11 ms·

They are used in all kinds of products that I personaly use everyday from pans to dental floss. And the replacements are not better, they just dont have studies

by Sytten 3y ago

They are used in all kinds of products that I personaly use everyday from pans to dental floss. And the replacements are not better, they just dont have studies yet that prove they are toxic...

deserialized 3y ago
Oh well that excuses all of the poisoning, clearly
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  disbanding this corporation doesn't undo decades of pollution either. I doubt very much that they're the only ones able to manufacture this stuff
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    But it will set a mighty example for others
    - jquast 3y ago
      Genuinely curious, would any money be extracted from the personal accounts of any executive employee that made these decisions, current or past, from any of these thousands of lawsuits? Unless the decision-making folks have their personal wealth destroyed, they really haven’t anything to lose. I would expect the worst-case scenario is that their stock portfolios will need to be adjusted, by tax-loss harvesting their losses in 3m stocks as an opportunity to divest and rebalance their portfolios.
      - pr0zac 3y ago
        Considering Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family has so far had to pay out $10.5 billion (estimates of their net worth including those settlements have it dropping $8b during this time period) and despite trying quite hard have not managed to gain legal immunity or protection regarding civil and criminal liability. That means they'll very likely be hit with more lawsuits going forward and possibly even criminal charges. Looking at it, I think thats pretty good and hope the possibility for future lawsuits means they continue to pay, but knowing that case is an unusual outlier and that none of the other people involved like the CEO or other executives have had any consequences makes it feel a little underwhelming. I'm glad government is going after bad companies more and I hope they continue, but it does seem like our legal system is just not equipped to correctly hold people responsible in these cases.
  - enraged_camel 3y ago
    >> disbanding this corporation doesn't undo decades of pollution either. Yes, but it prevents them from harming the public like this in the future, and also serves as a very strong deterrent for others.
    - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
      or mabye we should be more honest and consider that maybe this is a way for the USA government to fill its coffers back up? (rapping on another comment saying that there's a chance this is a way for the USA government to sell the 'manufacture capacity' that 3M is to other "greener" owners) now that I type this out, I realize that this is perfectly consistent with the behavior of empires. the realization that the alleged 'pax romana' (stability and 'peace' for the roman empire) was built on stealing from 'barbaric' tribes and selling stuff to more 'civilized' owners in Rome.
      - Jeff_Brown 3y ago
        As long as the laws and their enforcement are just, a theoretical government profit motive doesn't seem like a bad thing. But it's hard to see how the particular people who brought this case to bear would be motivated by the small slice of the increase in federal funding that would redound to them. And it's not consistent with most of the government's behavior -- it doesn't spend as many resources extracting judgments from big corporations as would be likely if its profit motive loomed large.
        BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
        no, you gotta be much more deep in your reasoning this "high" up philosophically, at this height, the principle of "justice" is to not so simple... what does it even mean "to be just"? may as well say "be good" but the point is that the issue is good for whom? the concept is "Empire"... USA government is the empire? aside question: can there ever exist multiple "empires"? monotheistic~ally speaking? uff... My English prose is answering its own questions... I am no longer deeply disturbed by this phenomenon... but it's not something scientifically real so it still shakes me.
  - jackmott42 3y ago
    The point isn't to undo the past, it is to make it clear to other companies that if they lie about safety they will face an existential threat too. Who are you people who feel compelled to defend mega corporations that screw people over? What is your psychology? What do you value in life? My goodness.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      There are millions of people all over the earth that genuinely believe "might makes right", or "greed is good", or "capitalism inherently results in meritocratic and technocratic allocation of resources so nothing that happens under capitalism can possibly be bad". That's not even the least liberal worldviews widely held. Love thy neighbor and the golden rule and accountability are not universal
      - njanirudh 3y ago
        I would say that billions of people believe that "might makes right". Its been seen across the centuries and countries alike. Colonialism, MegaCorps, Hague Invasion Act and countless examples that prove that morals matter very less in the long run.
    - RajT88 3y ago
