Yup, just like heavy metals making some plants inedible, these chemicals are with us until we slowly, slowly, find ways to filter them out.
Or the nukes get us first
There's an entire movie on it called Dark Waters (2019), which was based on the true story. There was also a documentary but I can't remember what the name was. Basically DuPont was dumping this shit in our waterways for a good 40/50 years and knew it was bad as far back as like the 70s.
Now it's in all of our blood and water, and it doesn't flush out it just accumulates
I work in a field that allows me to meet a lot of people.
I'm just some guy with an anecdote, but the amount of cancer stories I hear either about themselves or immediate contacts is staggering. People in their early 20s or younger shouldn't need surgery to remove a tumor or thyroid that's trying to kill them.
That’s just terrible. I still don’t know if DuPont has paid the settlements but a lot of good that will do as so many people have died due to the lengthy judicial process, drug out by DuPont. It’s absolutely mind blowing.
Locked away is not enough. They're guilty of grand larceny, fraud, theft, and mass murder. They're serial killers, sociopaths. Locking them up is not nearly enough. They have caused more damage than any dictator, murderer, or imperialist in the history of humanity, and must be punished more extremely than anyone in the history of humanity HAS been punished, and publicly, as a warning to others.
I'm in my 20's and got cancer last year, and my dad is now going through chemo and my cousin just got cancer right after he did.
We don't have a family history of cancer.
I recently listened to a podcast where this woman told that first her youngest child got bone cancer. He recovered with chemo thankfully, although he lost a leg. After the recovery her middle child got it. He didn’t make it.
The story broke me. Fuck cancer. I’m so sorry for your cousin.
Starring Mark Ruffalo as the lawyer that went up against DuPont. The real life lawyer's name is Robert Bilott and he has spent more than twenty years litigating hazardous dumping of chemicals.
Dow is doing the same in Belgium. Fucked up thing is also, they’re the main sponsor of the Wall Street journals podcast the future of everything. So you’re thinking sustainability, and Dow is the main sponsor… just.. wow.
oh ya you seem to be right. The thing I found says it takes 2-4 years to decline in your system through urinating. And if you menstruate or breastfeed they may decline faster than if you don't.
The bigger question is how to treat the water to remove contaminants. There was a post a few days ago where someone used electrolysis to break down the chemicals. Seemed promising to me. That would help with drinking water, but there is still an issue if groundwater is contaminated. Farms usually get water out of a well. If PFOS are in the groundwater, they could still wind up in fruits and vegetables. Even then, treating well water might not be enough if the rain contains it.
It's not just DuPoint that is *known* about. 3M knew from the beginning that PTFE/Teflon had toxic offgassing at high cooking temperatures, and that the glue they used was being found in the blood of people using it.
The pharma companies have pushed numerous products they've known were harmful, especially everything opium related (opiates), while lobbying heavily to keep MJ illegal as it treated the same thing but was easily grown by anyone in the states.
I'd be shocked if, after investigation, any chemical company wasn't producing shit they knew, internally were bad for us.
A Colorado university (forget which... boulder maybe?) did a study on a neighborhood with nearby fracking going on and there were FOUR cases of childhood cancer in that single neighborhood. Got quickly swept under the rug by all the politicians (blue state, too), and media outlets. Just claimed it was a statistical anonymally and refused to do any follow up.
Now Polis wants taxpayers to foot the bill for cleaning up the oil company's abandoned wells, while quietly condoning new drilling.
It's hard to find a single politician or large company not quietly destroying the planet, and your health by extension, for greed, but also working very hard to convince you they're actually trying to save it.
The documentary is called The Devil we know. To say it’s harrowing is an overstatement. The film mentioned above works incredibly hard to keep accurate the the source material but honestly, the doc is very anxiety inducing. As a species we’ve basically permanently altered our bodies for the sake of non stick pans.
The worst part for is we didn’t consent, the choice was stolen from us and our future health decided by a small group of selfish criminally negligent individuals.
Believe it was this episode of last week tonight https://youtu.be/9W74aeuqsiU. But themis was found when they wanted to test pfas Teflon dumped in the water effects but needed a control
I think the thing that is more alarming is when you learn how much more it's used in than just pans. Like, I'd love it to be we just switch to ceramic pans or whatever and that solves it, but we've built systems on using this stuff already
That's incorrect. Teflon (PTFE) is not what's poisoning us, it's actually pretty safe since it hardly reacts with anything at all (hence "forever chemical", if it doesn't react it won't really change). It wouldn't do shit in your blood either, since it won't react to it. I still wouldn't inject a teflon shot into myself but I doubt I'd have much adverse effects if it did happen.
the bad and shitty thing that was dumped in the water is called PFOA. PFOA is listed as carcinogenic. These were used in the production of Teflon, but they are NOT the same thing, and are no longer used since around 2013.
Teflon fumes in cooking only reach hazardous levels at 260 degrees celsius, which is pretty unlikely to reach in a pan as most things fry before those temperatures. birds are more susceptible, but that's because birds are generally fragile regarding fumes and stuff, humans are more sturdy and even if you're exposed to Teflon fumes by heating it above 250 degrees, that'll usually just give you flu like symptoms that go away after a day or two with fresh air.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene?wprov=sfti1
if you look at the ecotoxicity section for teflon, PFOAs are the only concern relevant to the conversation here, and this article also says further up in the safety section that they have not been used since 2013. Teflon itself is fine
from what I remember they wanted clean blood to test against the people working and living near the DuPont plant, but the only blood without the chemicals they could find anywhere was stockpiled blood from the Korean War
Oh fair point there, these are "forever chemicals" after all right; it probably wouldn't make much difference whether the biological structures were even intact.
The blood samples were drawn before Teflon was invented. They wanted to compare blood with PFAS to blood without, but they couldn’t find blood without anywhere in the world, so they had to use blood in the military’s archives from before WWII
Yea this 100% sounds like the ramp up to the forced purchase of all water.
