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Replacing Lead Water Pipes with Plastic Could Raise New Safety Issues
- legitster 4y agoThis title is clickbait. No on in the article is seriously proposing that lead pipes are better than plastic. BUT... we should not let Scientific American off the hook here for publishing straight up pseudoscience again. I do not get why the onus of this article is on PEX needing to prove it's own safety against any possible claim, and yet the safety of copper is kind of hand-waved away (based on interviews from people running anti-plastic studies). Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I'm going to side with the NSF and ANSI on this one. > As Yvette Jordan of the Newark Education Workers Caucus, an organization that signed the document, puts it, “When you have so many people—so many organizations, especially—when they agree..., shouldn’t you take notice and say, ‘Okay, we should probably reexamine this ... and use copper and not plastic’?” This closing quote is coming from someone who has no subject matter expertise. The stakes here are that copper, an increasingly limited substance, is a luxury item in plumbing, but a necessity for energy. A return to all copper plumbing would be an inconvenience in housing affordability and a disaster for green tech.