6 ms·

PFAS Forever Chemicals Present in Some Plastic Recyclable Bottles

61 points by martey 3y ago

londons_explore 3y ago
This is one thing that makes me not want to use recycled stuff... There is a much wider variety of contamination in it. Sure, we hopefully test for known-poisonous contamination, but there are all kinds of not-yet-known-to-be-poisonous contaminants, and recycled stuff has a much higher chance of having that than things made from new ingredients.
- coryrc 3y ago
  Treated sewage is used for fertilizing crops. They line "compostable" goods (straws, plates) with PFAS and it goes into municipal compost. And where does that go? For a long time we lived mostly avoiding the consequences of our pollution, but now it's everywhere in our food and water.
  - hh3k0 3y ago
    > For a long time we lived mostly avoiding the consequences of our pollution, but now it's everywhere in our food and water. To expand on that, there are places in the USA where you breathe in forever chemicals when you take a hot shower.
    - tekla 3y ago
      It IS pretty cool to think that we are probably drinking water that was also drunk by dinosaurs millions of years ago.
      - 2devnull 3y ago
        It tastes different I’m sure.
      - londons_explore 3y ago
        Mixed with a small amount of chemical made by the 3M company that will make you grow tits and balls, when you probably wished you had only one...
        hh3k0 3y ago
        Who the hell wishes for one tit and/or one ball? /s
  - ASalazarMX 3y ago
    And some said human civilization had mostly escaped natural selection. Humanity's evolution to coexist with its own pollution sure will be interesting, if global warming doesn't kill it first.
    - bhouston 3y ago
      I was thinking the same recently. Being able to survive through a lot of environmental pollution is likely a major driver of evolution.
    - KMag 3y ago
      Over what time frame do you believe global warming has a non-negligible chance of causing human extinction, as opposed to crashing populations, dramatically reducing quality of life, and/or destroying our current civilization?
    - fuzzfactor 3y ago
      >Humanity's evolution to coexist with its own pollution sure will be interesting, if global warming doesn't kill it first. Naturally you would have to figure by definition that cave men lived in caves, but I would imagine with a population explosion there was an eventual housing shortage like we have never seen. Plus with diasporatization lots of early humans would have ended up or even started out in places without any caves to begin with. Not all of them would be unhoused, and I think it was the ones with robust shelters like caves who were most likely to have "indoor" fires and breathe lots of smoke of various kinds for generations. And after thousands of years of natural selection I would think those possessing such stable (rent-controlled?) dwellings would be the ones most resistant to the damage caused by smoke inhalation, if not other pollutants. It could happen. And how do you think these people felt about global warming when their Ice Age started melting down?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- hh3k0 3y ago
  > This is one thing that makes me not want to use recycled stuff You should avoid plastics in general if you (rightfully) worry about forever chemicals.
  - dimitrios1 3y ago
    You simply cannot avoid plastics in the US, or probably anywhere in the world at this point. The water we drink, unless we have sourced it ourselves from a spring or well will come into contact with some kind of plastic tube, pipe, component, or bottle.
    - scottLobster 3y ago
      Avoid completely? No, but you can limit exposure. Even if you were living in the 60s when everyone smoked in public/at work/on planes, it was still healthier to not smoke and sit in non-smoking sections where they existed. In the case of plastics, filtering water helps. Even simple charcoal filters can catch a lot of it. Store your food in glass containers as opposed to plastic. Don't use non-stick cookware, some type of metal + fat works fine once you get a practiced technique. Use a stainless steel thermos, and minimize the amount of time hot liquid comes into contact with plastic components/containers. Heat breaks down plastics more easily and generally results in higher levels of contamination. Cold water passing through a plastic tube in your fridge is probably fine.
      - jondwillis 3y ago
        These are all good suggestions, and I have incorporated many of them in my life. Even still, food is often grown with and amongst contamination. Your friends and family probably don’t care or know as much as you do, so you get a nice dose when you are over for dinner. So much food is transported in plastic because it is cost-effective. It’s in the water at this point. Furthermore, in my personal experience, I can get obsessive about avoiding plastic/PFAS. People do not like to be lectured about plastic and PFAS so it is socially draining sometimes.
      - dimitrios1 3y ago
- alexpw 3y ago
  It suggests the new plastics have the PFAS. Any that are fluorinated by Inhance. To your point, the recycled may have them too, as a consequence.
  - rngname22 3y ago
    I just went down a rabbithole of googling Inhance Technologies, seeing an article mentioning a lawsuit against them by both the EPA as well another group, seeing an employee quoted in said article, googling them, and thinking about how it would be to work at a company that manufactures a PFAS product. Do they feel any guilt? Do they believe their use of carcinogenic substances that do not biodegrade and become dispersed globally with no cleanup mechanism is just....moral? Do they believe anthropogenic industrial activity is just justified by the Good and Benefits it can bring to the world? Do they just assume these small messes we make while advancing Science and Progress will be easily cleaned up by smarter, more powerful humans in the future? Do they just consider the health effects to be worth whatever marginal improvement in waterproofing we get to our fucking disposable plastic cups in return, like smoking a single cigarette being no big deal? Or do they just choose to ignore the headlines because its uncomfortable to think about how you might be one of the bad guys and their education and skillset is a sunk cost and acknowledging the environmental destruction they wreak would mean giving up a lucrative income, sort of how a FAANG employee might see a headline about IG being bad for teens mental heath and telling themselves 'whatever I'm sure it's not that bad'?
