5 ms·

PFAS are used because there isn't a better alternative. A globally coordinated reduction in production only increases the price of products for consumers.

Centigonal 4y ago
...which is a good thing! we should stop taking $20 teflon pans, nonstick fast food containers, and $40 raincoats with negative externalities for granted. We did fine without PFAS, we'll be okay with expensive PFAS (where externalities are internalized and built into the cost) too.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Does paying for the pollution really help fix the problem? Will the government use that money to filter rivers for PFAS? I think a lot of this need also comes from other supposedly environmental choices. My work banned plastic cups and now has paper cups with PFAS which are more toxic. I think the plastic ones were the better choice if recycled properly. And raincoats were really really horrible before Gore-Tex.
  - lukas099 4y ago
    If things cost more, people generally buy less of them.
  - geysersam 4y ago
    Paying for pollution makes the customer consider the full cost of the product, reducing demand to cases when the benefits of using the chemical are actually bigger than the external costs. It's not about using the money to solve the problems. It's about making the economy more efficient.
  - Centigonal 4y ago
    Price elasticity is real: if PFAS is more expensive, people will buy (and businesses will produce) fewer PFAS-derived products. Raising the price is especially nice because it causes price-elastic use cases (think PFAS coated paper cups) to drop out, while price-inelastic use cases (think teflon joint implants) are not made illegal, just more expensive. If the government earmarks PFAS tax revenue for remediation, that'd be awesome, but that's just a side benefit - the price increase is the main benefit. I do thing greenwashing and environmental whack-a-mole is a real problem (heck, we see it in the PFAS space with GenX replacing PFOA). I don't see that as a valid reason to do nothing.
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    > And raincoats were really really horrible before Gore-Tex. Nope, they were fine. A bit heavier but far longer-lasting, including the waxed versions which can be re-waxed if needed to keep up waterproofing. I'm still using my army-issued raincoats from when I served in 1992, one of them has been with me on a number of expeditions (months of paddling the Yukon from Whitehorse to the Bering Strait, climbing several mountains, etc) where it doubled as a tent bottom, it is still perfectly serviceable. The lighter version I still use when cycling, it is still waterproof and the seams - which usually are the weak spot - still hold. I'm also using a 20yo wax coat which I re-waxed a few times (still using the original tin of wax), that one hardly contains any synthetics. Anything made of Gore-Tex would have delaminated after a few months of this type of use.
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      But waxed fabrics don't breathe. That was the huge advantage of Gore-Tex. Being able to be dry and yet not get soaked in your own sweat was a really amazing invention.
      - the_third_wave 4y ago
        Waxed fabrics do "breathe" more or less as much as much as Gore-Tex does and - important - keep on doing so as long as you keep them waxed enough but not too much. Don't make the coat look like a waxed cheese, you're using too much wax. Use enough to get the fabric to reject dripping or flowing water, no more. Gore-Tex was made to imitate this characteristic without the need for wax but once the membrane is damaged it can not be repaired, unlike waxed fabrics.
        snovv_crash 4y ago
        This isn't true. The Gore-Tex layer isn't damaged like this. You're referring to the DNW coating, and there's no reason this can't be a waxed layer like old-school rain jackets. In fact a lot of companies started offering wax based DNW coatings in the name of environmental responsibility. The actual "Gore-Tex" layer, now no longer under patent and produced by many under names such as Dermizax, H2No, Sympatex and many others, is a thin, flexible, *fragile* PTFE membrane. This allows air through, and via a heat-pump-like mechanism drives water on its surfaces from the warm side to the cool side. There is no 'old school rainjacket' equivalent for this. Usually when your Gore-Tex jacket stops working it is because the DNW layer is gone. If you used a wax replacement the actual Gore-Tex would still be fine and your rain jacket would still be miles better than anything available 100 years ago.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    Why are people big on recycling plastic? In the West, non-recycled plastic goes to landfill and is LESS likely to end up in the oceans or whatever, as "recycling" is often sent overseas. In fact, single use plastic means more oil being used for plastic and less burnt for fuel, leading to lower CO2 emissions.
  - spikeagally 4y ago
    >> I think a lot of this need also comes from other supposedly environmental choices. My work banned plastic cups and now has paper cups with PFAS which are more toxic. I think the plastic ones were the better choice if recycled properly. Why do you need to choose between plastic or paper (PFAS)? Does your work not provide glasses? Ceramic mugs? Can you not bring your own reusable water bottle?
  - SyzygistSix 4y ago
    What was wrong with the old rubber raincoats?
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      Sweatiness.
      - SyzygistSix 4y ago