      > The point isn't to undo the past, it is to make it clear to other companies that if they lie about safety they will face an existential threat too. DuPont, while removed from the threat of this lawsuit, is guilty on plenty of counts of the same behavior with other chemicals. I believe I've read articles about GE and Monsanto also knowing the health risks to their own employees and doing nothing about it. Let alone the dumping into public waterways. $143 billion is hopefully the judgement which is levied, and hopefully the first of many.
      - red-iron-pine 3y ago
        > this lawsuit There can and will be others. Esp. if there is a legal precedent.
    - deleted 3y ago
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  That's a pretty shitty response to an actual problem. Companies don't need to prove the safety of things like this. Look at bpa free. Most people don't even know that bpa free plastic tends to be just as bad, or potentially worse than bpa. The press doesn't give a shit I guess. Society went through its giant bpa panic and now it's tired of dealing with this so let's just ignore it and move onto the next thing. Ignorance is bliss.
  - bravoetch 3y ago
    You're okay with companies not being responsible, but you want the press to help you out here? I feel the opposite. Companies should be responsible for poisoning us, and the press has zero to do with it.
    - pizlonator 3y ago
      I don’t think that the problem some posters are alluding to is the kind where we should be placing blame. The problem is: - Humans invent something useful and cool. - Humans discover that the cool and useful thing is toxic as fuck, but only after years go by. It takes years for the awareness of the toxicity to become widespread enough for everyone to concur it’s a problem. Often, we only find out about the toxicity as a result of the cool chemical becoming hella widespread. - Humans invent alternatives that are different enough to obviously not have the same exact problem. But: what toxic nonsense or buttcancer risks will we discover about the alternatives? No way to know immediately since it takes years to find out. And it’s only when the alternatives become widespread that we can even do the science to figure out what’s up. And by the time they become widespread, some folks got buttcancer. That’s the problem: just because there’s an alternative that is different from the thing we found out to be toxic doesn’t meant that the alternative isn’t toxic. And we find out it’s toxic because people get hurt. It’s not that the press is bad… it’s just a fundamental problem in science and engineering. You need scale to discover the really bad issues.
      - FollowingTheDao 3y ago
        > it’s just a fundamental problem in science and engineering. In my opinion is is a problem not of science and engineering, but of human greed. We do not need these products, we want them. As a species we did fine without them but suddenly in the last 100 years we need the so desperately? Adding, no one can give me a response, just downvotes. Why is the aversion to speaking about greed so strong here on hacker news?
mtalantikite 3y ago
There are plenty of pans you can use that don't have these chemicals -- cast iron, carbon steel, stainless steel, clay, etc. I agree about the floss and other plastics though. I just try to use other types of materials whenever possible.
stickyricky 3y ago
I hope steel pans aren't on that list. I prefer them to non-stick and I'm under the assumption that they're healthier than non-stick pans.
- burke 3y ago
  Steel pans—really any pans that just look like metal on the inside—are not made with "forever chemical" coatings.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  I am also a big fan of carbon steel cookware, I've replaced everything with cast iron where that is necessary or carbon steel everywhere else. It really is a minor adjustment to workflow, non stick coatings can be pretty easily avoided.
tomxor 3y ago
You are referring to Teflon, there's some confusion with the differences in toxicity between the chemical used in the final products (today at least) and the chemical used in manufacturing. Although the human impact is only subtly different (that in theory it makes no personal difference whether or not you buy such products, which is a worse position to be in than it sounds)... As a non-chemist I don't claim to have a comprehensive understanding, but as far as I can tell: PTFE (Teflon) is found in consumer products today, and has not been directly linked to cancer yet, i.e if you eat teflon (and you have) it will supposedly just pass through your gut in an inert fashion. PFOA and more generally PFAS are used to manufacture PTFE, these are known carcinogens according to independent studies and (allegedly) internally by 3Ms own research, unfortunately PFOA is also in your blood and my blood, not because you ate teflon from a frying pan, but because once it's in the environment it doesn't get broken down, and so inevitably we end up ingesting it. The reason we have to generalise to the group of chemicals "PFAS", is because once PFOA specifically was found to be problematic companies looked for similar alternatives, but these have also found to cause similar issues. To complicate matters the PTFE in your non-stick frying pan can also releases PFOA if heated high enough, supposedly the threshold is around 300 degrees C, however it has been found that this threshold varies between products and can be realistically reached under in "normal" cooking scenarios, but usually when someone accidentally dry heated a frying pan too much, or is just plain cooking on too high a temperature. The side effects of being exposed to PFOA in this way are supposed to feel