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I feel like a realist’s take is still positive. Some will be replaced with wax or other safe options. Others will use sketchy unregulated chemicals. But I can’t
by teaearlgraycold 3y ago
I feel like a realist’s take is still positive. Some will be replaced with wax or other safe options. Others will use sketchy unregulated chemicals. But I can’t see those chemicals being much worse on average than PFAS. So a net positive overall.
- dylan604 3y agoThese companies will not be stopping the use of items until they have a replacement. I don't understand how we can't just test the items intended as the replacement rigorously.
- Spivak 3y agoI mean we can and likely will. It won't stop it from being unsafe in a new novel to be discovered way. You can't replace it with anything known to be unsafe. The FDA's process isn't actually that bad, if one can tell in advance it will be unsafe then no bueno. But if it seems like it should be safe in theory and nothing we know currently contradicts that then go for it. Trans fats is a great example, they occur naturally in food we already eat and look chemically to be perfectly fine. Given the scientific knowledge at the time it would have been impossible to predict in advance that they were harmful to humans. People say it's blacklist vs whitelist but outside just banning everything new it's hard to get stricter. There's not much an approval from the FDA would do except verify that they did the testing they said they did. This isn't a case of the FDA being like "shoot if only we had seen this sooner we would have never allowed it."
- hx8 3y agoThe FDA's process would be much better if learned which substances are unsafe faster and responded to the knowledge that a substance is unsafe faster. PFAS were introduced in the 1940s. We started getting an idea that they were harmful in the 2000s. Six years ago the term "forever chemical" was coined and it entered mainstream discourse. It took us ~60 years to start to realize they are harmful, another ~15 to be certain, and another ~5 to ban them.
- dylan604 3y agoIt may have taken the public ~60 years, but the companies making them knew much much earlier.
- BizarroLand 3y agoIt is kind of strange that because we cannot test products on individual people because that would be inhumane, we end up testing products on animals, deciding they're ok, and then dumping these chemicals on billions of people only to find out 50 years later that there are unexpected side effects. I have vague memories of how people were so concerned about deforestation and trash that they pushed to get rid of paper bags and replace them with safer, clean, recyclable plastic, and now we still have deforestation and trash but also now plastic rains from the skies and lodges in the clogs in our arteries and has polluted distant islands where no human has ever touched foot on and created an island sized patch of garbage in the ocean that needs billions of dollars of cleanup to fix. Oh well, I guess that is "someone else's problem". Yay.
- dylan604 3y agoI can't tell, but are you advocating for human test subjects?
- BizarroLand 3y agoNo. I am pointing out the irony of the situation that if we were cruel enough to test the effects of these chemicals on a select few humans that it would have prevented humans worldwide from suffering under the cruelty of an untold multitude of side effects, but our own sense of ethics and justice prevented us from doing the thing that created the least total amount of suffering and cruelty. That being said, I would still not advocate for human testing of chemicals and products, not even for death row inmates because there are too many things people would want to test and there is no bottom once we start going down that slide. However, I would advocate for digital human simulacra that we could test the effects of chemicals on rather than any living creature. I hope that in the near future we could make a virtual human that we can carry out these tests on at many times normal speed so we can solve these things once and for all.
- BobbyTables2 3y agoYou realize a 10 serving package can say 0g trans-fat and have 5g of it inside? Thanks to the FDA!
- remarkEon 3y ago>Some will be replaced with wax I'm a little behind on the times it seems, but how would wax be produced in such industrial quantities? Which kind of wax? There's several, some artificial some not.