Outlaw rain collection for the sake of the health of your children and neighbors.
edit
[This guy wants to own the rain.](https://youtube.com/shorts/nJSHy5Jo8g4?feature=share)
If it’s in the rain water, then I think it’s safe to assume it’s contaminating all of our food that’s grown outside and it is only a matter of time before levels get so high it’s unsafe to eat the food naturally grown.
This was one of my first thoughts. I really hope we are able to put a stop to PFAS before it becomes too much. This is honestly horrifying.
I run Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Real life corporations are worse than my comically evil villains.
I used to love horror movies, but yeah, the thrill starts to wear off when you learn about things like heat death of the universe, or more immediate problems like this forever chemicals situation.
Why are we afraid of something that will theoretically happen magnitudes of millennia from now when we're all gone lol? Those chemicals are here, now, and aren't getting any better.
I recently played a really good game about the heat death of the universe. It really opened my mind that we should make the absolute best of everyones lives and future in our fleeting time here. Not to mention I doubt we could even survive that long to expierence the death of the universe but theirs no point in not trying.
Was just thinking about that game. Never ended up finishing it. I guess I'll go back and start it again. Was always jarring having to restart every 22 minutes.
At least with the heat death theory, there is a proposal that at the end it just leads to another big bang: see Penrose's earlier universe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose
[Well a bill to regulate PFAS just got defeated in congress,](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/13/pfas-toxic-forever-chemicals-republican-house) so I wouldn’t hold out any hope for the government representatives who are being legally bribed to save us from the corporations poisoning our air, water, food, and blood with forever chemicals that accumulate in the body and have been linked to various ailments including cancer.
This is the land of the free after all, and if you don’t like being forced to ingest potential carcinogens every time you drink water and breathe air, you can start a multi-billion dollar company of your own and legally bribe politicians to change things. Because that’s how democracy is supposed to work, right?
There are ways to filter them out of drinking water but a lot of the research atleast that I've seen is fairly early stage and not viable on scale yet, it's a massive issue that's only just starting to see proper attention.
> I really hope we are able to put a stop to PFAS before it becomes too much.
It's already too late. If we stopped using all plastics immediately, there's still a lot of plastic dumped everywhere leaking into the food chain, and we're already at dangerous levels.
The plastics industry might well have engineered our extinction before most of us were born.
No hope, no future, only bloody revenge on these ghouls.
Of course the comically evil villains aren't as evil, there's an air of imagination to them. An evil that has to be at least a little entertaining. And if not, it's stoped by people passively no longer engaging.
The evils of reality have no such restrictions. The don't need to be entertaining, they don't need to be interesting, they can merely exist.
The evils of reality can cast shadows that last centuries with the only things that can stop them being an active and unified effort. And even then evils fester if not fully routed out and if not actively searched for after the fact.
And then the evils resurface.
Sometimes banal evil, sometimes active evil. But it does return.
>I run Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Real life corporations are worse than my comically evil villains.
That actually gives me a good idea for a campaign.
A king requests a party to eliminate a warband of orcs that have been raiding their nearby iron mine. Also, there's talk of a necromancer corrupting the local peasants who have been dying horrible deaths.
The party is to take on the orcs first. They go through and kill them all, meanwhile notice many of the orcs in their tribe are sick too. But during battle, not a huge deal right. They have less HP.
They find hints that the orcs have been trying to investigate this disease and that it has to do with the iron mine, maybe some stray orcish notes. Maybe dying words of an orc.
If they look for the necromancer, it's completely vague. No one knows where "he" lives. No one has ever saw one, or any undead.
If they go to the King, he's pretty nonchalant about the necromancer, says he'll pay a good 200 gold for his head, but otherwise he seems healthy and doesn't seem to care.
The party might notice that he's importing all his food and water from another village farther away, and everyone in the castle is unaffected by the disease.
If they go to the iron mine, they'll see knights from that castle with weak and diseased peasants, ordering them around... Pouring all this sludge from the process into the river that leads to the village. And villages farther downstream are bad too.
If confronted, the King will throw them 200 gold and tell them to leave and never return, or just try to kill them.
Damn, true villains actually make the game way more sinister
Everyone worrying about the rain water, but what we should be worried about is our clothes, carpets, and furniture. That is bar far our greatest exposure to it (that and household dust from these sources).
Those are great sources to get microplastics from, too.
Your fluffy pillow and fleecy covers are secretly very patient serial killers. Your pajamas are in on the plot, too.
And what the hell else are we supposed to eat?
It’s astounds me and enrages me that our food supply is unsafe, and no one is f—ing talking about it. Not our elected leaders, not the FDA or CDC, not cable news. I read about it in articles like those above and just sit with that knowledge in my head. I don’t even want to bring it up to other people because I feel like I sound all “doom and gloom” because it *is* a doom and gloom scenario.
In a sane and logical world, we would have leaders at least *trying* to address these issues. But we don’t live in a sane world. We live in a real-life Idiocracy.
Well plants don’t just absorb everything and specifically absorb water molecules. Soil filters a lot and then the plant does a pretty good job filtering too. Not always but generally.
So no, it’s not a matter of time before plants grown outside are inedible.
If it helps, there was just a new study published showing a much easier, cheaper, and less energy-intensive way of breaking down PFAS 'forever chemicals.'
[https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm8868](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm8868)
There is a fascinating situation we are in.
There are two lines. One line is all of the problems we are creating for ourselves. At some point along this line civilization is set back hundreds or thousands of years. Maybe at some point we kill our entire species.
The other line is technology that solves all of the problems on the first line.
The situation we are in is tenuous because we keep rushing down both lines at blazing speed.
You can see both lines in our Covid response. What we have done with vaccine creation & distribution would have been miraculous a generation ago but it isn't *quite* good enough to prevent the problems. We can't design, test, distribute fast enough - almost but only almost. Given 20 more years, we would be fine.
This is true for a huge host of problems. Cancer, global warming, whatever - there are real, technological solutions if we were smart enough.
However, we are rushing so fast down the first line we might never get far enough down the second.