similar to catching a cold that disappears fairly quickly, and is often mistaken as such, I presume this is because it's vaporised. Even knowing all this (that provided you don't nuke your cookware it likely makes no personal difference) I've still decided to personally go down the stainless steel route, it's not very scientific, but the relationship between PTFE and PFOAs is close enough, and it flakes off my frying pans frequently enough that I've decided I don't want to keep on ingesting it only to find out later that it's also a problem. Although stainless is not hazard free, because you can get problems with metals leaching into the food and have to be careful with acidity, and also make sure you buy high quality pans. They also require more skill to cook with without destroying them, but ultimately last indefinitely if you can take care of them. The main problem with continuing to use PTFE in products is the indirect cost to the environment and human health through the "externalities" of manufacturing.
- 3y ago
rdli 3y ago
We've worked to reduce plastics & chemicals in our house. Some things we do: * We use silk dental floss (we use Radius) * We use glass storage containers instead of Tupperware * For cooking, we use All-Clad. * If a recipe calls for non-stick (e.g., pancakes) I use a braiser from Le Creuset, which works reasonably well. (Edited: formatting)
- MarkMarine 3y ago
  Same here, additionally reducing plastic packaging in our food purchases has been a constant effort. Glass milk jugs, baby bottles, etc. It's probably only touching the margins, but we're trying.
- stephencanon 3y ago
  A plain cast-iron skillet works flawlessly for pancakes and crepes, FWIW.
  - juujian 3y ago
    Thinking about buying one. Would I be wrong in assuming it was just a matter of the order: (really) heat the pan, add the oil, and then whatever you need to cook?
    - cptaj 3y ago
      In my experience all non-stick strategies are a hoax, including teflon XD
    - hedora 3y ago
      You don't want to get it super hot (the oil/butter should not smoke). Medium heat is fine. They do take a long time to warm up to a uniform steady state temperature though (this is both an advantage and a disadvantage, since it means the temperature stays stable as you cook). For instance, when making pancakes, my first step is putting the griddle on the range. Next, I start making the batter. Of course, you can set the range to high and heat it up really fast, but then you end up risking overheating it.
yojo 3y ago
Dental floss is easy - the widely available/cheap waxed Reach floss tested negative for PFAs[1], and it does a better job of cleaning too. The non-stick flosses miss stuff for me. 1: https://www.mamavation.com/beauty/toxic-pfas-dental-floss-tooth-floss.html#Better_Tooth_Floss_Brands https://www.mamavation.com/beauty/toxic-pfas-dental-floss-to...
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  Oh thank goodness. When I started looking at the prices of the silk flosses and whatnot, I thought I'd had to take a second mortgage. I've been using Reach for years, due to the price, but also because it works so well for me. Thanks for posting this!
FollowingTheDao 3y ago
"Why are so many young people getting colon cancer...????" >They [PFAS] are used in all kinds of products that I personaly use everyday from pans to dental floss. Perfluorooctanoic acid enhances colorectal cancer DLD-1 cells invasiveness through activating NF-κB mediated matrix metalloproteinase-2/-9 expression https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4637576/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4637576/ I just do not understand how people can be so "whatever" about this stuff. It is sad and infuriating.
jansan 3y ago
What does "toxic" mean in this case. AFAIK "toxic" can mean that you will get a headache if you eat a gram, but it can also mean that it will kill you if it touches your skin. For example I do not mind drinking a beer or two, which includes 5% of toxic ethanol, but I prefer not having lead in my drinking water.
- engineer_22 3y ago
  They're bioaccumulative and are linked to high cholesterol, thyroid disease, kidney and testicular cancer, and other chronic diseases.
r00fus 3y ago
Switch to silk floss - this is just a better version of anything you can get with PFAS: https://madebyradius.com/products/natural-biodegradable-silk-floss2 https://madebyradius.com/products/natural-biodegradable-silk... You can get it on Amazon too - price is the same as Glide, Reach, etc.
labawi 3y ago
I'm not sure why people keep talking about teflon pans and dental floss. There are PFAS in products that necessarily release them into human bodies and the environment, in dispersed form rather than flakes that would usually pass the digestive system. A few examples: - food containers coated with PFAS (usually single use, often cardboard) - water-repellent PFAS spray for clothes, shoes, cars/whatever - surface PFAS treatment of clothes/shoes/whatever (better but still rubs off) - PFAS bike-chain lube Why are any of these things legal? They cause much more exposure, by design cannot be contained and spread PFAS everywhere you go. They are the reason there are PFAS in snow on Mt. Everest. Pans, medical tubes and maybe even inner layers in clothes can at least theoretically be responsibly disposed of, e.g. by reasonably contained incineration. I don't want to support unneeded PFAS, but pans seem a whole different category than spray-on PFAS for "weather-proofing" that people use because shrug "it helps I get less wet".

