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The floss I use apparently has PFAS in it (Oral B Glude). Many paper straws contain it. Nonstick pans. Food wrappers designed to avoid grease. Water resistant c

• sirsinsalot 4y ago
  This. This is what regulation is for and should be doing. Trying to keep track of what is safe and isn't is basically impossible for an individual. I tried for years to avoid PFAS and friends, only to discover my sofa was covered in it. What's the point.
  • chmod600 4y ago
    Regulation works when experts really do have the answer. But the problem here is that we just don't know. We know about a few worrisome problems and signs, but we don't have a clear picture like we do with lead or asbestos. We could switch from "allow by default" to "deny by default", but I'm not even sure that would help. Often problems are hard to find even once its widespread. We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists. I think the right answer is more funding for long-term rigorous studies. That way we know.
    • xboxnolifes 4y ago
      The fact that we are commenting in a thread about a report on something that has an implied "this is bad for people" suggests experts know, to a good enough degree, about certain things that should be regulated better.
      • skybrian 4y ago
        It implies that some people think it's bad, but not necessarily that they're right. It's not like every science article shared here is accurate or reflects scientific consensus. There's no heuristic shortcut for actually learning about the subject. Without doing the homework, all we can say is that it seems plausible that there might be a problem.
        • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
          Given that these compounds are mass produced and spread all over the globe at an industrial scale, I think the plausibility of a problem should be sufficient for holding back. Especially when the compound is known to be non-degradable. Then we know, if there is a problem, we're gonna be stuck with it for a long time. Even more reason for extreme caution.
          • skybrian 4y ago
            It's reason for concern but not enough to make a convincing case. This is still trying to take a logical shortcut to avoid actually learning specifics about the problem. But if you don't learn anything then you're just another person saying their opinion on the Internet, like the rest of us.
            • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
              My point is, I don't like this defeatist attitude of "well there's no way to know, so we should just do more of the same". Just because it's a very hard problem doesn't mean there isn't a lot more we could do. And a lot of the chemicals causing problems today could have been ruled out with far less effort than haphazardly testing it on the whole world population. I don't see why so many people these days need to reduce everything to this type of false dichotomy. And it's also a question of how much concern is enough? I would argue that currently the threshold is set far, far too high.
              • skybrian 4y ago
    • underdeserver 4y ago
      Experts never have "the answer". Science changes over time - see the article and how guidelines for what's OK grew stricter. You work with what you have right now.
      • upsidesinclude 4y ago
        I disagree with your stance. While emerging evidence should be used to change guidelines, we should not be at the mercy of corporations wishing to increase their profit margins with unknown chemicals. You don't have to work with what you have only just invented and don't understand. You're talking about bottles and pans. We have managed with bottles and pans for a thousand years before pfas.
        • esoterica 4y ago
          They used to put lead in everything. Just because it’s traditional doesn’t mean it’s safe.
          • upsidesinclude 4y ago
            No one said traditional. Time tested would be a better phrase for what I've described. Cast iron, steel, glass, ceramic We have thousands of years of evidence that these things are safe Edit: traditional? That's not even what that means anyway. Old?
        • underdeserver 4y ago
          What? I'm saying we now know it's super harmful and should work with that knowledge to regulate against it, without waiting for all experts to agree and all studies to show.
          • upsidesinclude 4y ago
            That does not come across from the other post, but yes that seems fair
    • pirate787 4y ago
      precautionary principle is the answer. industry must have the burden to prove something is safe before using it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
      • master_crab 4y ago
        It’s very difficult (if not impossible) to prove chemicals are safe. All regulatory bodies can really do is prove that something is not safe.
        • southerntofu 4y ago
          > It’s very difficult (if not impossible) to prove chemicals are safe. Yes, but it's certainly possible to rule out entire classes of harms by asking the right questions before putting a product on the market. Maybe 100% safe is impossible but 99% is still a pretty low bar/standard when it comes to health/pollution risks. The problem is in the current situation, corporations push toxic products on everyone that they either know to be toxic or really don't want to find out. Then we wait for people to get sick and die, then finally after it becomes a too big scandal for corporate PR and government regulators to pretend they didn't see, they start to maybe study the problem and issue guidelines. This timeline is so broken and we see the same thing in the medical world where substances we'd known to be harmful for years/decades kept on being marketed and prescribed to unknowing patients. I personally have no faith in governments (who created or benefited from these abuses), but if you're a believer in regulations, the bare minimum they can do is publish 100% of toxicity claims/studies without any delay from submission (public inbox). This could help in that whistleblowers are often coming forward with such claims (such as the EDF nuclear whistleblower lately) but it's hard for them to find a platform, and for the public to get informed.