    - didntknowya 3y ago
      it's very easy to ask questions sitting on a chair of privilege. most people just take a job to survive.
      - rngname22 3y ago
        I don't really believe that, for the case of a chemical engineer who was able to complete at minimum a four year engineering degree who works in Texas (where said company is located).
- arbitrage 3y ago
  This article was not about recycled plastics. It's about plastics that can be recycled. Subtle difference, there.
- jondwillis 3y ago
  We need to greatly improve consumer education around recycling best practices. We also need to add more regulatory pressure for businesses to comply (and probably eventually consumers too.) Currently, in the United States at least, recycling rules can vary so widely based on locality. Sometimes, several authoritative sources disagree. There is therefore rampant and conflicting misinformation which adds to a sense of hopelessness and apathy. All of this adds to increased chances of contamination, and lower profitability for recycling companies.
  - smileysteve 3y ago
    What if we (the US, or most states) simplified recycling to cardboard and aluminum. Frankly, we should be composting organics rather than the wastes on most plastics.
    - anticensor 3y ago
      Transparent glass, white paper and certain thermoplastics (PE, PP, PET) too.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nayuki 3y ago
https://archive.ph/wkUOL https://archive.ph/wkUOL
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
Ajay-p 3y ago
What is the solution to recycled plastic? Asia is no longer buying it from America (1) and it's more carbon polluting to use recycled plastic (2) so.. what is the answer? 1) https://www.npr.org/2019/08/20/750864036/u-s-recycling-industry-is-struggling-to-figure-out-a-future-without-china https://www.npr.org/2019/08/20/750864036/u-s-recycling-indus... 2) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/sep/24/lego-abandons-effort-to-make-bricks-from-recycled-plastic-bottles https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/sep/24/lego-ab...
- dackerlunghack 3y ago
  [dead]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- scottLobster 3y ago
  The answer is to stop using plastic where its material properties confer no functional advantage. More metal, more paper, more glass, perhaps more high-quality plastic. Of course, this makes everything currently packaged in cheap, mildly toxic plastic more expensive. It's the defining trait of the 21st century, our global economic pursuit of the lowest prices possible for everything is starting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The solutions are all inflationary, whether paying for decontamination/medical treatment after the fact or using higher quality materials, so if we do fix the problem people will generally bitch about the increased cost and poor people will be stepped on yet again through cost inflation; because a financial asset can go up and down automatically with inflation, but inflation-matching salary increases are only extracted at economic gunpoint. Maybe the would-be Neo-Aristocrats will wake up and realize it isn't the 90s anymore, and keeping the herds healthy is in the ranchers' best interest; but they're stubborn enough to force that realization to be a violent one, so it'll be a while yet before we truly turn the corner.
  - Fauntleroy 3y ago
    We also need to somehow prevent those alternative materials from being coated in plastic, as many metal and paper "replacements" for plastic often are.
purpleblue 3y ago
I feel like the real environmental problem we have is chemical pollution we are generating throughout the world, and I feel like these companies are diverting people's attentions with carbon and global warming. Yes, that is a problem but I feel like the chemical pollution in our waters and in our food supply is a much more immediate issue. Yet almost no focus is done on it. It very much feels like what the sugar industry did back in the 1960s to divert attention away from sugar and onto fats, which lead to decades of wrong advice and bad food habits.
- maherbeg 3y ago
  I definitely agree with this, though it seems like the EU has stricter standards on a lot of chemicals (like dyes and such). I really wish a movement would pick up to start fixing this.
nyanpasu64 3y ago
What plastics are still safe to use? Polycarbonate is made from phthalates (BPA and others), an unknown portion of HDPE contains PFOAs, PET plastic bottles leach antimony when hot...
dmbche 3y ago
What a surprise to see antispeciesism show up here!
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  David S. Oderberg, "The Illusion of Animal Rights"[0]. [0] https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7SKlRTfkUiecnJuOWpJSzFOaDg/edit?resourcekey=0-XzKHWNunKf6fOxbYcahEvw https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7SKlRTfkUiecnJuOWpJSzFOaDg/...
  - dmbche 3y ago
    Went through a few pages - it's quite weak argumentation, to just state without support that animals don't have rights or that they historically have them, when it's trivial to show laws on the book giving animals rights or looking up trials in which animals were involved, especially historically. Edit0: it's also very weak in that it doesn't name the rights that are to be "pushed by activists", simple things like the right to life and the right to freedom (cannot be sequestered), which have little to do with animals capacities. Edit1: This philosopher is also against contraception and fights against it, for the rights of sperm and egg it seems.