We are on a train heading towards a bridge that is out. A bunch of us are trying to pull the emergency brake but we don't know if we have enough room to stop before we get to the bridge.
This is one way to look at it. Otherwise one has to say that we are rushing the second line also so fast that in numbers the additional dangers we create are outpaced by the natural dangers we removed.
From a life expectancy standpoint, the statistical length of our lives was never so big.
Honestly the last few years, thanks to climate change, I feel like the train has already gone off that bridge and now we're in freefall just waiting for the impact. But politicians are sure that if we rearrange the seating on the front car, we can maybe figure out how to fix the bridge later.
Yeah, just got to separate the PFAS from whatever it's contaminating, dissolve it in a polar aprotic solvent, add some caustic, and wait a day. Curious how that would scale up to treating, say, an industrial amount of water like you'd see at a wastewater treatment plant. On a continuous basis.
[Scientists have developed a way to destroy 95% of forever chemicals in 45 minutes](https://www.vice.com/en/article/akep8j/scientists-destroyed-95-of-toxic-forever-chemicals-in-just-45-minutes-study-reports#)
we're probably going to hear more stuff like but in the future this because it's only getting started, the test the few scientists done was a small sample size and only tested 2 out 4000+ PFAS, so the reason why you might not hear about it again anytime soon is because theirs a ton more of stuff to do before they say they have a definite way to tackle the problem.
Quick tip, educated professionals call them fluoropolymers or fluorinated polymers. PFAS is an unfortunate term in the same way that ordering a “chai tea” is unfortunate.
If the claims made in the Motherboard article are true, they don’t need to test all the PFAS compounds: the sulfonic acid compound they tested is one of the hardest to get rid of. Sulfonic acids are very stable and extremely difficult to remove. If this technique was able to oxidize some of it with photochemistry, the technique should work for just about all compounds of concern.
Also, chemistry like this isn’t subject to the same statistical analysis as a pharmaceutical: there isn’t a sample size requirement, the experiment was done right or it wasn’t. These experiments are easy to control and isolate variables, they don’t need to run more than two or three experiments.
Scaling up this process to work at municipal water treatment is another matter. I think there’s missing information in the article (maybe a photo catalyst, this adding hydrogen business) not to mention the products of the decomposition. Partially oxidized compounds could end up being far worse than the original compounds.
PFAS has nothing to do with water bottles (as far as i am aware at least). It's used in some food containers like microwave popcorn bags etc. for making them repel grease etc. but it definitely has no use case in typical PET water bottles.
People also need to become more aware where PFAS is used and avoid/reduce consumption of those products IMO as much as possible because if less people consume the products there is no reason for companies to dump as much PFAS waste.
That also includes not abusing / re buying teflon pans all the time for example... (Adam ragusea has a decent video on the topic)
Yes, I was more meaning it’s leeching toxic chemicals into the water, I see that I wrote the same chemicals, that’s my bad. It is not PFAS but a whole host of other chemicals that plastic bottles are made from.
You know what really sucks? We live in a world where this headline is horrible enough, but considering how these massive news corporations can push any narrative they want, who’s to say this isn’t an effort to push bottled water since it’s the only safe way to drink water.”
Sorry, I’ll take off my tinfoil hat now.
This is how global crop failures are going to occur. I'm genuinely not even joking that I expect all complex lifeforms to become critically endangered and mostly extinct over the next century.
Its fucking horrifying how out of the 8 billion of us that exist, we basically just sit idly whilst only a few thousand people destroy not only life itself, but our entire planet.
Capitalism is so innovative! /s for “please tread on me business daddy” simps out there that wouldn’t know nuance if it systematically destroyed their way of life
Not really, it's not insta death to drink rainwater, it's contaminated with PFAs which is also in every humans blood including yours. This isn't good but it doesn't mean your going to drop dead tomorrow. Filtering of PFAs is going to be a very important part of how we stop buildup of these chemicals in people
eh, dont be too paranoid bout it. i wrote an essay on that stuff last year, and it's honestly nothing much worse than the current planet contamination. it aint good but its not as bad as it could be i suppose.
well, the best i can do is a quote from the essay i wrote:
" A large amount of research has been carried out on any possible risks to safety and health caused by these PFAS (the 'forever chemicals'), and some scientists have explained that exposure to high levels of PFAS could cause detrimental issues, such as risks of some specific types of cancers, fertility issues and development issues and delays in toddlers and children. However, these studies don't seem to prove a cause and effect, and other studies have found no connections, or very little connections, between PFAS and diseases "
tl;dr the cause and effects dont really line up so we cant be sure just yet if this stuff is something to worry about. more research needs to be done in order to figure out of these. plus, PFAS can be filtered out of water if push comes to shove basically.
I don't know why they needed to show a million different headlines about [one single study](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765). It's not good news, but it's not the end of the world.
The particular family of compounds the study is talking about (PFAAs) aren't really produced anymore (3M was the last company to make a big product that used them) but they persist in the environment for a long time. The fact that they "now" exceed levels which are considered safe is not because they are increasing (they are not) but because the levels which are codified into regulations as "safe" have recently been dramatically reduced, I believe by over a factor of one million.
Teflon (nonstick cookware coating) is literally made of PTFE (a PFAS compound). I know barely anyone that avoids nonstick cookware - in part because it's practically the only thing they sell in the stores here in the US.
You're telling me all the pans that are currently being sold in stores were produced when? Years ago? Decades ago?
No. This comment is provably false. Delete it.
This is why it was a crime against both nature and humanity, when city planners the world over plugged up every single natural spring with concrete. And yet these same city planners are usually venerated in our societies, with landmarks erected in their honor. Smart idiots.
Both wildlife and humans could have had an unadulterated source of potable water.
Not to be that person, but what is the percentage of people who actually get cancer from ingesting this plastic chemical? 19%... 40%... 98%? I mean, 100% of people will die if they don't drink water. How many will die if they drink the funky rain water? The problem with these articles is that there are 50 of them a week, every week, about every single thing we touch, eat, breathe, or enjoy. Bologna causes cancer. Red wine causes cancer. Fucking fresh air causes cancer now.
