Micro-plastics are definitely harmful, e.g. they’ve been associated with lower fertility [1,2]. We’re actively engineering our own extinction. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7967748/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7967748/ [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/28/shanna-swan-fertility-reproduction-count-down https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/28/shanna-swan-...
  - kongolongo 5y ago
    Associated with sure, but at what exposure levels? Can we expect all microplastics to have this affect? What if the lower fertility rates are tolerable compared to the benefits of plastic use overall? From your first source: >Data are still preliminary but suggest that ingested MPs bio-accumulate in mammalian tissue, including the testis, with outcomes on semen quality in rodents, as a consequence of inflammatory state and oxidative stress damage. >The mechanisms decreasing fertility rate during the lifespan are still poorly understood. >Taken together, although studies in mammals are still limited, preliminary observations point out a possible risk of MPs for male fertility. The evidence is still "preliminary" and data "suggests" some outcomes but nothing is close to definitive. There are lots of confounding factors that can cause lower fertility that are explicitly noted in the that source. For example they even suggest that the microplastics themselves might not be causing harm, but rather that they act as "sponges" or vehicles for concentrating other pollutants that are actually decreasing fertility.
bcrl 5y ago
It's not entirely regulatory capture. Progress in science requires the ability to understand and accept that new information can arrive that invalidates prior decisions. In the political sphere, this is known as a "flip-flop" and is sadly considered to be a poor trait by a good chunk of the public. So long as governments represent the public, and a cross section of the general public thinks that flip-flopping is a bad thing, I don't think it's possible to have decisions driven by the best available science. Side note: even scientists get things wrong. Businesses thrive on certainty, so some level of damping of changes in regulatory direction is required. Finding the right balance is, however, not something humans have done as well as we need to just yet.

by doitLP 5y ago

ashildr 5y ago

> from "safe until proven otherwise" to "unsafe until (independently) proven safe" That’s about how the EU does it.

ironmagma 5y ago
How can you prove anything safe without data on its use? Isn't that sort of a chicken and egg problem?
- sooheon 5y ago
  Should the data be collected without consent by exposing the public to it for decades or provided by clinical trials funded by the company that wants to bring it to market?
  - qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
    You are asking for the impossible. It can be impossible to tell with things that only have no - to mild effects. Proving a negative ("this is not dangerous") is hard :)
    - sooheon 5y ago
      > It can be impossible to tell with things that only have no - to mild effects. If any effects are unmeasurable with standard clinical trial practices, then it's safe. People care about things that actually are harmful. > Proving a negative ("this is not dangerous") is hard :) Which is why I never asked for it. Safety standards are always phrased positively. OSHA doesn't say "workplaces must not be dangerous", they say "wear a hard hat, the employer shall do ___, employees must not be forced to do ___". It's very easy to regulate that "new compounds must be shown not to affect human hormone levels at X concentration, must be shown not to be carcinogenic in Y model of cancer" etc.
      - ironmagma 5y ago
        Even still, PFAS started being used in the 50s. If it took us this long to figure out there is something dangerous about it, chances are a small study would not have found anything either. We’ve had lots of time and a huge N.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  You collect data on a smaller scale, like clinical trials do for medications. There's a big range between "no data" and "we've enrolled eight billion humans in an uncontrolled trial".
BoxOfRain 5y ago
Which isn't without issues of its own of course, for example the EU is notoriously backwards on the issue of genetically modified crops which may turn out to be a vital lifeline if climate change causes agricultural collapse. Another example I can think of off the top of my head is the atrociously bad legislation to what was then the new technology of vaping, it came in pre-Brexit just when I was considering quitting smoking (which I eventually managed and never could have done without a vape) and it was so poorly thought out I'm convinced the tobacco industry had a hand in drafting it! The precautionary principle has its merits, but I think it's often cargo-culted and its limitations not well articulated. In cases such as GM crops where the stakes may within a human lifetime be "devestating famine" versus "less famine", or cases like vaping where although the harm is unknown it's certainly less than what it's replacing (vaping is uncontroversially less harmful than smoking) the precautionary principle actually has a harmful effect in itself.
- jszymborski 5y ago
  Sure, banning GMO's outright would be a huge problem, but is it so awful that they be tested first? I don't know if they test for this, but GMOs do run the risk of become invasive or destructive species which could potentially tilt things towards the "devastating famine" side of the equation. I don't think the ecological concern is what most people worry about when they think GMOs, and I'm not of the mind that GMOs = Bad, but I think we owe it to ourselves to study the ecological impact of GMOs we plan to grow widely.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    I think what the argument comes down to is how much risk we're willing to tolerate as a society. There's definitely a middle ground to be had between an under-cautious world where things like leaded petrol and thalidomide are on the market causing immense human suffering, and an overly cautious world where progress is suffocated by the glacially slow wheels of bureaucracy and endless spurious "safety" objections by lobbyists attempting to kill their competition in its crib. Having said that, the EU is a bit of a unique specimen when it comes to things like this. I'm perhaps being a little unfair to the precautionary principle per se when I suppose it's more the EU's implementation of it that I'm criticising. I don't want this to come across as an anti-EU polemic either, there's obviously pros and cons here and I realise the EU is very much in a class by itself when it comes to political polities which make comparisons quite difficult. My own biases are probably at play here too, for various reasons I'd say my risk tolerance is probably higher than most.
refurb 5y ago
No, that’s not how the EU does it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfluorex https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfluorex A drug that was highly suspected of killing several hundred to several thousand people stayed on the market for decades. A similar drug with similar risks was pulled from the US market 24 years earlier.
- Lutzb 5y ago
  Would you say Benflourex is an outlier or the norm regarding the EUs stance?
wiz21c 5y ago
If you think about REACH I heard it's not what it does (although it sounds like it does). The lobbies were there...