          • fuzzfactor 4y ago
            >corporations push toxic products on everyone One aspect we have, is defense materials being mass-produced for potentially large-scale warfare, then really raking in the bucks when a consumer application can be found. That way everybody wants some, not just soldiers. And if it's consumable, so much better since that calls for continuous mass-production. And where's it all going to end up? What part of the environment? Well, that's diferent for different materials. Sometimes a material itself is highly disruptive, other times it's the vast quantities that end up being mass-produced. Even then the risk of an unforseen toxic outcome has always been underestimated.
    • na85 4y ago
      >We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists. I dunno, I kinda think we do want to foster that.
    • ifyoubuildit 4y ago
      > We also don't want to foster a "chemicals are bad" attitude more than it already exists. Why don't we want to foster this? If some compound is unknown, it seems prudent to assume its a risk until proven otherwise. Then you can calculate whether or not the possible miniscule or nonexistent benefit is worth the potentially miniscule or catastrophic downside. Some might respond that this would hamper progress, but really it would just hamper sales. You can continue to learn things without testing on the general public. And if you can't, then maybe that's no excuse to test it in prod.
      • Tao3300 4y ago
        We already have too many people who won't get life-saving vaccines that will protect others because of "chemicals", and that was before covid.
        • ifyoubuildit 4y ago
          This is probably not a great reading of what you wrote, so I'm happy to be corrected, but this is what I get from your comment: humanity has discovered or invented beneficial uses for some compounds (like for example some of the vaccines that have been developed throughout history), so therefore we should presume the safety of every other novel use of a compound that comes along. Thats not what you mean, right?
          • Tao3300 4y ago
            You must be replying to the wrong comment, because I didn't say anything like that. Next time trust your instinct that you got it wrong.
      • google234123 4y ago
        Just wait until you learn about all the chemicals in a banana https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2018/12/image.png https://www.snopes.com/tachyon/2018/12/image.png
        • 4y ago
    • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      There are lots of things that can be detected rather simply in a lab though. Like running a bioassay to ascertain activity at various receptors. Bisphenol A for instance has interactions with several hormone receptors. A single in vitro study is enough to label BPA as biologically active and therefore a potential risk. Similarly, some PFAS compounds are now known to interact with certain receptors involved in lipid metabolism. So it can also be determined as biologically active in vitro. There's just so much more that can be done about this on the regulatory side than is done currently.
    • the8472 4y ago
      There's a middle ground. You can permit novel substances but if it is discovered to be harmful then the burden of proof is inverted for the family of related chemicals. Like not only narcotics but also chemical analogues (even those that haven't been designed yet) are banned
      • gmac 4y ago
        Yes! That would catch firms touting “BPA-free” plastics that instead contain the chemically very similar BPS, for example.
        • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
          And BPF, both of which are now known to have similar problems. It's not like the companies developing these chemicals don't know that they're likely to have the same activity. It's just pharmacology. Similar structures tend to have similar activity. I definitely second GPs suggestion of having the burden of proof reversed like that. It would greatly reduce the work required by researchers, too. Interestingly, BPA was actually known to have estrogenergic properties in the 30s shortly after it was first isolated, and was first researched as a potential estrogen replacement. With the right regulation this could have been caught close to a century ago...
    • slaymaker1907 4y ago
      There are some suspected and known harms certain enough to be published by the EPA https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-health-and-environmental-risks-pfas https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-hea... You're right we're not completely certain, but I think it would be prudent to immediately cut back on all PFAS except scenarios where no viable alternative exists since they are so hard to remove from the environment. As nice as non-stick PFAS pans are, they need to go for now until we know more.
    • intrepidhero 4y ago
      If I could make one change I would require more thorough scrutiny for any product that we know is going to persist in the environment for a long time. The half life of your new plastic is 10 years due to UV degradation? Great you can use that only moderate safety studies. The half life of your new waterproof coating is 100 years? Let's do some pretty serious studies. Half life of this gasoline additive is basically forever? Um, maybe don't use that.
    • londons_explore 4y ago
      > But the problem here is that we just don't know. Many of these things we don't know are because it would be unethical to do the experiment to give some people PFAS and some people no PFAS and see if the PFAS group get more diseases. Instead, we allow PFAS to be used indiscriminately, and then afterwards regret it. Experimentation of potentially harmful things on people should be allowed if the alternative is giving the same potentially harmful thing to everybody with no experimentation done.