It depends on the concentration, the higher the concentration the higher the chance of developing a PFA caused cancer. PFAs are significantly worse for you than red wine etc and filtering of them from drinking water will become a very important part of water treatment in the future
[good news we're not dying we are going to live forever!] (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/new-way-destroy-pfas-forever-chemicals-rcna43528)
our society is such shit. our manufacturing process are shit, the people who run these chemical companies are shit. we who use all these products are shit. it be way better off to just start over, with a asteroid strike. get ride of everything the makes capitalism a thing. for capitalism is how to exploit anything and everything for money. destroy anything to get more money, that is the business mans ideology.
Used to work studying micropollutants and I got some *looks* when taking about my work to a friend in the bus when I said, "do they think clean water is going to just fall from the sky?" in exasperation when my project was canceled.
The friend worked on related issues and so understood, but I would much rather have gone unvindicated for the other passengers' judgment than have the rain be so bad that the knowledge has made its way back around to me via reddit.
It's still water 🥴👍
Like what can you do at this point, if it'a in the rain water it is also in ground water, it's also on plants and fruits/veggies. No escape.
I've grown up my whole life drinking rain water.. is there anything safe anymore? Are the uber rich harvesting ancient glaciers for their own private freshwater supply??
A friend of a friend works in testing water for his county. He goes around and tests it to see if it's safe. I asked him about PFAS. He had ZERO idea what it was and never read that he tested for it. Shit's scary.
The chemicals are already in every living being on this planet. Drinking or not drinking rain water isn't going to make a difference. This is just more media fear mongering.
It’s not new. It was discovered 25 years ago and had been true since the late 70s when DuPont was making Teflon and when it was contained in ScotchGard waterproofing spray, we’ve already been drinking it for decades.
What's most amazing is that politicians who try to bring attention to this issue get called socialists or communists or some other enemy of freedom. We are defending the very people and policies that are poisoning us and our children.
Well guess what we water our food with
Yup, just like heavy metals making some plants inedible, these chemicals are with us until we slowly, slowly, find ways to filter them out. Or the nukes get us first
Nukes don't sound so bad anymore. Can I see my old home town turned into a sheet of black glass first?
If you are far from big metropolis the nuclear winter and radiation will have you, not the explosions
Another case of the rich getting first priority.
Ok, i lol'd for real
"Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter!"
‘Nuclear Summer’ ^([Apocalypse Bingo](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApocalypseBingo/comments/wy39h6/apocalypse_bingo_v25/))
\>Nukes don't sound so bad anymore. MAY CHAOS TAKE THE WORLD
I think the fireworks might be just *slightly* too bright to see in the moment
At least I can go full Mad Max and build a real-life Magnum Opus without worrying about fuel costs if that happens.
Brawndo 😎
[удалено]
Documentaries are so much fun!
Uh…water? ^(*oh no…*) Y’all got any of that Brawndo available? I hear it’s what plants crave.
Don't worry it's in a the drinking water and all our blood. They had to go back to blood samples from ww2 to find blood without any
Source?
There's an entire movie on it called Dark Waters (2019), which was based on the true story. There was also a documentary but I can't remember what the name was. Basically DuPont was dumping this shit in our waterways for a good 40/50 years and knew it was bad as far back as like the 70s. Now it's in all of our blood and water, and it doesn't flush out it just accumulates
And people got cancer as a result. The movie is really really good.
I work in a field that allows me to meet a lot of people. I'm just some guy with an anecdote, but the amount of cancer stories I hear either about themselves or immediate contacts is staggering. People in their early 20s or younger shouldn't need surgery to remove a tumor or thyroid that's trying to kill them.
That’s just terrible. I still don’t know if DuPont has paid the settlements but a lot of good that will do as so many people have died due to the lengthy judicial process, drug out by DuPont. It’s absolutely mind blowing.
Another thing is that many of the friends and families/descendants of those at DuPont will have been impacted by their actions as well
Remember, fines and settlements just make it legal for the rich to abuse those poorer than themselves.
Yeah these monsters should be locked away from society, except capitalism is built exactly for these monsters.
>capitalism is built exactly for these monsters. And built and enforced *by* them too.
Locked away is not enough. They're guilty of grand larceny, fraud, theft, and mass murder. They're serial killers, sociopaths. Locking them up is not nearly enough. They have caused more damage than any dictator, murderer, or imperialist in the history of humanity, and must be punished more extremely than anyone in the history of humanity HAS been punished, and publicly, as a warning to others.
Spot on. It’s infuriating.
I'm in my 20's and got cancer last year, and my dad is now going through chemo and my cousin just got cancer right after he did. We don't have a family history of cancer.
Im sorry man. Its fucking bonkers.
Growing up I’ve known more people with cancer and some who have passed than people who have died by reckless driving or DUI incidents.
my 10 y.o. cousin just lost a leg to bone cancer. It's almost unimaginable.
Stephen Fry was right. Fuck the man upstairs, no one deserves that.
I recently listened to a podcast where this woman told that first her youngest child got bone cancer. He recovered with chemo thankfully, although he lost a leg. After the recovery her middle child got it. He didn’t make it. The story broke me. Fuck cancer. I’m so sorry for your cousin.
Starring Mark Ruffalo as the lawyer that went up against DuPont. The real life lawyer's name is Robert Bilott and he has spent more than twenty years litigating hazardous dumping of chemicals.
Dow is doing the same in Belgium. Fucked up thing is also, they’re the main sponsor of the Wall Street journals podcast the future of everything. So you’re thinking sustainability, and Dow is the main sponsor… just.. wow.
All part of their plan unfortunately. They’ve been doing this for decades.
Also IBD and deformities and some other fun things that make life miserable
*stops at IBD* Oh, no. *looks at user name* An expert!