        So we have to use toxic chemicals because people don't like being sweaty. Makes sense.
- 4ad 4y ago
  We should stop taking the pans, one-time use containers, etc, but a GoreTex jacket costs $400, not $40, and even the "cheap" GoreTex knockoffs cost $200...
- missedthecue 4y ago
  What will happen is that the PFAS pan becomes $26 instead of $20. PFAS is not the most expensive part of the pan, only a minor component. A doubling or tripling of PFAS prices is unlikely to price anyone out of getting that pan or raincoat. It's just going to make middle and lower class people cumulatively billions of dollars poorer.
  - pigsty 4y ago
    Iron pans are ridiculously cheap these days and they last forever if you bother to read the 3 line instructions included with them. Teflon isn’t as great as people were deceived into believing. Even if you’re absolutely meticulous with care, it’ll have a noticeable lack in non-stick abilities within months and be noticeably sticky after 2 years, and rapidly degrading into useless territory. An iron pan starts out about as sticky as a slightly used Teflon pan and feels like brand new Teflon after a few uses and stays that way for as long as a human lifespan.
    - missedthecue 4y ago
      I mean pans are only one thing. PFAS are used in many products. Yes you can make inferior substitutions but again this reduces standard of living. This is not to mention its widespread use in military applications. There is already concern about China's lock on the global supply of rare earths and other raw materials like silicon and magnesium (80%+ market share). What happens when the US can't make fighter jets because a belligerent China refuses to export PFAS?
      - pigsty 4y ago
        Generally, matters of national security are exempt from consumer goods safety regulations. A typical company also can’t easily handle, say, plutonium, but if the military needs it, an exemption is granted. The typical consumer gets by without lead, asbestos, and so on. The consumer market will adapt.
        missedthecue 4y ago
themitigating 4y ago
Better solution ? Let's take one example. Teflon coated cookware. As an alternative there are cooking sprays, butter, oils, or stiring the contents of the pan more frequently. In this case it's not a nessacity but a convenience. Why don't we start by restricting the use of PFAS to those products in which there are no alternatives and are a nessacity.
- p1necone 4y ago
  In my experience non stick pans are pretty awful, basically anything else is a better alternative. You can't get them hot enough to sear a steak properly without damaging the non stick coating, and the non stick coating is oleophobic which means that oil pools rather than spreading out so you can't get proper browning on anything even if you do cook it at an appropriate temp. Seasoned cast iron and carbon steel will be non stick without either of those downsides, and even regular stainless steel is perfectly fine as long as you let it heat up properly before using it.
  - cityofdelusion 4y ago
    I love my cast iron, stainless, and carbon steel pans, but calling them nonstick is a stretch. In fact, their stickiness is pretty much their valuable property in getting good browning on food. You can definitely cook delicate fish and scrambled eggs on say, cast iron, but you will either be scraping hard during clean up or using an absurd amount of oil to cook. I don't mind it myself, but its clear why nonstick is popular.
    - haswell 4y ago
      A high quality, well seasoned cast iron pan will allow you to fry an egg while said egg slides around the pan as if nonstick. Not every pan is capable of this, and meticulous care is required to keep it in shape, but I became a believer in non stick cast iron when I first met a pan that could do it. I had used plenty of "stickier" cast iron pans before and my perspective shifted a bit.
      - 4y ago
p1necone 4y ago
> A globally coordinated reduction in production only increases the price of products for consumers. Which is great. Higher prices = less usage. We don't have to eradicate them entirely before we see any benefit.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  It depends on demand elasticity. Products with very little demand elasticity like energy or medicine just make everyone miserable and worse off when production is cut, because you can't live without them. Yes you can scrimp and save and stretch your dollar, but at the end of the day you have to pay up no matter the price. I'm not sure that anyone knows what the demand elasticity for an industrial chemical like PFAS is, but it's obviously not a completely discretionary item.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Energy has a lot of demand elasticity, it just takes a few years for demand to catch up with price changes. See for example how fuel efficiency changed during the oil crisis a few decades ago. Or how building insulation changes with rising energy prices.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >Which is great. Higher prices = less usage. Don't lie to us by not mentioning the tradeoffs. Reduced standards of living = less spare f-s to give about abstract big picture issues (like pollution and climate change).
  - triceratops 4y ago
    Who knows? Maybe better health = more spare f-s to give about abstract big picture issues.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
megablast 4y ago
Good. People buy less of them then.
rngname22 4y ago
The better alternative is for humans to suffer from not having good water-repellant substances but in the process avoid polluting the world.