61 points by martey 3y ago

This is one thing that makes me not want to use recycled stuff... There is a much wider variety of contamination in it. Sure, we hopefully test for known-poisonous contamination, but there are all kinds of not-yet-known-to-be-poisonous contaminants, and recycled stuff has a much higher chance of having that than things made from new ingredients.

coryrc 3y ago
Treated sewage is used for fertilizing crops. They line "compostable" goods (straws, plates) with PFAS and it goes into municipal compost. And where does that go? For a long time we lived mostly avoiding the consequences of our pollution, but now it's everywhere in our food and water.
- hh3k0 3y ago
  > For a long time we lived mostly avoiding the consequences of our pollution, but now it's everywhere in our food and water. To expand on that, there are places in the USA where you breathe in forever chemicals when you take a hot shower.
  - tekla 3y ago
    It IS pretty cool to think that we are probably drinking water that was also drunk by dinosaurs millions of years ago.
    - 2devnull 3y ago
      It tastes different I’m sure.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      Mixed with a small amount of chemical made by the 3M company that will make you grow tits and balls, when you probably wished you had only one...
      - hh3k0 3y ago
        Who the hell wishes for one tit and/or one ball? /s
- ASalazarMX 3y ago
  And some said human civilization had mostly escaped natural selection. Humanity's evolution to coexist with its own pollution sure will be interesting, if global warming doesn't kill it first.
  - bhouston 3y ago
    I was thinking the same recently. Being able to survive through a lot of environmental pollution is likely a major driver of evolution.
  - KMag 3y ago
    Over what time frame do you believe global warming has a non-negligible chance of causing human extinction, as opposed to crashing populations, dramatically reducing quality of life, and/or destroying our current civilization?
  - fuzzfactor 3y ago
    >Humanity's evolution to coexist with its own pollution sure will be interesting, if global warming doesn't kill it first. Naturally you would have to figure by definition that cave men lived in caves, but I would imagine with a population explosion there was an eventual housing shortage like we have never seen. Plus with diasporatization lots of early humans would have ended up or even started out in places without any caves to begin with. Not all of them would be unhoused, and I think it was the ones with robust shelters like caves who were most likely to have "indoor" fires and breathe lots of smoke of various kinds for generations. And after thousands of years of natural selection I would think those possessing such stable (rent-controlled?) dwellings would be the ones most resistant to the damage caused by smoke inhalation, if not other pollutants. It could happen. And how do you think these people felt about global warming when their Ice Age started melting down?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hh3k0 3y ago
> This is one thing that makes me not want to use recycled stuff You should avoid plastics in general if you (rightfully) worry about forever chemicals.
- dimitrios1 3y ago
  You simply cannot avoid plastics in the US, or probably anywhere in the world at this point. The water we drink, unless we have sourced it ourselves from a spring or well will come into contact with some kind of plastic tube, pipe, component, or bottle.
  - scottLobster 3y ago
    Avoid completely? No, but you can limit exposure. Even if you were living in the 60s when everyone smoked in public/at work/on planes, it was still healthier to not smoke and sit in non-smoking sections where they existed. In the case of plastics, filtering water helps. Even simple charcoal filters can catch a lot of it. Store your food in glass containers as opposed to plastic. Don't use non-stick cookware, some type of metal + fat works fine once you get a practiced technique. Use a stainless steel thermos, and minimize the amount of time hot liquid comes into contact with plastic components/containers. Heat breaks down plastics more easily and generally results in higher levels of contamination. Cold water passing through a plastic tube in your fridge is probably fine.
