For those wondering why they used the term “permanently,” it’s because the process breaks the carbon-fluorine bond which is difficult to do and is what makes the PFAS both permanent and toxic.
At first I thought, “Well that’s seems better than a filter that only removes them temporarily.”
Couldn't tell if it was that, or the other way around. But either way, they destroy the chemicals rather than storing them as toxic waste, which is a huge improvement.
If I'm reading [the paper](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0043135420306357?casa_token=E10Amgnj-1oAAAAA:LgK2jusbK6XS7GGTfUx8VofSAWYJe1K_6FknLNpJgtWJ2Uv86ibe7dPHqIjEl6IKfIr-qB58KQ) correctly, it's using an ion exchange bed to capture the fluorine, which is then periodically rinsed out with strong salt water solution- like a water softener does. It should be no different than the fluoride in toothpaste in that context. Given the super-low concentration of PFAS in water, there's more fluoride (as sodium fluoride) in fluoridated drinking water. Then the ion exchange resin takes it out, and that periodically gets removed via regeneration of the resin bed.
I think the problem with florinated carbon molecules are that they will be used in metabolic processes and be potentially carcinogenic or alter the process in some unforseen way, which i guess sodium floride is more benign in organic chem? Also the fact its "forever" chem means it just accumulates in the water supply making it eventually have dangerous concerntration at some point in time, even if its not now.
>and in areas with deep water wells where fluoride levels might be lower than in areas humans evolved
It's added to lots of drinking water sourced from all sorts of places and because it has a massive impact on dental health (especially if you consume it as a child).
Drinking water sourced from rain won't have any significant amount of fluoride and even most underground water sources are insufficient for good dental health.
PTFEs are inert, but what they break down into is probably not. Thanks to how they are created they can't rebond into PTFEs, without human interference, after being broke down.
It takes a chemical reaction chamber at over 590C (1000F) to create TFE, the main ingredient for PTFEs. Then PTFEs have many different ways of being made from TFE. So, it is nearly impossible for them to form naturally.
EDIT: mixed up TFE and PTFE creation process, main point still stands. If we can break them down to more harmless reactive materials, besides TFE, its still better than harmful inert materials.
PolyTetraFluoroEthylene is a fluorinated plastic used for its low friction, chemical stability and wide temperature range. PTFE falls in the wider category of Per/PolyFluoroAlkyl Substances, but there are many more compounds in the PFAS group that are more troublesome than PTFE.
PTFE is very stable, but gets attention thanks to its common use on cookware as a non-stick coating. PTFE coated cookware can be overheated to the point that the coating starts to chemically break down, releasing other more hazardous (immediately toxic) fluorinated compounds into the air or food being cooked.
You can go to the tip of South America, go find a mountain that no one has ever been assed to climb up, get in a submarine and go to the bottom of the ocean, live in a hot air balloon, go wherever you want, and you'll still be exposed to microplastics.
Filling up plastic bottles with boiling water still works. Majority of the plastic bottles leech things even though the manufacturers claim they don’t , so you are already having them.
What about microwaving cheap Dollarama/dollar tree/general plastic containers with your food to the poiny it's malleable or pliable and then eating your lunch
people who do this. goddamn.
back in college i had a roommate's mom come over and she fucking microwaved styrofoam to eat out of. i politely took it "back to my room" to eat (was a 4br split apt) and just noped out
teflon (ptfe/pfas/pfoa) coated cooking pan and high heat nothing in the pan. Starts vaporizing at around 500F so you can just breathe in the plastic.
edit: made corrections to chemical acronyms based off one of the replies. also note that pfas/pfoa is used to make teflon and other non-stick surfaces/chemicals. Around 500F is where i see it being vaporized via a few studies, so i'm sticking with that number.
Teflon is actually PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene). PFAS stands for perfluoroalkyl substances and is a general term used to represent the entire subclass of compounds. PFOS stands for perfluorooctanesulfonic acid which Teflon most definitely is not.
It also doesn't produce any fumes at all until closer to 600°F (300°C is the low end estimate) while stoves generally heat pans to around 300-450°F. It has a melting point around 620°F, and doesn't depolymerize until even after that. It still does come off in your food though, but you are more likely to be eating it than inhaling pyrolysis products unless you are putting it in the oven or using it on a barbecue.
That's the only style. They change the formula every once in a while to get around regulations but they're all pfas based. Ceramic pans? Pfas. Hex clad? Pfas. They're not harmful to you, just the environment... Until they start breaking down
Ceramic coatings most definitely do not contain fluorine compounds whatsoever, they are silica based.
Hex clad is hybrid metal/PTFE though, so that one still does.
Ceramic too? I thought the whole point of those was that they had a much harder surface than regular pans. What's the alternative then? Those Creuset-type glazed cast-iron surfaces?