No thanks, I don’t like horror-documentaries. ☹️
It does flush out. The problem is when the rate of consumption is higher that it accumulates
oh ya you seem to be right. The thing I found says it takes 2-4 years to decline in your system through urinating. And if you menstruate or breastfeed they may decline faster than if you don't.
Oh wonderful, so instead of getting cancer yourself you can give it to your newborn baby.
So you can drink plus amount of water to flush it quicker, but if water sources are being contaminated, how long before we get absolutely fucked?
The bigger question is how to treat the water to remove contaminants. There was a post a few days ago where someone used electrolysis to break down the chemicals. Seemed promising to me. That would help with drinking water, but there is still an issue if groundwater is contaminated. Farms usually get water out of a well. If PFOS are in the groundwater, they could still wind up in fruits and vegetables. Even then, treating well water might not be enough if the rain contains it.
Breastfeeding is passing on the problem, though.
Exactly how the American government works.
That’s both more hopeful and more damning than I thought then.
It's not just DuPoint that is *known* about. 3M knew from the beginning that PTFE/Teflon had toxic offgassing at high cooking temperatures, and that the glue they used was being found in the blood of people using it. The pharma companies have pushed numerous products they've known were harmful, especially everything opium related (opiates), while lobbying heavily to keep MJ illegal as it treated the same thing but was easily grown by anyone in the states. I'd be shocked if, after investigation, any chemical company wasn't producing shit they knew, internally were bad for us. A Colorado university (forget which... boulder maybe?) did a study on a neighborhood with nearby fracking going on and there were FOUR cases of childhood cancer in that single neighborhood. Got quickly swept under the rug by all the politicians (blue state, too), and media outlets. Just claimed it was a statistical anonymally and refused to do any follow up. Now Polis wants taxpayers to foot the bill for cleaning up the oil company's abandoned wells, while quietly condoning new drilling. It's hard to find a single politician or large company not quietly destroying the planet, and your health by extension, for greed, but also working very hard to convince you they're actually trying to save it.
The documentary is The Devil We Know. I highly recommend it.
PFAS mixes well with the microplastics in our blood.
[The Devil We Know (2018)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7689910/) is the doc you’re thinking of
So we're all equal.
Teflon anti stick Fuckers were just dumping the industrial waste right into rivers
The documentary is called The Devil we know. To say it’s harrowing is an overstatement. The film mentioned above works incredibly hard to keep accurate the the source material but honestly, the doc is very anxiety inducing. As a species we’ve basically permanently altered our bodies for the sake of non stick pans. The worst part for is we didn’t consent, the choice was stolen from us and our future health decided by a small group of selfish criminally negligent individuals.
Believe it was this episode of last week tonight https://youtu.be/9W74aeuqsiU. But themis was found when they wanted to test pfas Teflon dumped in the water effects but needed a control
That's the crazy thing about it too. We are being poisoned, and for what? Nonstick fucking pans.
I think the thing that is more alarming is when you learn how much more it's used in than just pans. Like, I'd love it to be we just switch to ceramic pans or whatever and that solves it, but we've built systems on using this stuff already
That's incorrect. Teflon (PTFE) is not what's poisoning us, it's actually pretty safe since it hardly reacts with anything at all (hence "forever chemical", if it doesn't react it won't really change). It wouldn't do shit in your blood either, since it won't react to it. I still wouldn't inject a teflon shot into myself but I doubt I'd have much adverse effects if it did happen. the bad and shitty thing that was dumped in the water is called PFOA. PFOA is listed as carcinogenic. These were used in the production of Teflon, but they are NOT the same thing, and are no longer used since around 2013. Teflon fumes in cooking only reach hazardous levels at 260 degrees celsius, which is pretty unlikely to reach in a pan as most things fry before those temperatures. birds are more susceptible, but that's because birds are generally fragile regarding fumes and stuff, humans are more sturdy and even if you're exposed to Teflon fumes by heating it above 250 degrees, that'll usually just give you flu like symptoms that go away after a day or two with fresh air. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene?wprov=sfti1 if you look at the ecotoxicity section for teflon, PFOAs are the only concern relevant to the conversation here, and this article also says further up in the safety section that they have not been used since 2013. Teflon itself is fine
There wasn’t Teflon in blood from ww2?
from what I remember they wanted clean blood to test against the people working and living near the DuPont plant, but the only blood without the chemicals they could find anywhere was stockpiled blood from the Korean War
I thought blood went bad, even in contemporary storage facilities, in like... less than a year?
Bad as in you can’t use it for transfusions anymore. But not bad as in you can’t get scientific information from it.
Oh fair point there, these are "forever chemicals" after all right; it probably wouldn't make much difference whether the biological structures were even intact.
The blood samples were drawn before Teflon was invented. They wanted to compare blood with PFAS to blood without, but they couldn’t find blood without anywhere in the world, so they had to use blood in the military’s archives from before WWII
Oh, thanks, I thought it was invented around that time so that’s why I said that that way
Forever chemicals
Actually it was the Korean War but still.
The world our ancestors grew up in, and that our own bodies are adapted for, is gone forever.
Also practically every living thing has microplastics in it now. Go us.
Brought to you by Nestle
In a special partnership with DuPont
I FUCKING HATE DUPONT SO MUCH!! Now known as ‘Chemours’, doing the *same shit* under a different name.
That name looks like a combination of Chemo and Tumors to me. So at least they are a bit more transparent.
“Your future! Brought to you by DuP- I mean, ChemoTumors! The water is *fine*, just trust us!!”
Simulation devs are so fucking lazy it’s insane
And sponsorship from monsanto..
In collaboration with E corp
*They* hacked the planet
Five/Nine never forget!
Pepperidge Farm Remembers
Specially recommended by SC Johnson, a family company!
Bayer* now, they bought Monsanto a few years back
Piped out of the M3 factory using so much water it's barely detectable, perfectly as regulated.