    • jahewson 4y ago
      “Oh it’ll probably be fine” is just not good enough any more. We’ve destroyed and irreparably harmed huge swaths of nature in a vanishingly short period of time due to this attitude. It has failed again, and again, and again. If we keep this up, we really will destroy ourselves and the habitability of the planet. The consequences are just so dire now that the notion that we should just roll the dice is frankly absurd. If we don’t know it’s safe, assume it’s not. Perfect? No. Better than the alternative? Yes.
      • dividedbyzero 4y ago
        Cognitive dissonance regarding this is completely crazy right now. As far as I can tell, most people will acknowledge that there is a big crisis looming ahead by now (some even that we're already in the midst of it) but the mere thought of the tiniest bit of action to deal with that crisis is met with steadfast resistance, even things that don't affect them all that much individually. You'd expect a lot of popular demand for political action to at least soften the crash, but at least where I live (southern Germany) I don't perceive any such demand. What concerns are voiced are always strictly in the abstract. Please do save the environment, but definitely not in my backyard, or village, or district, or anywhere else, thank you very much. Yet the changes are really obvious by now. I've been on a hike in the northern Alps a few days ago. I know the mountain quite well, and it should be teeming with life this time of the year, insects, birds, but it was eerily quiet across the whole altitude range. The river in my hometown should carry yearly floodwaters from snowmelt, but this year there was not a hint of a flood. The all-time temperature record was shattered (again), though. Forest fires in areas that never saw any just decades ago. Clean windshields in mid-August. Either no rainfall for months, or several 1000-year floods, nothing in between. Silence where there have been annoyingly loud crickets and frogs since forever. I guess we're running a deeply, deeply dangerous experiment on the biosphere and I'm not convinced anymore that it's going to be fine. I have a feeling it's going to be very, very much not fine at all.
    • mikeiz404 4y ago
      > Regulation works when experts really do have the answer. I think there are other significant factors to consider as well. In the US at least I think regulation, in our current day, has failed in many areas due to 1) the slowing down of decision makers to become informed and make decisions (see congress for stagnation in passing legal regulations) 2) industries or large industry players have waged effective influence campaigns in mainstream and scientific communities to push a friendly agenda or inject uncertainty which has nock on affects when it comes to funding (see pesticides like neonics and glyphosates, oil and gas companies with respect to global warming and plastic recycling, tobaco companies and smoking causing cancer, …), and 3) a certain degree of capture in regulatory agencies by industry (industry players later work for the regulatory agency or the reverse, as well as other tactics). 4) the politicization of regulation (not sure how much this can be helped though). It’s a mess. > We could switch from "allow by default" to "deny by default", but I'm not even sure that would help. There may be a middle ground here. As a chemic becomes more widely used that could trigger required enhanced testing by a regulatory agency as well as research grants looking into their safety. And as a chemical becomes ever more widely used rigorous long-term studies could be required. I’m not sure what the right long term answer is but I can’t help but think there is some fundamental mismatch of top down regulation by regulatory bodies in a market based system where companies are innovating and also creating these harms / negative externalities. In the former regulators are slow, reactionary, and often substantial harm must have already occurred for a regulation to be passed. The latter is a dynamic and fast moving system where companies are ruled by a fitness function which is often myopic and locally greedy. It seems introducing another market for regulation could offer a solution by using one dynamic system to regulate another. Carbon credits is an example of this. However two or more interacting systems will make things much harder to reason about and may have their own significant flaws if not designed well (for example trees are planted but then die earlier than expected or are later harvested after the carbon credits have been sold).
  • anjel 4y ago
    The fireproofing chemical sprayed on fabrics for sheets upholstery etc since the 1970s in the US is and has been a known forever chemical but also very profitable so the mfr basically used the tobacco industry strategy for 20+ years at which point its in everyone's bodies for the rest of their lives. [1] The book was published over a decade ago, so news travels slowly sometimes, even to regulators. [1] Slow Death By Rubber Duck https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Death-Rubber-Duck-Everyday/dp/1582437025 https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Death-Rubber-Duck-Everyday/dp/15...
  • tresqotheq 4y ago
    > Regulation People, people. Why do you all expect regulation to work in the presence of corruption? All regulations break down with high enough stakes. We are in this mess right now, because we made the mistake of thinking that regulations will be good enough to stop it.
• layer8 4y ago
  Regarding the floss, the study doesn’t seem to have been corroborated. Instead I found this: https://www.ada.org/publications/ada-news/2022/february/ada-questions-conclusions-in-study-linking-dental-floss-with-toxic-chemicals https://www.ada.org/publications/ada-news/2022/february/ada-...
• twistedpair 4y ago
  This is why I switched to silk floss. Just search for it on your favorite Bezos emporium.