    - jondwillis 3y ago
      These are all good suggestions, and I have incorporated many of them in my life. Even still, food is often grown with and amongst contamination. Your friends and family probably don’t care or know as much as you do, so you get a nice dose when you are over for dinner. So much food is transported in plastic because it is cost-effective. It’s in the water at this point. Furthermore, in my personal experience, I can get obsessive about avoiding plastic/PFAS. People do not like to be lectured about plastic and PFAS so it is socially draining sometimes.
    - dimitrios1 3y ago
alexpw 3y ago
It suggests the new plastics have the PFAS. Any that are fluorinated by Inhance. To your point, the recycled may have them too, as a consequence.
- rngname22 3y ago
  I just went down a rabbithole of googling Inhance Technologies, seeing an article mentioning a lawsuit against them by both the EPA as well another group, seeing an employee quoted in said article, googling them, and thinking about how it would be to work at a company that manufactures a PFAS product. Do they feel any guilt? Do they believe their use of carcinogenic substances that do not biodegrade and become dispersed globally with no cleanup mechanism is just....moral? Do they believe anthropogenic industrial activity is just justified by the Good and Benefits it can bring to the world? Do they just assume these small messes we make while advancing Science and Progress will be easily cleaned up by smarter, more powerful humans in the future? Do they just consider the health effects to be worth whatever marginal improvement in waterproofing we get to our fucking disposable plastic cups in return, like smoking a single cigarette being no big deal? Or do they just choose to ignore the headlines because its uncomfortable to think about how you might be one of the bad guys and their education and skillset is a sunk cost and acknowledging the environmental destruction they wreak would mean giving up a lucrative income, sort of how a FAANG employee might see a headline about IG being bad for teens mental heath and telling themselves 'whatever I'm sure it's not that bad'?
  - didntknowya 3y ago
    it's very easy to ask questions sitting on a chair of privilege. most people just take a job to survive.
    - rngname22 3y ago
      I don't really believe that, for the case of a chemical engineer who was able to complete at minimum a four year engineering degree who works in Texas (where said company is located).
arbitrage 3y ago
This article was not about recycled plastics. It's about plastics that can be recycled. Subtle difference, there.
jondwillis 3y ago
We need to greatly improve consumer education around recycling best practices. We also need to add more regulatory pressure for businesses to comply (and probably eventually consumers too.) Currently, in the United States at least, recycling rules can vary so widely based on locality. Sometimes, several authoritative sources disagree. There is therefore rampant and conflicting misinformation which adds to a sense of hopelessness and apathy. All of this adds to increased chances of contamination, and lower profitability for recycling companies.
- smileysteve 3y ago
  What if we (the US, or most states) simplified recycling to cardboard and aluminum. Frankly, we should be composting organics rather than the wastes on most plastics.
  - anticensor 3y ago
    Transparent glass, white paper and certain thermoplastics (PE, PP, PET) too.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nayuki 3y ago