by Sytten 3y ago

They are used in all kinds of products that I personaly use everyday from pans to dental floss. And the replacements are not better, they just dont have studies yet that prove they are toxic...

deserialized 3y ago

Oh well that excuses all of the poisoning, clearly

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
disbanding this corporation doesn't undo decades of pollution either. I doubt very much that they're the only ones able to manufacture this stuff
- hackernewds 3y ago
  But it will set a mighty example for others
  - jquast 3y ago
    Genuinely curious, would any money be extracted from the personal accounts of any executive employee that made these decisions, current or past, from any of these thousands of lawsuits? Unless the decision-making folks have their personal wealth destroyed, they really haven’t anything to lose. I would expect the worst-case scenario is that their stock portfolios will need to be adjusted, by tax-loss harvesting their losses in 3m stocks as an opportunity to divest and rebalance their portfolios.
    - pr0zac 3y ago
      Considering Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family has so far had to pay out $10.5 billion (estimates of their net worth including those settlements have it dropping $8b during this time period) and despite trying quite hard have not managed to gain legal immunity or protection regarding civil and criminal liability. That means they'll very likely be hit with more lawsuits going forward and possibly even criminal charges. Looking at it, I think thats pretty good and hope the possibility for future lawsuits means they continue to pay, but knowing that case is an unusual outlier and that none of the other people involved like the CEO or other executives have had any consequences makes it feel a little underwhelming. I'm glad government is going after bad companies more and I hope they continue, but it does seem like our legal system is just not equipped to correctly hold people responsible in these cases.
- enraged_camel 3y ago
  >> disbanding this corporation doesn't undo decades of pollution either. Yes, but it prevents them from harming the public like this in the future, and also serves as a very strong deterrent for others.
  - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
    or mabye we should be more honest and consider that maybe this is a way for the USA government to fill its coffers back up? (rapping on another comment saying that there's a chance this is a way for the USA government to sell the 'manufacture capacity' that 3M is to other "greener" owners) now that I type this out, I realize that this is perfectly consistent with the behavior of empires. the realization that the alleged 'pax romana' (stability and 'peace' for the roman empire) was built on stealing from 'barbaric' tribes and selling stuff to more 'civilized' owners in Rome.
    - Jeff_Brown 3y ago
      As long as the laws and their enforcement are just, a theoretical government profit motive doesn't seem like a bad thing. But it's hard to see how the particular people who brought this case to bear would be motivated by the small slice of the increase in federal funding that would redound to them. And it's not consistent with most of the government's behavior -- it doesn't spend as many resources extracting judgments from big corporations as would be likely if its profit motive loomed large.
      - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
        no, you gotta be much more deep in your reasoning this "high" up philosophically, at this height, the principle of "justice" is to not so simple... what does it even mean "to be just"? may as well say "be good" but the point is that the issue is good for whom? the concept is "Empire"... USA government is the empire? aside question: can there ever exist multiple "empires"? monotheistic~ally speaking? uff... My English prose is answering its own questions... I am no longer deeply disturbed by this phenomenon... but it's not something scientifically real so it still shakes me.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  The point isn't to undo the past, it is to make it clear to other companies that if they lie about safety they will face an existential threat too. Who are you people who feel compelled to defend mega corporations that screw people over? What is your psychology? What do you value in life? My goodness.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    There are millions of people all over the earth that genuinely believe "might makes right", or "greed is good", or "capitalism inherently results in meritocratic and technocratic allocation of resources so nothing that happens under capitalism can possibly be bad". That's not even the least liberal worldviews widely held. Love thy neighbor and the golden rule and accountability are not universal
    - njanirudh 3y ago
      I would say that billions of people believe that "might makes right". Its been seen across the centuries and countries alike. Colonialism, MegaCorps, Hague Invasion Act and countless examples that prove that morals matter very less in the long run.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    > The point isn't to undo the past, it is to make it clear to other companies that if they lie about safety they will face an existential threat too. DuPont, while removed from the threat of this lawsuit, is guilty on plenty of counts of the same behavior with other chemicals. I believe I've read articles about GE and Monsanto also knowing the health risks to their own employees and doing nothing about it. Let alone the dumping into public waterways. $143 billion is hopefully the judgement which is levied, and hopefully the first of many.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      > this lawsuit There can and will be others. Esp. if there is a legal precedent.
  - deleted 3y ago
bcrosby95 3y ago
That's a pretty shitty response to an actual problem. Companies don't need to prove the safety of things like this. Look at bpa free. Most people don't even know that bpa free plastic tends to be just as bad, or potentially worse than bpa. The press doesn't give a shit I guess. Society went through its giant bpa panic and now it's tired of dealing with this so let's just ignore it and move onto the next thing. Ignorance is bliss.
- bravoetch 3y ago
  You're okay with companies not being responsible, but you want the press to help you out here? I feel the opposite. Companies should be responsible for poisoning us, and the press has zero to do with it.
  - pizlonator 3y ago
    I don’t think that the problem some posters are alluding to is the kind where we should be placing blame. The problem is: - Humans invent something useful and cool. - Humans discover that the cool and useful thing is toxic as fuck, but only after years go by. It takes years for the awareness of the toxicity to become widespread enough for everyone to concur it’s a problem. Often, we only find out about the toxicity as a result of the cool chemical becoming hella widespread. - Humans invent alternatives that are different enough to obviously not have the same exact problem. But: what toxic nonsense or buttcancer risks will we discover about the alternatives? No way to know immediately since it takes years to find out. And it’s only when the alternatives become widespread that we can even do the science to figure out what’s up. And by the time they become widespread, some folks got buttcancer. That’s the problem: just because there’s an alternative that is different from the thing we found out to be toxic doesn’t meant that the alternative isn’t toxic. And we find out it’s toxic because people get hurt. It’s not that the press is bad… it’s just a fundamental problem in science and engineering. You need scale to discover the really bad issues.
    - FollowingTheDao 3y ago
      > it’s just a fundamental problem in science and engineering. In my opinion is is a problem not of science and engineering, but of human greed. We do not need these products, we want them. As a species we did fine without them but suddenly in the last 100 years we need the so desperately? Adding, no one can give me a response, just downvotes. Why is the aversion to speaking about greed so strong here on hacker news?