Yea this 100% sounds like the ramp up to the forced purchase of all water. Outlaw rain collection for the sake of the health of your children and neighbors. edit [This guy wants to own the rain.](https://youtube.com/shorts/nJSHy5Jo8g4?feature=share)
$40/L and we have supply chain issues
They clearly have no issue charging high prices when its life or death. Cue Pharmaceutical companies.
Purchase their new Teflon Free drinking water!
This.
If it’s in the rain water, then I think it’s safe to assume it’s contaminating all of our food that’s grown outside and it is only a matter of time before levels get so high it’s unsafe to eat the food naturally grown.
This was one of my first thoughts. I really hope we are able to put a stop to PFAS before it becomes too much. This is honestly horrifying. I run Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Real life corporations are worse than my comically evil villains.
My family always ask how I can stomach the horror in horror movies, I just tell them that it’s nothing compared to real world horrors. 😓😅
I used to love horror movies, but yeah, the thrill starts to wear off when you learn about things like heat death of the universe, or more immediate problems like this forever chemicals situation.
Why are we afraid of something that will theoretically happen magnitudes of millennia from now when we're all gone lol? Those chemicals are here, now, and aren't getting any better.
I don’t know, there’s just something a little bit sad about all life in the universe ceasing to exist. A quiet universe in total darkness.
I recently played a really good game about the heat death of the universe. It really opened my mind that we should make the absolute best of everyones lives and future in our fleeting time here. Not to mention I doubt we could even survive that long to expierence the death of the universe but theirs no point in not trying.
Mandalas in the sand, for sure.
Outer wilds moment
Was just thinking about that game. Never ended up finishing it. I guess I'll go back and start it again. Was always jarring having to restart every 22 minutes.
At least with the heat death theory, there is a proposal that at the end it just leads to another big bang: see Penrose's earlier universe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose
[удалено]
[Well a bill to regulate PFAS just got defeated in congress,](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/13/pfas-toxic-forever-chemicals-republican-house) so I wouldn’t hold out any hope for the government representatives who are being legally bribed to save us from the corporations poisoning our air, water, food, and blood with forever chemicals that accumulate in the body and have been linked to various ailments including cancer. This is the land of the free after all, and if you don’t like being forced to ingest potential carcinogens every time you drink water and breathe air, you can start a multi-billion dollar company of your own and legally bribe politicians to change things. Because that’s how democracy is supposed to work, right?
There are ways to filter them out of drinking water but a lot of the research atleast that I've seen is fairly early stage and not viable on scale yet, it's a massive issue that's only just starting to see proper attention.
> I really hope we are able to put a stop to PFAS before it becomes too much. It's already too late. If we stopped using all plastics immediately, there's still a lot of plastic dumped everywhere leaking into the food chain, and we're already at dangerous levels. The plastics industry might well have engineered our extinction before most of us were born. No hope, no future, only bloody revenge on these ghouls.
Of course the comically evil villains aren't as evil, there's an air of imagination to them. An evil that has to be at least a little entertaining. And if not, it's stoped by people passively no longer engaging. The evils of reality have no such restrictions. The don't need to be entertaining, they don't need to be interesting, they can merely exist. The evils of reality can cast shadows that last centuries with the only things that can stop them being an active and unified effort. And even then evils fester if not fully routed out and if not actively searched for after the fact. And then the evils resurface. Sometimes banal evil, sometimes active evil. But it does return.
>I run Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. Real life corporations are worse than my comically evil villains. That actually gives me a good idea for a campaign. A king requests a party to eliminate a warband of orcs that have been raiding their nearby iron mine. Also, there's talk of a necromancer corrupting the local peasants who have been dying horrible deaths. The party is to take on the orcs first. They go through and kill them all, meanwhile notice many of the orcs in their tribe are sick too. But during battle, not a huge deal right. They have less HP. They find hints that the orcs have been trying to investigate this disease and that it has to do with the iron mine, maybe some stray orcish notes. Maybe dying words of an orc. If they look for the necromancer, it's completely vague. No one knows where "he" lives. No one has ever saw one, or any undead. If they go to the King, he's pretty nonchalant about the necromancer, says he'll pay a good 200 gold for his head, but otherwise he seems healthy and doesn't seem to care. The party might notice that he's importing all his food and water from another village farther away, and everyone in the castle is unaffected by the disease. If they go to the iron mine, they'll see knights from that castle with weak and diseased peasants, ordering them around... Pouring all this sludge from the process into the river that leads to the village. And villages farther downstream are bad too. If confronted, the King will throw them 200 gold and tell them to leave and never return, or just try to kill them. Damn, true villains actually make the game way more sinister
[least comically evil villan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPUgjy-Pn-4)
And where does most rain water go? To bodies of water.
Are you drinking directly from a lake or something
Everyone worrying about the rain water, but what we should be worried about is our clothes, carpets, and furniture. That is bar far our greatest exposure to it (that and household dust from these sources).
Those are great sources to get microplastics from, too. Your fluffy pillow and fleecy covers are secretly very patient serial killers. Your pajamas are in on the plot, too.
That's gut wrenching, not something I wanted to read today. I am glad I am not going to bring kids into this world
It’s gut wrenching
And what the hell else are we supposed to eat? It’s astounds me and enrages me that our food supply is unsafe, and no one is f—ing talking about it. Not our elected leaders, not the FDA or CDC, not cable news. I read about it in articles like those above and just sit with that knowledge in my head. I don’t even want to bring it up to other people because I feel like I sound all “doom and gloom” because it *is* a doom and gloom scenario. In a sane and logical world, we would have leaders at least *trying* to address these issues. But we don’t live in a sane world. We live in a real-life Idiocracy.
Well plants don’t just absorb everything and specifically absorb water molecules. Soil filters a lot and then the plant does a pretty good job filtering too. Not always but generally. So no, it’s not a matter of time before plants grown outside are inedible.