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

> Example: look at what happened when BPAs harms became known. Manufacturers switched to using any of the other 40 chemicals in the same bisphenol family (BPS, etc) many of which had even worse safety profiles, while proudly proclaiming their products were "BPA free". It's worse than that. I remember when some 10 years ago Johnson&Johnson baby bottles were banned in one market, they were still available in others, and the FAQ on their website said they do this because they don't believe BPA is harmful. It is only after the total ban in 2012 that they stopped doing this.

qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
Except that most evidence support the safety of BPA...

toss1 5y ago

>>We need to flip the approval process on its head -- from "safe until proven otherwise" to "unsafe until (independently) proven safe". Totally agree in principle. There is one fly in the ointment - it is impossible to prove a negative, such as "X does not exist" or "there is no possible harm from this to any person ever" (water would not meet that standard). So, this needs to be implemented in such a way as to not completely halt progress. Should be straightforward to require testing to reasonable standards levels of biological harm to humans and ecology, persistence/degradability, etc. the levels need to be set by NEITHER the industry NOR the perfectionist eco-activists. Finding such a panel will be tricky.

meristohm 5y ago
What is progress?
- toss1 5y ago
  I consider progress to be getting closer to technology that gets us out of the unsustainable ecological/biosystems hole which we have dug for ourselves. We are not going to put the technological genie back in the bottle, short of eliminating 98+% of all humans and reverting back to hunter-gatherer tribes. The only solution is to go through this dirty technology cycle and build and implement clean sustainable technologies that allow us to live with something resembling current populations without destroying the climate system, breaking the food web, or poisoning ourselves (& everything else). So, yes, the only thing worse than halting all progress now would be to do it a decade age before solar, wind, etc. became viable, but we need a lot more progress, i.e., better performance for lower costs - both ecological & economical - for most of our technologies, and eliminating those destructive technologies. That would be progress. What's your definition?

kongolongo 5y ago

>We need to flip the approval process on its head -- from "safe until proven otherwise" to "unsafe until (independently) proven safe". The tally of harm to all life caused by these chemicals is on a massive scale that any mass murderer would be proud of. That isn't always practically feasible and its a really tough problem to solve. Consider all the ways a compound released into the environment can break down and how long it might take for any exposure or even low levels of exposure might take to have any adverse health affects. The type of evidence you'd need to gather to demonstrate any compound is fully safe with that bar would make it nearly impossible to declare anything safe. Microplastics, PFAS, and other compounds with potential long-acting health impacts are very hard to predict far in advance. Strong evidence against any adverse health effects would take considerable effort to gather while in the mean time they would offer massive clear benefits and solve so many problems. Plastics have massively reduced costs in almost every industry and have become almost irreplaceable in some applications such as medical equipment (think packaging for syringes, surgical tools, or anything that requires contamination control). Yet how they break down into microplastics in the environment and then eventually bioaccumulate in our tissues through the food chain is something that would've been extremely hard to predict at the onset of their creation. Even now we don't know if they're necessarily harmful.

just-ok 5y ago
> Even now we don’t know if they’re necessarily harmful. Micro-plastics are definitely harmful, e.g. they’ve been associated with lower fertility [1,2]. We’re actively engineering our own extinction. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7967748/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7967748/ [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/28/shanna-swan-fertility-reproduction-count-down https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/28/shanna-swan-...
- kongolongo 5y ago
  Associated with sure, but at what exposure levels? Can we expect all microplastics to have this affect? What if the lower fertility rates are tolerable compared to the benefits of plastic use overall? From your first source: >Data are still preliminary but suggest that ingested MPs bio-accumulate in mammalian tissue, including the testis, with outcomes on semen quality in rodents, as a consequence of inflammatory state and oxidative stress damage. >The mechanisms decreasing fertility rate during the lifespan are still poorly understood. >Taken together, although studies in mammals are still limited, preliminary observations point out a possible risk of MPs for male fertility. The evidence is still "preliminary" and data "suggests" some outcomes but nothing is close to definitive. There are lots of confounding factors that can cause lower fertility that are explicitly noted in the that source. For example they even suggest that the microplastics themselves might not be causing harm, but rather that they act as "sponges" or vehicles for concentrating other pollutants that are actually decreasing fertility.

bcrl 5y ago

It's not entirely regulatory capture. Progress in science requires the ability to understand and accept that new information can arrive that invalidates prior decisions. In the political sphere, this is known as a "flip-flop" and is sadly considered to be a poor trait by a good chunk of the public. So long as governments represent the public, and a cross section of the general public thinks that flip-flopping is a bad thing, I don't think it's possible to have decisions driven by the best available science. Side note: even scientists get things wrong. Businesses thrive on certainty, so some level of damping of changes in regulatory direction is required. Finding the right balance is, however, not something humans have done as well as we need to just yet.