https://archive.ph/wkUOL https://archive.ph/wkUOL

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

Ajay-p 3y ago

What is the solution to recycled plastic? Asia is no longer buying it from America (1) and it's more carbon polluting to use recycled plastic (2) so.. what is the answer? 1) https://www.npr.org/2019/08/20/750864036/u-s-recycling-industry-is-struggling-to-figure-out-a-future-without-china https://www.npr.org/2019/08/20/750864036/u-s-recycling-indus... 2) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/sep/24/lego-abandons-effort-to-make-bricks-from-recycled-plastic-bottles https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/sep/24/lego-ab...

dackerlunghack 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
scottLobster 3y ago
The answer is to stop using plastic where its material properties confer no functional advantage. More metal, more paper, more glass, perhaps more high-quality plastic. Of course, this makes everything currently packaged in cheap, mildly toxic plastic more expensive. It's the defining trait of the 21st century, our global economic pursuit of the lowest prices possible for everything is starting to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The solutions are all inflationary, whether paying for decontamination/medical treatment after the fact or using higher quality materials, so if we do fix the problem people will generally bitch about the increased cost and poor people will be stepped on yet again through cost inflation; because a financial asset can go up and down automatically with inflation, but inflation-matching salary increases are only extracted at economic gunpoint. Maybe the would-be Neo-Aristocrats will wake up and realize it isn't the 90s anymore, and keeping the herds healthy is in the ranchers' best interest; but they're stubborn enough to force that realization to be a violent one, so it'll be a while yet before we truly turn the corner.
- Fauntleroy 3y ago
  We also need to somehow prevent those alternative materials from being coated in plastic, as many metal and paper "replacements" for plastic often are.

purpleblue 3y ago

I feel like the real environmental problem we have is chemical pollution we are generating throughout the world, and I feel like these companies are diverting people's attentions with carbon and global warming. Yes, that is a problem but I feel like the chemical pollution in our waters and in our food supply is a much more immediate issue. Yet almost no focus is done on it. It very much feels like what the sugar industry did back in the 1960s to divert attention away from sugar and onto fats, which lead to decades of wrong advice and bad food habits.

maherbeg 3y ago
I definitely agree with this, though it seems like the EU has stricter standards on a lot of chemicals (like dyes and such). I really wish a movement would pick up to start fixing this.

nyanpasu64 3y ago

What plastics are still safe to use? Polycarbonate is made from phthalates (BPA and others), an unknown portion of HDPE contains PFOAs, PET plastic bottles leach antimony when hot...

dmbche 3y ago

What a surprise to see antispeciesism show up here!

lo_zamoyski 3y ago
David S. Oderberg, "The Illusion of Animal Rights"[0]. [0] https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7SKlRTfkUiecnJuOWpJSzFOaDg/edit?resourcekey=0-XzKHWNunKf6fOxbYcahEvw https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7SKlRTfkUiecnJuOWpJSzFOaDg/...
- dmbche 3y ago
  Went through a few pages - it's quite weak argumentation, to just state without support that animals don't have rights or that they historically have them, when it's trivial to show laws on the book giving animals rights or looking up trials in which animals were involved, especially historically. Edit0: it's also very weak in that it doesn't name the rights that are to be "pushed by activists", simple things like the right to life and the right to freedom (cannot be sequestered), which have little to do with animals capacities. Edit1: This philosopher is also against contraception and fights against it, for the rights of sperm and egg it seems.