mtalantikite 3y ago

There are plenty of pans you can use that don't have these chemicals -- cast iron, carbon steel, stainless steel, clay, etc. I agree about the floss and other plastics though. I just try to use other types of materials whenever possible.

stickyricky 3y ago

I hope steel pans aren't on that list. I prefer them to non-stick and I'm under the assumption that they're healthier than non-stick pans.

burke 3y ago
Steel pans—really any pans that just look like metal on the inside—are not made with "forever chemical" coatings.
idiotsecant 3y ago
I am also a big fan of carbon steel cookware, I've replaced everything with cast iron where that is necessary or carbon steel everywhere else. It really is a minor adjustment to workflow, non stick coatings can be pretty easily avoided.

tomxor 3y ago

You are referring to Teflon, there's some confusion with the differences in toxicity between the chemical used in the final products (today at least) and the chemical used in manufacturing. Although the human impact is only subtly different (that in theory it makes no personal difference whether or not you buy such products, which is a worse position to be in than it sounds)... As a non-chemist I don't claim to have a comprehensive understanding, but as far as I can tell: PTFE (Teflon) is found in consumer products today, and has not been directly linked to cancer yet, i.e if you eat teflon (and you have) it will supposedly just pass through your gut in an inert fashion. PFOA and more generally PFAS are used to manufacture PTFE, these are known carcinogens according to independent studies and (allegedly) internally by 3Ms own research, unfortunately PFOA is also in your blood and my blood, not because you ate teflon from a frying pan, but because once it's in the environment it doesn't get broken down, and so inevitably we end up ingesting it. The reason we have to generalise to the group of chemicals "PFAS", is because once PFOA specifically was found to be problematic companies looked for similar alternatives, but these have also found to cause similar issues. To complicate matters the PTFE in your non-stick frying pan can also releases PFOA if heated high enough, supposedly the threshold is around 300 degrees C, however it has been found that this threshold varies between products and can be realistically reached under in "normal" cooking scenarios, but usually when someone accidentally dry heated a frying pan too much, or is just plain cooking on too high a temperature. The side effects of being exposed to PFOA in this way are supposed to feel similar to catching a cold that disappears fairly quickly, and is often mistaken as such, I presume this is because it's vaporised. Even knowing all this (that provided you don't nuke your cookware it likely makes no personal difference) I've still decided to personally go down the stainless steel route, it's not very scientific, but the relationship between PTFE and PFOAs is close enough, and it flakes off my frying pans frequently enough that I've decided I don't want to keep on ingesting it only to find out later that it's also a problem. Although stainless is not hazard free, because you can get problems with metals leaching into the food and have to be careful with acidity, and also make sure you buy high quality pans. They also require more skill to cook with without destroying them, but ultimately last indefinitely if you can take care of them. The main problem with continuing to use PTFE in products is the indirect cost to the environment and human health through the "externalities" of manufacturing.