  • bilsbie 4y ago
    Waxed seems almost as good too.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• specialist 4y ago
  > floss I use apparently has PFAS I too had no idea. Pisses me off. After trying a handful of alternatives, I settled on bamboo floss. For all I know, bamboo floss contains arsenic and midi-chlorians. > ...whole host of rare medical conditions become common when my generation gets older. You mean like how leaded gasoline caused populate wide cognitive and behavioral problems?
  • briantakita 4y ago
    It's not considered "unsafe" until there's enough sponsored scientific studies. Until there's enough ontological awareness, funding, time, & inclination for these studies, it's considered "safe". Welcome to public perception through the lens of Positivism.
    • CommanderData 4y ago
      Exactly. We need to stop playing and sounding the other side constantly. There is enough evidence to suggest it's unsafe.
• TheRealPomax 4y ago
  s/to consumers//
• rocqua 4y ago
  I was recently in the market for high end rainproof hiking gear, and most brands are only offering PFAS free rainproof coatings.
  • DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    Well either it does not contain PFAS but used PFAS in the manufacturing process thus harming the environment anyway. Or it used some other long fluoropolymer with a similar biological effect as PTFE but can claim to be "PTFE free" because on paper no PTFE was used.
    • Sakos 4y ago
      I'd say this is the biggest issue with PFAS and PFAS-likes. PTFE-free doesn't mean anything useful.
    • egman_ekki 4y ago
      Fjallraven reportedly uses wax instead of PFAS. https://www.fjallraven.com/ca/en-ca/customer-service/care-repair/g-1000 https://www.fjallraven.com/ca/en-ca/customer-service/care-re...
  • colechristensen 4y ago
    The thing to beware is X-free! Products often contain a slightly different X with similar risks.
• DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  Another example people miss is plumber's tape. That tape is effectively all PTFE. Literary every plumbing system in the last 20 years or more has all your water inlets lathered in PTFE along every joint of the pipework.
  • hef19898 4y ago
    Which, as bad as it is in general, shouldn't be that much of a problem since it is not in direct contact with water flow, being used to seal the joints.
    • serf 4y ago
      > Which, as bad as it is in general, shouldn't be that much of a problem since it is not in direct contact with water flow, being used to seal the joints. have you ever taken apart half of those joints? people love going overboard with the tape, when the threads are overloaded guess where the excess gets squished?
    • amelius 4y ago
      Since the tape prevents leakage, isn't it in contact with the water flow by definition?
      • 8note 4y ago
        Kinda. Water has a skin effect where at the surface it doesn't move, only acts as a lubricant of sorts for water in the middle of the pipe
        • amelius 4y ago
          Interesting. What does that mean for the diffusion of contaminants? Does the boundary between these two regions act as a barrier for diffusion?
  • aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
    Just use crimped fittings or hemp.
• maguirre 4y ago
  This is awful. That's the only floss I can use that doesn't disintegrate between my teeth. Where does one go to find pfas content in items like these?
  • williamscales 4y ago
    This[1] has been a useful resource for me. It has lists of PFAS chemicals and products. [1]: https://pfascentral.org/data-hub/ https://pfascentral.org/data-hub/
  • nimos 4y ago
    FWIW Tom's of Maine Naturally Waxed Antiplaque Flat Dental Floss works well for me. Pretty thick though.
  • p1mrx 4y ago
    Listerine Ultraclean floss is made of PEBAX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyether_block_amide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyether_block_amide
    • jeffdubin 4y ago
      Is this good or bad? I can't tell if that's a safe alternative or another potentially problematic one, and the Wikipedia entry doesn't mention safety.
      • p1mrx 4y ago
        PEBAX is not obviously bad, but I don't know whether it's good.
  • ChoGGi 4y ago
    I use a water flosser, my teeth also like ripping floss.
    • maguirre 4y ago
      Which one works for you?
• tartoran 4y ago
  I think we should study the effects of materials well before jumping ship to production and consumption. The industry is guilty for rushing this and for the lack of knowledge pretends there’s no proof of effects on human health. They could always use something that is not (yet) banned but also not well tested in the first place. The regulators ‘regulate’ within the framework but if the framework is bad is complete different thing. The industry has bigger pockets so it can almost always put the consumer’s interest at the bottom of their priorities. Till we fix this imballance we’re likely to suffer again and again in different ways in the future. To me the return to simpler times really means simply consume less and if we all did that and coupled it with strong repairability movements and proper recycling we’d all benefit from this as well as the environment.
  • southerntofu 4y ago
    Exactly. Low-tech and repairability are the only way forward for humanity... all other scenarios end up in painful dreadful collapse. But our tyrannical overlords are ideologically opposed to this conclusion because it's a path of degrowth and sharing economy which is fundamentally contradictory to capitalist doctrine and interests.
