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Or lawn darts, or those old time open fans that you can stick your hands in (or more often kids), or x-ray radiation based shoe sizing machines, or asbestos til
by iancmceachern 4y ago
Or lawn darts, or those old time open fans that you can stick your hands in (or more often kids), or x-ray radiation based shoe sizing machines, or asbestos tiles.
As stated in other comments, this is a concentration that's not used for anything else. The food preservative is a different concentration.
A better analogy would be to ban ropes that are pre-tied into noises and cannot be untied, so they can only be used for hanging. Yep, I agree, those should be banned too.
- cypress66 4y agoYou can go to Sigma Aldrich website and buy tens of thousands of other chemicals as deadly or deadlier. Also I disagree that the concentration is not used for anything else.
- iancmceachern 4y agoYes, but that's not amazon, it's not a general store, it's a chemical supplier. The issue here is ease of access and direction (the instructions on how to do it), not the fact that these things exist. It's like hydrogen peroxide. You can go to a chemical supplier and buy high concentration stuff that will eat your arm off. They don't sell that at the grocery store, because it'd be dangerous. The high concentration stuff is still available to those who need it, but it's not so easy to get and readily available that it causes preventable deaths.
- catiopatio 4y agoThey sell bleach and ammonia-based cleaning products at the grocery store, and those will eat your lungs out if you mix them. They sell dry ice, and that’ll give you frostbite in seconds if you’re stupid. They sell extra-strength Tylenol, and that’ll destroy your liver if you just take 10-20 of them. They don’t sell concentrated hydrogen peroxide at the grocery store because nobody is asking and there’s not a market for it — not because it’s dangerous.
- iancmceachern 4y agoBleach and ammonia at the grocery store are also very diluted solutions. Most household bleach is 5-9%. Imagine if they sold 100% bleach in stores!
- catiopatio 4y agoMixing 5-9% solutions will still produce chlorine/chloramine gas and can cause significant lung damage. The maximum commercially available (sodium hypochlorite) bleach concentration is about 15%, and that’s due to its non-linear rate of decomposition and extremely short shelf-life at higher concentrations. A 15% solution must be used very soon after manufacture and does not have significant non-industrial uses — that’s why it’s not stocked in grocery stores. It has nothing to do with its safety at that concentration. 100% bleach would be anhydrous sodium hypochlorite, which is highly unstable and can decompose explosively. Nobody stocks that.
- sokoloff 4y agoI assume you realize that a highly pure salt can be effectively diluted for uses where less is needed.
- iancmceachern 4y agoYes, but similar to high concentration hydrogen peroxide, when the higher concentration product is causing preventable harm and death they make only the more diluted version readily available to the public and keeps the higher concentration stuff just for the folks that truly need it (industry).
- sokoloff 4y agoAn alternative explanation is that 3%, 6%, and 12% are more commonly useful and so the market meets the need. 34% H2O2 is readily available (it’s hardly “kept for industry”, but rather industry/food prep is the most common purchaser of it, just like I can buy urea or ammonium nitrate even though commercial farms are a more common user of it.)
- Ferret7446 4y agoYes but sodium nitrite isn't that dangerous to handle.
- iancmceachern 4y agoNot to handle, but it's clearly dangerous in the way noted in this article.