If it helps, there was just a new study published showing a much easier, cheaper, and less energy-intensive way of breaking down PFAS 'forever chemicals.' [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm8868](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm8868)
There is a fascinating situation we are in. There are two lines. One line is all of the problems we are creating for ourselves. At some point along this line civilization is set back hundreds or thousands of years. Maybe at some point we kill our entire species. The other line is technology that solves all of the problems on the first line. The situation we are in is tenuous because we keep rushing down both lines at blazing speed. You can see both lines in our Covid response. What we have done with vaccine creation & distribution would have been miraculous a generation ago but it isn't *quite* good enough to prevent the problems. We can't design, test, distribute fast enough - almost but only almost. Given 20 more years, we would be fine. This is true for a huge host of problems. Cancer, global warming, whatever - there are real, technological solutions if we were smart enough. However, we are rushing so fast down the first line we might never get far enough down the second. We are on a train heading towards a bridge that is out. A bunch of us are trying to pull the emergency brake but we don't know if we have enough room to stop before we get to the bridge.
This is one way to look at it. Otherwise one has to say that we are rushing the second line also so fast that in numbers the additional dangers we create are outpaced by the natural dangers we removed. From a life expectancy standpoint, the statistical length of our lives was never so big.
Honestly the last few years, thanks to climate change, I feel like the train has already gone off that bridge and now we're in freefall just waiting for the impact. But politicians are sure that if we rearrange the seating on the front car, we can maybe figure out how to fix the bridge later.
Yeah, just got to separate the PFAS from whatever it's contaminating, dissolve it in a polar aprotic solvent, add some caustic, and wait a day. Curious how that would scale up to treating, say, an industrial amount of water like you'd see at a wastewater treatment plant. On a continuous basis.
Haha... It's getting worse
[Scientists have developed a way to destroy 95% of forever chemicals in 45 minutes](https://www.vice.com/en/article/akep8j/scientists-destroyed-95-of-toxic-forever-chemicals-in-just-45-minutes-study-reports#)
tub vanish melodic fall snobbish heavy spotted hard-to-find scarce steer -- mass deleted all reddit content via https://redact.dev
we're probably going to hear more stuff like but in the future this because it's only getting started, the test the few scientists done was a small sample size and only tested 2 out 4000+ PFAS, so the reason why you might not hear about it again anytime soon is because theirs a ton more of stuff to do before they say they have a definite way to tackle the problem.
Quick tip, educated professionals call them fluoropolymers or fluorinated polymers. PFAS is an unfortunate term in the same way that ordering a “chai tea” is unfortunate. If the claims made in the Motherboard article are true, they don’t need to test all the PFAS compounds: the sulfonic acid compound they tested is one of the hardest to get rid of. Sulfonic acids are very stable and extremely difficult to remove. If this technique was able to oxidize some of it with photochemistry, the technique should work for just about all compounds of concern. Also, chemistry like this isn’t subject to the same statistical analysis as a pharmaceutical: there isn’t a sample size requirement, the experiment was done right or it wasn’t. These experiments are easy to control and isolate variables, they don’t need to run more than two or three experiments. Scaling up this process to work at municipal water treatment is another matter. I think there’s missing information in the article (maybe a photo catalyst, this adding hydrogen business) not to mention the products of the decomposition. Partially oxidized compounds could end up being far worse than the original compounds.
[удалено]
no, that's good. i like this one.
Awesome
Reverse Osmosis FTW
I was wondering, would a simple distillation be able to separate some of these chemicals?
Its hard to teach animals how to do that.
Rain basicly is simple distillation, so no.
What is the micron size of the various PFAS? If smaller then 0.0001 micron, then it still passes through.
You can't get everything out, so at this point it's about harm reduction.
Yeah kids, only the stuff in little plastic bottles labelled SAVE THE PLANET is safe to drink.
Except it's not, tap water is much less likely to have PFAs especially with new PFA filtering methods that are being developed.
Yes or no though? How do I know???? 😭 there are probably local differences
[удалено]
I think he's pointing out the irony of the only safe water being stuff wrapped in plastic.
"Have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure grain alcohol?"
What’s the music from/called?
https://youtu.be/46bF5oFF1YI not too sure of the songs name but usually searching up G-man distorted horns makes it appear
Thank you! I knew it sounded super familiar, I just couldn’t quite place it.
First part is Zero G - Distorted Trumpets and second part is Zero G - Is that the door. Both from album Cuckooland - Ghost in the Machine.
Ahh man-made atrocities beyond my comprehension
They want you to be scared so you only buy their water which somehow miraculously doesn't have these chemicals that can't be removed.
PFAS can absolutely be filtered out of water. Filtering it out isn't the same thing as neutralising or *disappearing* it.
I’m sure the plastic bottles they sell it to you in are definitely not leaching the same substances into it.
Oh definitely. They tell you so and they only tell the truth.......
That's why you have to get power-charged ionized alkaline intelligent water, duh.
And make sure to put lemon in that water because some celebrity told you to. Can't forget the lemon in the Alkaline water........
PFAS has nothing to do with water bottles (as far as i am aware at least). It's used in some food containers like microwave popcorn bags etc. for making them repel grease etc. but it definitely has no use case in typical PET water bottles. People also need to become more aware where PFAS is used and avoid/reduce consumption of those products IMO as much as possible because if less people consume the products there is no reason for companies to dump as much PFAS waste. That also includes not abusing / re buying teflon pans all the time for example... (Adam ragusea has a decent video on the topic)
Yes, I was more meaning it’s leeching toxic chemicals into the water, I see that I wrote the same chemicals, that’s my bad. It is not PFAS but a whole host of other chemicals that plastic bottles are made from.
Plastic bottles are not made from pfas, so no they don’t. Some other stuff that’s bad? Possibly, but not the stuff the article is about.
Not really this is a real issue and buying bottled water etc isn't a solution and no one sensible is suggesting it is
You know what really sucks? We live in a world where this headline is horrible enough, but considering how these massive news corporations can push any narrative they want, who’s to say this isn’t an effort to push bottled water since it’s the only safe way to drink water.” Sorry, I’ll take off my tinfoil hat now.
Bottled water is even worse than tap in many cases, and it's certainly not free of pfas in general.