Centigonal 4y ago

...which is a good thing! we should stop taking $20 teflon pans, nonstick fast food containers, and $40 raincoats with negative externalities for granted. We did fine without PFAS, we'll be okay with expensive PFAS (where externalities are internalized and built into the cost) too.

wkat4242 4y ago
Does paying for the pollution really help fix the problem? Will the government use that money to filter rivers for PFAS? I think a lot of this need also comes from other supposedly environmental choices. My work banned plastic cups and now has paper cups with PFAS which are more toxic. I think the plastic ones were the better choice if recycled properly. And raincoats were really really horrible before Gore-Tex.
- lukas099 4y ago
  If things cost more, people generally buy less of them.
- geysersam 4y ago
  Paying for pollution makes the customer consider the full cost of the product, reducing demand to cases when the benefits of using the chemical are actually bigger than the external costs. It's not about using the money to solve the problems. It's about making the economy more efficient.
- Centigonal 4y ago
  Price elasticity is real: if PFAS is more expensive, people will buy (and businesses will produce) fewer PFAS-derived products. Raising the price is especially nice because it causes price-elastic use cases (think PFAS coated paper cups) to drop out, while price-inelastic use cases (think teflon joint implants) are not made illegal, just more expensive. If the government earmarks PFAS tax revenue for remediation, that'd be awesome, but that's just a side benefit - the price increase is the main benefit. I do thing greenwashing and environmental whack-a-mole is a real problem (heck, we see it in the PFAS space with GenX replacing PFOA). I don't see that as a valid reason to do nothing.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  > And raincoats were really really horrible before Gore-Tex. Nope, they were fine. A bit heavier but far longer-lasting, including the waxed versions which can be re-waxed if needed to keep up waterproofing. I'm still using my army-issued raincoats from when I served in 1992, one of them has been with me on a number of expeditions (months of paddling the Yukon from Whitehorse to the Bering Strait, climbing several mountains, etc) where it doubled as a tent bottom, it is still perfectly serviceable. The lighter version I still use when cycling, it is still waterproof and the seams - which usually are the weak spot - still hold. I'm also using a 20yo wax coat which I re-waxed a few times (still using the original tin of wax), that one hardly contains any synthetics. Anything made of Gore-Tex would have delaminated after a few months of this type of use.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    But waxed fabrics don't breathe. That was the huge advantage of Gore-Tex. Being able to be dry and yet not get soaked in your own sweat was a really amazing invention.
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      Waxed fabrics do "breathe" more or less as much as much as Gore-Tex does and - important - keep on doing so as long as you keep them waxed enough but not too much. Don't make the coat look like a waxed cheese, you're using too much wax. Use enough to get the fabric to reject dripping or flowing water, no more. Gore-Tex was made to imitate this characteristic without the need for wax but once the membrane is damaged it can not be repaired, unlike waxed fabrics.
      - snovv_crash 4y ago
        This isn't true. The Gore-Tex layer isn't damaged like this. You're referring to the DNW coating, and there's no reason this can't be a waxed layer like old-school rain jackets. In fact a lot of companies started offering wax based DNW coatings in the name of environmental responsibility. The actual "Gore-Tex" layer, now no longer under patent and produced by many under names such as Dermizax, H2No, Sympatex and many others, is a thin, flexible, *fragile* PTFE membrane. This allows air through, and via a heat-pump-like mechanism drives water on its surfaces from the warm side to the cool side. There is no 'old school rainjacket' equivalent for this. Usually when your Gore-Tex jacket stops working it is because the DNW layer is gone. If you used a wax replacement the actual Gore-Tex would still be fine and your rain jacket would still be miles better than anything available 100 years ago.
- concordDance 4y ago
  Why are people big on recycling plastic? In the West, non-recycled plastic goes to landfill and is LESS likely to end up in the oceans or whatever, as "recycling" is often sent overseas. In fact, single use plastic means more oil being used for plastic and less burnt for fuel, leading to lower CO2 emissions.
- spikeagally 4y ago
  >> I think a lot of this need also comes from other supposedly environmental choices. My work banned plastic cups and now has paper cups with PFAS which are more toxic. I think the plastic ones were the better choice if recycled properly. Why do you need to choose between plastic or paper (PFAS)? Does your work not provide glasses? Ceramic mugs? Can you not bring your own reusable water bottle?
- SyzygistSix 4y ago
  What was wrong with the old rubber raincoats?
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    Sweatiness.
    - SyzygistSix 4y ago
      So we have to use toxic chemicals because people don't like being sweaty. Makes sense.
4ad 4y ago
We should stop taking the pans, one-time use containers, etc, but a GoreTex jacket costs $400, not $40, and even the "cheap" GoreTex knockoffs cost $200...
missedthecue 4y ago
What will happen is that the PFAS pan becomes $26 instead of $20. PFAS is not the most expensive part of the pan, only a minor component. A doubling or tripling of PFAS prices is unlikely to price anyone out of getting that pan or raincoat. It's just going to make middle and lower class people cumulatively billions of dollars poorer.
- pigsty 4y ago
  Iron pans are ridiculously cheap these days and they last forever if you bother to read the 3 line instructions included with them. Teflon isn’t as great as people were deceived into believing. Even if you’re absolutely meticulous with care, it’ll have a noticeable lack in non-stick abilities within months and be noticeably sticky after 2 years, and rapidly degrading into useless territory. An iron pan starts out about as sticky as a slightly used Teflon pan and feels like brand new Teflon after a few uses and stays that way for as long as a human lifespan.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    I mean pans are only one thing. PFAS are used in many products. Yes you can make inferior substitutions but again this reduces standard of living. This is not to mention its widespread use in military applications. There is already concern about China's lock on the global supply of rare earths and other raw materials like silicon and magnesium (80%+ market share). What happens when the US can't make fighter jets because a belligerent China refuses to export PFAS?
    - pigsty 4y ago
      Generally, matters of national security are exempt from consumer goods safety regulations. A typical company also can’t easily handle, say, plutonium, but if the military needs it, an exemption is granted. The typical consumer gets by without lead, asbestos, and so on. The consumer market will adapt.
      - missedthecue 4y ago