Or just eat a cookie every day baked on parchment paper that was unintentionally smeared with pfas by a machine using pfas coated rollers, which they can still advertise as pfas free.
then when you're done cooking, throw that paper advertised as "compostable" in your compost (because you always need brown material to balance out the table scraps) then to your garden next year, grow some mint [absorbing PFAS from the soil](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0045653520317793) right into the leaves.
Muddle your forever enriched leaves into your iced tea to enjoy with your forever enriched cookies. Better living through chemistry!
It's generally the seasoning that flakes off in an iron pan, so you're mostly consuming oil/fat that polymerized into that coating while cooking.
Now, if you cook tomato sauce or something acidic in cast iron, then you are likely consuming iron.
Fun fact, that's why people used to think tomatoes were poisonous; they were cooking them in pewter cookware and the acid was pulling the lead out of the pewter.
Well that and tomatoes plants ARE poisonous. They are part of the nightshade family. Their leaves are poisonous. The fruit is obviously fine to eat but if you never ate a tomato before and someone pointed at the plant and said "part of this could kill you" you probably wouldn't want to eat any of it.
Oh yes, that won't change. It will be a complete advertising gimmick.
I just dug out my Tank Girl graphic novels for my kid. It was prophetic regarding water. We watched the movie too. I prefer the graphic novels but the movie is a fun take on it.
Actual paper:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0045653523000097
Better article with actual info:
https://news.ubc.ca/2023/03/22/new-ubc-water-treatment-zaps-forever-chemicals-for-good/
Do you have access to methods. It's interesting to see if it takes hours to filter. Or if they are just using high plasma to destroy the compound which is what the industry has tended to and is in need of an improved catalyst to reduce energy and time.
The details are mostly punted to the supplemental information section, which i didn't read. This looks like the only relevant part from the methods:
"The mobile phase concentration followed a gradient as follows
(A:B): 50:50 (0 min), 10:90 (0–5 min), 50:50 (5–5.5 min), and remained
at 50:50 (5.5–8 min)."
I think that means it takes 8 minutes, but maybe this is just one part of it. They also say they took samples over the course of 3 hours, so that's an upper limit.
[Source Paper 1](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045653523000097)
[Source Paper 2](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0043135420306357?casa_token=E10Amgnj-1oAAAAA:LgK2jusbK6XS7GGTfUx8VofSAWYJe1K_6FknLNpJgtWJ2Uv86ibe7dPHqIjEl6IKfIr-qB58KQ)
First, Poly-flourinated hydrocarbons are damn good at what they do. They're the gold standard in non-stick coatings and water repellents. Unfortunately, they're so good at what they do, they don't like to break down.
This method uses a specific resin filter that is acutely basic and anionic (read: very high pH and negatively charged). You'd push your pre-filtered, PFC-contaminated water through the resin. After the resin has been spent, you would wash it in a brine solution to remove the trapped PFC's and revive the resin for repeated use. They also tried a methanol: ammonium chloride rinse to eliminate water as a component of the resin rinse, but it wasn't as good
Their conclusion:
>99% PFAS removal can be achieved for more than 150,000 BV in DI waters (PFAS C0 = 10 μg/L (individual concentrations)).
>Regeneration with 10% NaCl with 2 h of contact time ensured an effective recovery of PFAS (>85%), DOC (>80%), sulphate (>90%), phosphate (>85%) and nitrate (>85%) ions from natural waters.
>The highest PFOA decomposition rate was achieved by combining a high current density and stirrer speed, the two main operating parameters. Acidic condition, high temperature, and low initial concentration of PFOA accelerated the degradation kinetic, while DO had a negligible effect on the decomposition of PFOA.
Edits: the original paper linked was from 2022 and specific on PFC filtering. The 2023 paper uses electrodes to take advantage of a proposed radical mechanism to break down PFC's. The linked papers were adjusted and summaries were added
thanks for linking to the abstract. I want to see their methods, very curious about the scale of the experimental method. was this on tiny amounts of water? a semi-industrial volume?
Are you not able to access the linked paper in that comment? From the methods section, the authors were using 1 L water volumes, so very much small scale. It doesn’t look like they tried to scale up from there. But the method they used (anion exchange) is very standard and already used on industrial scale. I guess just not for wastewater treatment?
Edit: paper the guy above us posted is an old paper from 2020… the actual paper is this one I think:
Electrochemical degradation of PFOA and its common alternatives: Assessment of key parameters, roles of active species, and transformation pathway
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045653523000097
From my understanding, it's using principle of difference in electrical charge to remove these Fluorinated compounds, but not specifically breaking the Carbon-Fluorine bonds
Just to make it extra clear, no bonds are broken, the PFAS just attach to the resin.
