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The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances

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Re: The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances

#191

Post by Bluecobra »

hcurtiss wrote: post #189
marshray wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Bose–Einstein condensate a chemical? How about Neutronium? See how that works? Real productive mode of conversation, huh.

I’m just trying to understand what “don’t dump chemicals in water or on land” even means. If nitrogen and water are OK, then the directive is plainly wrong. What else would be OK? And how would we make that decision?

Well for starters, maybe it was a bad idea to dump 27,000 barrels of DDT in the ocean near Los Angeles.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-05-18/heres-w...

Re: The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances

#192

Post by autoexec »

cyberax wrote: post #143
andersrs wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a joke. Companies like 3M and Dupont just switch up a few atoms. Teflon becomes 'GenX'. One has to conclude that the EPA are complicit in this.

Teflon is not hazardous, it's also not GenX.

It can be extremely hazardous to birds (https://www.ewg.org/research/canaries-kitchen) and can also make humans sick ("Teflon flu").

Re: The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances

#193

Post by autoexec »

robocat wrote: post #152
zug_zug wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those tests exist already Do you actually know which tests the EPA runs and if so could you cite your source? > no ethical tests can determine the full truth. That's an all-or-nothing fallacy. Also you didn't respond to the core of my remark, which is about increasing the financial incentives by an order of magnitude. Lastly I take your complaint about coffee as support my argument that the current testing mechanis…

> fallacy No. Ethical tests cannot determine the full truth - that is just a simple fact. How can anything be tested on on enough humans ethically? We can use animal models to detect some negatives. But if animal tests show a substance is "safe", doubt would still remain until tested on humans. It is normal that humanity creates new technology without knowing the future impact. Some people think that we shouldn't int…

I guess that it's a fallacy because we don't need to determine the "full truth", just as much of it as we can if doing so would prevent mass poisonings.

Re: The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances

#194

Post by trofh »

sva_ wrote: post #155
hcurtiss wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, after so many studies, I would be particularly surprised if we discover severe detrimental effects of PFAS as a category. So far, most of the science has revolved around the fact we can find them all over the place. They are relatively pervasive. For most of these compounds (and there are many under the umbrella PFAS) health effects at expected exposure levels have been much more difficult to prove. In fa…

Yeah, and we've seen some pervasive changes about people in the past decade. Just because people made those changes to their bodies their identity, doesn't mean that those changes haven't happened.

This is probably linked more to changing social attitudes towards the medicalization of gender non-conformity. And also sexual fetishes being more accepted.

Re: The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances

#195

Post by epcoa »

krisoft wrote: post #126
sitkack wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything is chemicals. This is a thought terminating cliche and pedantically destroys the conversation.

> This is a thought terminating cliche and pedantically destroys the conversation. It is not. Quite contrary. The thought it provokes is "what chemicals do you want to ban?" Do you want to ban water? Should we throw anyone in a prison who transports it? It is a chemical after all. One which is quite dangerous in many circumstances. But surely that is not what edgyquant meant. Should we prohibit people selling soap? I…

> Should we prohibit people selling soap?

I mean, there's a good example there with phosphate compounds in detergents.

Re: The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances

#196

Post by andersrs »

sneak wrote: post #133
andersrs wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a joke. Companies like 3M and Dupont just switch up a few atoms. Teflon becomes 'GenX'. One has to conclude that the EPA are complicit in this.

Most of the regulatory agencies in the US exist to serve as anticompetitive moats around the largest industrial companies in the US. You see it in the FDA, the FAA, the EPA, SEC/FINRA, etc. Once you get big enough, it seems that the federal government places you under the umbrella of "national security" and decides to make sure you get to continue to exist (so long as you cooperate and play ball). Being part of the l…

The food pyramid is what made me see it. The USDA decided to just fuck up the diet of the western world because the US happens to be great a growing corn.