themitigating 4y ago

Better solution ? Let's take one example. Teflon coated cookware. As an alternative there are cooking sprays, butter, oils, or stiring the contents of the pan more frequently. In this case it's not a nessacity but a convenience. Why don't we start by restricting the use of PFAS to those products in which there are no alternatives and are a nessacity.

p1necone 4y ago
In my experience non stick pans are pretty awful, basically anything else is a better alternative. You can't get them hot enough to sear a steak properly without damaging the non stick coating, and the non stick coating is oleophobic which means that oil pools rather than spreading out so you can't get proper browning on anything even if you do cook it at an appropriate temp. Seasoned cast iron and carbon steel will be non stick without either of those downsides, and even regular stainless steel is perfectly fine as long as you let it heat up properly before using it.
- cityofdelusion 4y ago
  I love my cast iron, stainless, and carbon steel pans, but calling them nonstick is a stretch. In fact, their stickiness is pretty much their valuable property in getting good browning on food. You can definitely cook delicate fish and scrambled eggs on say, cast iron, but you will either be scraping hard during clean up or using an absurd amount of oil to cook. I don't mind it myself, but its clear why nonstick is popular.
  - haswell 4y ago
    A high quality, well seasoned cast iron pan will allow you to fry an egg while said egg slides around the pan as if nonstick. Not every pan is capable of this, and meticulous care is required to keep it in shape, but I became a believer in non stick cast iron when I first met a pan that could do it. I had used plenty of "stickier" cast iron pans before and my perspective shifted a bit.
    - 4y ago

p1necone 4y ago

> A globally coordinated reduction in production only increases the price of products for consumers. Which is great. Higher prices = less usage. We don't have to eradicate them entirely before we see any benefit.

missedthecue 4y ago
It depends on demand elasticity. Products with very little demand elasticity like energy or medicine just make everyone miserable and worse off when production is cut, because you can't live without them. Yes you can scrimp and save and stretch your dollar, but at the end of the day you have to pay up no matter the price. I'm not sure that anyone knows what the demand elasticity for an industrial chemical like PFAS is, but it's obviously not a completely discretionary item.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Energy has a lot of demand elasticity, it just takes a few years for demand to catch up with price changes. See for example how fuel efficiency changed during the oil crisis a few decades ago. Or how building insulation changes with rising energy prices.
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>Which is great. Higher prices = less usage. Don't lie to us by not mentioning the tradeoffs. Reduced standards of living = less spare f-s to give about abstract big picture issues (like pollution and climate change).
- triceratops 4y ago
  Who knows? Maybe better health = more spare f-s to give about abstract big picture issues.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

megablast 4y ago

Good. People buy less of them then.

rngname22 4y ago

The better alternative is for humans to suffer from not having good water-repellant substances but in the process avoid polluting the world.