141–150 of 423 posts
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Most bottled mineral water is just filtered tap water with some different minerals added to give it flavor.
Tap water is vastly different depending on where it is sourced. In my experience, most countries have pretty bad tap water.
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...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.
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.
In fact, single use plastic means more oil being used for plastic and less burnt for fuel, leading to lower CO2 emissions.
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This is the prisoner's dilemma situation. Everyone would benefit more from a reduction, but if only one company does it, they benefit (in the short term) even more. I think the signalling is also valuable -- humans have a remarkable tendency to adopt attitudes over time, and I think every contribution towards the attitude that we should not harm the environment is a good one. I for one currently support and will cont…
Just to chime in about your use of the word "signaling" and when others use "virtue signaling". I believe the traditional term is "setting a good example" and even if the motivation is selfish there's a positive outcome. "Virtue signaling" was invented to demonize this behavior by focusing on (the assumed) motive as selfish.
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I have no experience or advanced education in chemistry or material sciences. Do you think it's possible that a ban would spur innovation? I imagine our modern world has use cases that can't just disappear or settle for something not as effective.
Unfortunately probably not much - the relevant properties come from the element itself (fluorine) where there literally doesn't exist an alternative. It is possible that some alternatives will come to light, but there is a limited design space and it's not as if people haven't been looking for cheaper[0] and better solutions. I'm curious as to the scope of this, and what end products are effected. A lot of the best-i…
3M has been facing a raft of litigation that has prompted the move Generally speaking, toxic substances are only "cheap" due to externalizing many of the costs involved, like increased healthcare costs and lost productivity. If you do a thorough analysis of the costs of using such chemicals, they aren't cheap at all. Maybe someday humans will get that.
Competition goes beyond just companies too, countries compete with each other, to the point of starting wars over e.g. natural resources, territory, and access to infrastructure. And one future scenario is wars over more basic resources like food and water, as climate change will cause droughts and famines. At the very least it will (and already is) triggering mass migrations.
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I try really hard not to use single use plastic. Especially plastic bags, plastic bottles, etc. This frequently means I’ll be extremely thirst throughout some days but will wait till I get home or to work to drink filtered water out of the tap. I went to Las Vegas about a year ago on a work trip and realized that the hotel I stayed at uses more plastic bottles in an hour than I would use in my lifetime with no though…
Why try and minimise single use plastic? That's oil going straight back into the ground (landfill) rather than being refined into petrol and burnt! Single use plastic is way better than recycled plastic at slowing global warming.
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> 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 mo…
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.
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Dec 20 (Reuters) - U.S. industrial conglomerate 3M Co (MMM.N) on Tuesday set a 2025 deadline to stop producing PFAS, the "forever chemicals" used in anything from cell phones to semiconductors that have been linked to cancers, heart problems and low birth weights. Perfluoralkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) do not break down quickly and have in recent years been found in dangerous concentrations in drinking w…
>dangerous concentrations Those words need context, otherwise this reads a lot like scaremongering. Dangerous as in close to an LD50? A minimum measured effect? Or in layman: how much worse/better are exposure to those concentrations than say time-equivalent exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke? Or first-hand. >in drinking water, soils and foods. Routes of introduction to people and environment are also important…
The article gives a perfectly good overview for people that don't know the term.
> ...sued by California's attorney general to recover clean-up costs. So what are the clean-up costs? Is it even possible or do they just clean up the most urgent parts?
3M has been facing a raft of litigation that has prompted the move Generally speaking, toxic substances are only "cheap" due to externalizing many of the costs involved, like increased healthcare costs and lost productivity. If you do a thorough analysis of the costs of using such chemicals, they aren't cheap at all. Maybe someday humans will get that.
Coal cheap, nuclear expensive.
I mean don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of nuclear energy as a CO2-less high potential source of energy, it's just that they're fucking around with the waste too much and umming and arring about it while it just sits near the nuclear power plants, instead of just burying it in a mountain like they do in finland [0]). They could decomission a strip mine and fill it back up with lead-and-concrete encased nuclear waste, then bury it in another few hundred meters of sand - nobody would be the wiser for the next millennia. In theory.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-s...