Re: The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances

#197

Post by littlestymaar »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #147
littlestymaar wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that scenario to be a proposal , the hypothesis of the said scenario should be asserted first. They just said: “should this be a big enough harm to humanity as a whole we should not shy away from a total ban”, but he's not arguing that there is a big enough harm at stake here. And they aren't even talking specifically about PFAS in this comment in the first place! They're answering, in the abstract , to a comment…

They literally declared that the only harms are to enterprise and are trivial. >For what it's worth, depending on the harms, a sudden total ban is not out of the question as being beneficial to humanity as a whole. Total ban should be considered against harms. >It would just be disruptive to enterprise, boo hoo. Harms are trivial because they are to enterprise. >We don't need to always treat bad actors with kid glove…

Yes, that's what they said. And I'm not giving my opinion on their take here.

But they said nothing about PFAS, and made no proposal to ban them.

Again, this is an abstract statement that says “stop shying away from punishing those bastards when they kill people”, not a proposal to ban PFAS in particular in this situation.

Re: The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances

#198

Post by AniseAbyss »

happytiger wrote: post #180

Lets us all join hands and pray that the EPA will one day learn to do their job. How can this be a debate? This stuff has broadly poisoned the water supplies of entire regions in a way that won’t be easy to fix and they are still debating . Is that really the line? Look at this map. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.2c00502 Look at the known effects: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/index.html

[dead]

Re: The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances

#199

Post by littlestymaar »

hcurtiss wrote: post #145
littlestymaar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally how it works today. And that's part of the problem with PFAS, because you can release them in tiny fractions (not toxic at this scale) but they end up concentrating in the food chain and people are still being harmed in the end.

Can you point me to a study showing definitive harm due to bioaccumulation of expected exposure levels? EPAs own page cleverly dodges the issue by saying (1) it can accumulate and (2) high exposure levels can cause harm. But the exposure levels we've seen in the studies evidencing harm are thousands of times higher than any observed bioaccumulation. For me to be concerned about environmental exposure, I'm going to ac…

This line of reasoning is absurd!

We know PFAS levels in the environment can only increase in practice due to their very low degradation rate (hence their “forever chemicals” nickname). So even if these harmful levels aren't being reached now, they will definitely be at some point of we keep pouring them out there. And by that time it would be too late.

You don't wait for someone to be harm before intervening when the harm is likely.

Re: The EPA is proposing that 'forever chemicals' be considered hazardous substances

#200

Post by happytiger »

warble wrote: post #187
happytiger wrote: post #180

Lets us all join hands and pray that the EPA will one day learn to do their job. How can this be a debate? This stuff has broadly poisoned the water supplies of entire regions in a way that won’t be easy to fix and they are still debating . Is that really the line? Look at this map. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.2c00502 Look at the known effects: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/index.html

After reading this it's still not clear there's a problem.

What’s hard to understand exactly? I’ve pulled a brief summary from both links here to make sure it’s clearer.

> Research is ongoing to understand the mechanisms of PFAS toxicity. The epidemiological evidence suggests associations between increases in exposure to (specific) PFAS and certain health effects

* Heart

Increases in cholesterol levels (PFOA, PFOS, PFNA, PFDA)

* Vaccine

Lower antibody response to some vaccines (PFOA, PFOS, PFHxS, PFDA)

* Liver

Changes in liver enzymes (PFOA, PFOS, PFHxS)

* Pregnancy complications

Pregnancy-induced hypertension and preeclampsia (PFOA, PFOS)

* Infant birth weights

Small decreases in birth weight (PFOA, PFOS)

* Cancer

Kidney and testicular cancer (PFOA)

And

An estimated 200 million U.S. residents receive PFAS-contaminated drinking water, and state-level testing indicates widespread contamination of environmental media, (13) yet tremendous data gaps exist related to PFAS contamination and human exposure. (2,14) The only federal drinking water testing initiative with PFAS data to date, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule 3 (UCMR3), focused on large drinking water systems, had high reporting thresholds (10–90 ng/L), and excluded private wells. (15) The EPA has developed nonbinding Health Advisory Levels (HALs) for four PFAS, including updated HALs for PFOA and PFOS at “near zero” levels, (16) but no federal limits on PFAS in public drinking water currently exist. (2)

That set of known harmful effects + 2/3 of the population having the stuff in their drinking water… ain’t great.

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