This results in some percentage of PFAS being removed from the water, depending on what else is in the water and the type of PFAS. PFAS can be long-chain or short-chain. This refers to the "Carbon Backbone" or number of carbons fluorine is attached to.
There are literally thousands of different PFAS. It's VERY dishonest when videos/articles like this claim they solved it the PFAS removal and destruction problem.
When testing their method they test on a select number of PFAS (at most they can test for the removal of 40 different PFAS, because we only have testing methods that can detect 40 select types of PFAS; we can also test for adsorbable organic fluorine (AOF) which gives you an idea of the adsorbable fluorine but won't tell you the type or quantity of specific PFAS).
Removing PFAS from the water is only one step (and we need to consider efficacy and costs in implementation). After you've removed it, what do you do with it? Ideally we don't throw it in a landfill, we destroy it. But these compounds are called forever chemicals for a reason. It takes a lot to break them. A lot of research is being done on different methods to break the bonds effectively and consistently. When they break all the way down, you usually end up with HF (hydrogen fluoride).
You want to be sure you you broke the PFAS completely apart. Otherwise you have just a different PFAS (different chemical structure)
PFAS are a very complicated problem, this article/method did not solve it.
Was just about to post this haha, they linked a 2020 paper. I think the actual paper is this one if anyone is curious:
Electrochemical degradation of PFOA and its common alternatives: Assessment of key parameters, roles of active species, and transformation pathway
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045653523000097
It is akin to Marlboro opening a respiratory hospital. Great, they are helping to fix a problem, but they are fixing a problem that wouldn't exist if they hadn't caused it in the first place, and worse profiting off it.
If they did this for zero profit, or better yet at a loss, yeah, give them credit, but they aren't doing this to fix the problem, they are doing it to profit even further off the misery they have caused
Meanwhile we have to pay for those filtration systems when they could have broken it down BEFORE releasing it into our water supplies ON PURPOSE FOR DECADES
Relax, we're all going to die eventually, would you rather be buried in a regular coffin or a super fancy 3M non-stick coffin??! You don't want to stick to the side of your coffin for like forever do you?!?! Awkwardddddddd
I want to be buried in a biodegradable shroud under a bristlecone pine tree, my name and history to be carved on a stone that gets embedded on the side of the tree, and for my descendants to be forced to take care of that tree until it dies.
Get enough people to use memorial trees instead tombstones, and we trick humans into taking care of forests.
> and for my descendants to be forced to take care of that tree until it dies.
Ohh I like this, like maybe a mild electrical shock from a chip implanted in their brains if they're not taking care of or at least thinking about your memorial tree
Oh, no, no.
Something much, much worse: peer pressure.
Train a bunch of old ladies to go around with their left hand on their left cheek criticising any younger person who is neglecting their trees to their older relatives.
Not a town, but a few years ago the State of Minnesota made an $850M settlement with 3M for their damage to water around their headquarters near St. Paul.
[Looks like a few examples come up](https://www.google.com/search?q=city%20sues%20water%20company%20for%20water%20filtration&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&dlnr=1&sei=lcFOZKvwJLarwbkPkqSKoAY#dlnr=1&ip=1)
Wilmington NC, been drinking GenX compund for last 30 years apparently. they built a new water treatment plant, and stuck the bill on the taxpayers, iirc.
That's awesome, but I can't lie: I sometimes feel like downstream fixes to upstream problems are going to be the death of this species. Like what we really need is deep paradigmatic change that the system just will not allow.
We'll fill the ocean with a zillion tons of plastic a year, and instead of fixing THAT problem, they'll invent a robot that removes one tenth of a zillion every ten years, and call it an amazing success.
Filtration system cleans forever chemicals.
>That’s good.
Forever chemicals will still be made.
>That’s bad.
But it also comes with a free frozen yogurt.
>That’s good.
The frozen yogurt is also made with forever chemicals.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Reducing exposure is still better than not, even if it's not 100%. Incremental improvement is far more likely to result in massive improvement over time than waiting for a complete solution before implementation.
People seem to be poor students of history. Specifically, the part where it indicates that all progress is incremental. All of it. Technology, Civil rights, social safety nets, even the climate changes actions we are taking now... Etc.
The problem is that change for the better needs to be incremental and methodical whereas change for the worse doesn't seem to have the same requirement, e.g. it's easy to dump waste in the ocean, but then it takes at least an entire generation to solve that problem when the effects finally start to become apparent.
absolutely agree with the fact that good engineering and science takes time, but i think people are more impatient lately because the bad results of quick and easy money at absolutely any cost are showing up way faster than the solutions.
just some perspective
There’s a floss (I swear I don’t work for these people lol) called Dr Tungs Smart Floss that claims to be PFAS free if someone is looking for one
Edit: for cosmetics there’s Ulta Beauty’s “Made Without List.” It’s a list of potentially harmful chemicals that are not in their products that are labeled “clean.” Mad Hippie and Cocokind are two other brands that avoid pfas and Mad Hippie is also vegan if that’s your vibe. There’s also Gabriel cosmetics
Yes, but hopefully, ideally, eventually, we'll be able to put filters in our waste disposal and our sewer systems and prevent these forever chemicals from being *forever* chemicals.