• ijidak 4y ago
  > I feel powerless to make an impact. Sadly, we are. This system is broken beyond repair. I'm not holding my breath for humans to fix this. I have my money on an alternative.
  • coding123 4y ago
    What is your alt?
    • CommanderData 4y ago
      Every once in a comment has the mentality of, "it's not going affect me because I have reverse osmosis 9000, just get one and problem solved". These people live life with heads in the sand while the world burns. They won't wake up even once their torso is rotisserie.
• dvt 4y ago
  Why is it so in vogue to be a doomer? Malthus, the original doomer, was wrong on just about all of his predictions. Most likely, we're wrong too. I mean, the planet survived like half a dozen mass extinction events, what makes you think it won't survive another one? I just don't understand the "woe is me" nihilistic narrative so many intelligent people are deeply fond of. Recycle, turn off the lights, vote with your conscience. Get a wife, make some kids, live a happy life, try to make a positive difference in the world. It's not hard.
  • matsemann 4y ago
  • kube-system 4y ago
    The “doomers” who were right are what we call “modern health and safety regulation”. All that stuff is written in blood.
    • colechristensen 4y ago
      It wasn’t doomsayers spreading that, it was people shining the light on “this is how it is and it’s disgusting”. More Kitchen Nightmares less “The end is near!”
      • kube-system 4y ago
        At the time, many of the people who brought legitimate concerns to light were dismissed as alarmist. History is full of instances of people not taking concerns seriously because “I’ve done things this way for years and I’m not dead yet”, only to find out a 30 years later, that in fact, it was something that causes a chronic disease.
        • colechristensen 4y ago
          Some alarmists being right in the past does not validate all future alarmists.
• mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  The problem is we're effectively using the public as a guinea pig. Then when lots of issues are detected, the specific chemicals used are banned. Then industry quickly replaces it with a very similar compound(see e.g Bisphenol A being replaced with Bisphenol S and F in "BPA free plastics" even though it's not known that they are safer) which is likely to have similar problems, but not proven to yet, kicking the can down the road. Some possible regulations come to mind. For instance, maybe a ban or very strict regulations on the widespread use of compounds like PFAS that have no known biological or other natural path of degradation. Because it's become very clear that such compounds are inevitably going to end up spread all over global ecosystems. Edit: So I did some more research. Not only are BPS and BPF not known to be safer, they are already known to have many of the same problems as BPA. To make things worse BPS and possibly BPF are even less degradable than BPA. So they may even be worse. This is not even a little surprising. Their structure is identical except for the linkage between the phenol groups. From pharmacology it's well known that highly similar structures tend to have similar pharmacodynamic properties. So they're not even remotely likely to have been good replacements before the growing mountain of evidence to the contrary appeared. Clearly this blatantly irresponsible behaviour from industry needs to be stopped.
  • theropost 4y ago
    Corporations need to focus on being efficient, and doing what they do best within the rules. Government should concern itself with doing its best to continue a healthy, happy nation. Regulation does not always need to be complex, and it should put public interest ahead of corporate agency.
    • nebulousthree 4y ago
      Corporations are people and how dare you threaten peoples' agencies like that! You wouldn't propose that of a human group, so why do it to non-human persons??
      • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
        I know you're being sarcastic here. But man it depresses me how many people seem to unironically think this way.
• hombre_fatal 4y ago
  Consumer products are only part of the problem. PFAS are emitted from industry, like from farms and smoke stacks, straight into the atmosphere where they deposit and precipitate back down onto everything. That's one of the main issues here: you don't avoid it just by avoiding the consumer goods in your post.
• Zamicol 4y ago
  Regulators were forcing its use and regulation was one of the main drivers of the PFAS industry. California forced furniture makers to spray new furniture with PFAS based flame retardants for years. As of just this year, 2022, in California, even though they are no longer required, PFAS are still allowed in furniture until 2024.
• mizzao 4y ago
  The "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) safety guideline from the FDA seems like it should be renamed "we don't have statistically significant evidence this will kill you yet, but we're also not looking very hard for it"
• stjohnswarts 4y ago
  non stick pans use ptfe not pfoa, this has been a scare tactic by "holistic nutritionists" on the internet for ages. If your non-stick is from a name brand and less than 10 years old, they haven't used PFOA (or PFAs) in ages. Don't toss your stuff out.
• pwpw 4y ago
  > I feel powerless to make an impact. Following a plant-based diet and trying alternative modes of transit to the car make a pretty great impact!