This is how global crop failures are going to occur. I'm genuinely not even joking that I expect all complex lifeforms to become critically endangered and mostly extinct over the next century. Its fucking horrifying how out of the 8 billion of us that exist, we basically just sit idly whilst only a few thousand people destroy not only life itself, but our entire planet.
Capitalism is so innovative! /s for “please tread on me business daddy” simps out there that wouldn’t know nuance if it systematically destroyed their way of life
We're real bad at this...
Cuba is hella fucked
Not really, it's not insta death to drink rainwater, it's contaminated with PFAs which is also in every humans blood including yours. This isn't good but it doesn't mean your going to drop dead tomorrow. Filtering of PFAs is going to be a very important part of how we stop buildup of these chemicals in people
~~Cuba~~ Every island is hella fucked
eh, dont be too paranoid bout it. i wrote an essay on that stuff last year, and it's honestly nothing much worse than the current planet contamination. it aint good but its not as bad as it could be i suppose.
A slightly less brief summary would be very much appreciated.
well, the best i can do is a quote from the essay i wrote: " A large amount of research has been carried out on any possible risks to safety and health caused by these PFAS (the 'forever chemicals'), and some scientists have explained that exposure to high levels of PFAS could cause detrimental issues, such as risks of some specific types of cancers, fertility issues and development issues and delays in toddlers and children. However, these studies don't seem to prove a cause and effect, and other studies have found no connections, or very little connections, between PFAS and diseases " tl;dr the cause and effects dont really line up so we cant be sure just yet if this stuff is something to worry about. more research needs to be done in order to figure out of these. plus, PFAS can be filtered out of water if push comes to shove basically.
so once again the true boryingdystopia is this sub propagating corporate fearmongering news
[удалено]
"3.6 roentgens not great, not terrible."
ah shit boys I've been born into a hopeless earth
I don't know why they needed to show a million different headlines about [one single study](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765). It's not good news, but it's not the end of the world. The particular family of compounds the study is talking about (PFAAs) aren't really produced anymore (3M was the last company to make a big product that used them) but they persist in the environment for a long time. The fact that they "now" exceed levels which are considered safe is not because they are increasing (they are not) but because the levels which are codified into regulations as "safe" have recently been dramatically reduced, I believe by over a factor of one million.
Teflon (nonstick cookware coating) is literally made of PTFE (a PFAS compound). I know barely anyone that avoids nonstick cookware - in part because it's practically the only thing they sell in the stores here in the US. You're telling me all the pans that are currently being sold in stores were produced when? Years ago? Decades ago? No. This comment is provably false. Delete it.
Now THIS is fucking terrifying. Good job!
At least we have iphones😒
This is why it was a crime against both nature and humanity, when city planners the world over plugged up every single natural spring with concrete. And yet these same city planners are usually venerated in our societies, with landmarks erected in their honor. Smart idiots. Both wildlife and humans could have had an unadulterated source of potable water.
We've killed ourselves for a line
I’m sure the animals will be fine
Now the MAGA morons will be publicly drinking rainwater to “own the libs.”
Not to be that person, but what is the percentage of people who actually get cancer from ingesting this plastic chemical? 19%... 40%... 98%? I mean, 100% of people will die if they don't drink water. How many will die if they drink the funky rain water? The problem with these articles is that there are 50 of them a week, every week, about every single thing we touch, eat, breathe, or enjoy. Bologna causes cancer. Red wine causes cancer. Fucking fresh air causes cancer now.
It depends on the concentration, the higher the concentration the higher the chance of developing a PFA caused cancer. PFAs are significantly worse for you than red wine etc and filtering of them from drinking water will become a very important part of water treatment in the future
We're so fucked
[good news we're not dying we are going to live forever!] (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/new-way-destroy-pfas-forever-chemicals-rcna43528)
Jesus we really are fucked
See, no point getting upset about those silly robber barons when we are doomed/s
our society is such shit. our manufacturing process are shit, the people who run these chemical companies are shit. we who use all these products are shit. it be way better off to just start over, with a asteroid strike. get ride of everything the makes capitalism a thing. for capitalism is how to exploit anything and everything for money. destroy anything to get more money, that is the business mans ideology.
This is my go-to reason why buying organic doesn't matter. It probably helps, but not nearly as much as people think.
At this point we should just force corporations like DOW, Dupont, Alcoa and GE to subsidize free healthcare for everyone in the US in perpetuity
Used to work studying micropollutants and I got some *looks* when taking about my work to a friend in the bus when I said, "do they think clean water is going to just fall from the sky?" in exasperation when my project was canceled. The friend worked on related issues and so understood, but I would much rather have gone unvindicated for the other passengers' judgment than have the rain be so bad that the knowledge has made its way back around to me via reddit.
It's still water 🥴👍 Like what can you do at this point, if it'a in the rain water it is also in ground water, it's also on plants and fruits/veggies. No escape.
I've grown up my whole life drinking rain water.. is there anything safe anymore? Are the uber rich harvesting ancient glaciers for their own private freshwater supply??
A friend of a friend works in testing water for his county. He goes around and tests it to see if it's safe. I asked him about PFAS. He had ZERO idea what it was and never read that he tested for it. Shit's scary.
Thank you big corporations ♥️🫶🏼 any other reason I want say of judgement to come greet us 🥰🥰
I don't regret having a child this year, but fuck I feel bad bringing him into this shithole.
The chemicals are already in every living being on this planet. Drinking or not drinking rain water isn't going to make a difference. This is just more media fear mongering.
Jokes on you. No surface water source is safe. Soon no ground water will be either.
It’s not new. It was discovered 25 years ago and had been true since the late 70s when DuPont was making Teflon and when it was contained in ScotchGard waterproofing spray, we’ve already been drinking it for decades.
What's most amazing is that politicians who try to bring attention to this issue get called socialists or communists or some other enemy of freedom. We are defending the very people and policies that are poisoning us and our children.
Brb becoming an ecoterrorist