3y ago

rdli 3y ago

We've worked to reduce plastics & chemicals in our house. Some things we do: * We use silk dental floss (we use Radius) * We use glass storage containers instead of Tupperware * For cooking, we use All-Clad. * If a recipe calls for non-stick (e.g., pancakes) I use a braiser from Le Creuset, which works reasonably well. (Edited: formatting)

MarkMarine 3y ago
Same here, additionally reducing plastic packaging in our food purchases has been a constant effort. Glass milk jugs, baby bottles, etc. It's probably only touching the margins, but we're trying.
stephencanon 3y ago
A plain cast-iron skillet works flawlessly for pancakes and crepes, FWIW.
- juujian 3y ago
  Thinking about buying one. Would I be wrong in assuming it was just a matter of the order: (really) heat the pan, add the oil, and then whatever you need to cook?
  - cptaj 3y ago
    In my experience all non-stick strategies are a hoax, including teflon XD
  - hedora 3y ago
    You don't want to get it super hot (the oil/butter should not smoke). Medium heat is fine. They do take a long time to warm up to a uniform steady state temperature though (this is both an advantage and a disadvantage, since it means the temperature stays stable as you cook). For instance, when making pancakes, my first step is putting the griddle on the range. Next, I start making the batter. Of course, you can set the range to high and heat it up really fast, but then you end up risking overheating it.

yojo 3y ago

Dental floss is easy - the widely available/cheap waxed Reach floss tested negative for PFAs[1], and it does a better job of cleaning too. The non-stick flosses miss stuff for me. 1: https://www.mamavation.com/beauty/toxic-pfas-dental-floss-tooth-floss.html#Better_Tooth_Floss_Brands https://www.mamavation.com/beauty/toxic-pfas-dental-floss-to...

stronglikedan 3y ago
Oh thank goodness. When I started looking at the prices of the silk flosses and whatnot, I thought I'd had to take a second mortgage. I've been using Reach for years, due to the price, but also because it works so well for me. Thanks for posting this!

FollowingTheDao 3y ago

"Why are so many young people getting colon cancer...????" >They [PFAS] are used in all kinds of products that I personaly use everyday from pans to dental floss. Perfluorooctanoic acid enhances colorectal cancer DLD-1 cells invasiveness through activating NF-κB mediated matrix metalloproteinase-2/-9 expression https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4637576/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4637576/ I just do not understand how people can be so "whatever" about this stuff. It is sad and infuriating.

jansan 3y ago

What does "toxic" mean in this case. AFAIK "toxic" can mean that you will get a headache if you eat a gram, but it can also mean that it will kill you if it touches your skin. For example I do not mind drinking a beer or two, which includes 5% of toxic ethanol, but I prefer not having lead in my drinking water.

engineer_22 3y ago
They're bioaccumulative and are linked to high cholesterol, thyroid disease, kidney and testicular cancer, and other chronic diseases.

r00fus 3y ago

Switch to silk floss - this is just a better version of anything you can get with PFAS: https://madebyradius.com/products/natural-biodegradable-silk-floss2 https://madebyradius.com/products/natural-biodegradable-silk... You can get it on Amazon too - price is the same as Glide, Reach, etc.

labawi 3y ago

I'm not sure why people keep talking about teflon pans and dental floss. There are PFAS in products that necessarily release them into human bodies and the environment, in dispersed form rather than flakes that would usually pass the digestive system. A few examples: - food containers coated with PFAS (usually single use, often cardboard) - water-repellent PFAS spray for clothes, shoes, cars/whatever - surface PFAS treatment of clothes/shoes/whatever (better but still rubs off) - PFAS bike-chain lube Why are any of these things legal? They cause much more exposure, by design cannot be contained and spread PFAS everywhere you go. They are the reason there are PFAS in snow on Mt. Everest. Pans, medical tubes and maybe even inner layers in clothes can at least theoretically be responsibly disposed of, e.g. by reasonably contained incineration. I don't want to support unneeded PFAS, but pans seem a whole different category than spray-on PFAS for "weather-proofing" that people use because shrug "it helps I get less wet".