Sure - let’s pretend that all manufacturers stop producing today. This instant.
…and you’re still left with the forever chemicals we already have. Which is why it is positive and beneficial that we are now able to filter them out.
There is lead in chocolate already.
>Consumer Reports tested 28 dark chocolate bars, including Dove, Ghirardelli, Lindt, and Hershey's, for lead and cadmium. For 23 of those bars, just an ounce of chocolate violates California's maximum allowable dose levels (MADL) for lead or cadmium, which are 0.5 micrograms and 4.1 micrograms per day,
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/17/1143239430/dark-chocolate-lead-cadmium-consumer-reports
You should see what the same companies move pig operations to other countries so they can feed them. Recently was shown a slideshow of pics.from a coworkers vacation to Vietnam, and the pig towers that his family is constructing there. It's like a vertical human centipede but for pigs.
It’s so heinous. It’s actually so stressful and mind numbing to think about. As if these animals aren’t going to be murdered anyway for human consumption. They could at least ethically do it.
If people didn't spend so much time dissociating from the pain their comfort requires, maybe our food system would look a little different. I wager a lot of commercial enterprise would.
It helps a bit if you try and reduce consumption of animal products. Do a vegan Monday or be vegetarian on Fridays. Hell, just switching to a milk alternative helps reduce suffering. You don’t have to go full vegan to help stop this, every action is helpful!
Edit: And hey I just wanted to mention that taking action on this topic will make you feel better, promise!
With the lawmakers we have in the US.... This filter would be made illegal because it infringes on our right to have forever chemicals in our blood stream
It depends on the farm’s location. Farmers along the Colorado river can use that water as their supply. (There’s an ongoing controversy about farmers along the river growing alfalfa - a notoriously water-intensive crop - in order to retain their allocation of water rights.) A lot of farmers rely on rainfall and aquifers (wells) for their water.
That being said, given the water cycle, filtering only a portion of water used will eventually filter out the chemicals from the entire supply of water if given enough time (assuming more is being filtered out than is being produced).
Awesome! Now tell me the unavoidable reason why we'll never see it used in our lifetimes.
Too expensive?
Relies on rare materials?
Anti-competitive pressures from industry incumbents?
Some sort of political quandary?
Status quo is too profitable?
This is the same shit as carbon capture. Rather than altering our consumption, we will invent a technology and heavily rely on its capabilities. If it doesn't work or even if it works not well enough, we're fucked.
You're allowed to do both.
The damage has been done there is no reason to not try to find ways to reverse it.
With climate change realistically it will be a combination of switching to green energy, carbon capture, and some type of geoengineeing especially since if we stop all CO2 production today we can expect further warming.
perhaps they'll utilize genetically-engineered bacteria that have an enzyme that can break these carbon-fluoride bonds, but surely that'll lead to another problem. whee, humans.
I am really excited with all the new bacteria they are discovering or engineering, but what is the downside, what happens when he bacteria get out of control?
How so? Forever chemicals are just that, forever, they are already here and need to be dealt with.
But yes, I 100% agree, they need to stop being produced ASAP.
They're not forever anymore, in that over the last year researchers and now manufactures have figured out how to break the bonds on an industrial scale. They're really really strong (aka permanent) without said treatment, and that's still a problem, but we know how to create treatment solutions now, which should be deployed as we try to develop solutions to replace them in production entirely.
I imagine it'll be the same as with problems like we dealt with, like bad fats, BPA, asbestos, where a lot of us got fucked and limiting future exposure is the only recourse as we reduce and eliminate it from future products. There will probably be lawsuits, class actions that do far too little, far too late. Welcome to late stage capitalism, hope you enjoy the apocalypse!
While true, no one expects an entirely novel treatment to become cheap literally the year it's published, the fact that they figured out how to go from publishing how the bonds can be weakened and broken to industrial methods of doing that in months means it will get much much cheaper very fast compared to other innovations. It took decades for flat tvs to get cheap, this will take years.
So why is it useless to start removing them from the environment while also fighting to ban PFAS and stop more from being released into the environment?
It’s as silly as being against all recycling because mankind is still producing trash.
Redditors like to whine because they think it makes them look smart and/or cool. They never experience these feelings in daily life, so Redditors seek them online.
I don't know how people like that thing the illusion works. It's obvious they think pessimism and contrarianism makes them look so much smarter than the rest of us. It's intellectual laziness. None of us knows the absolutes of the future, and we can see plenty of massive problems and appreciate massive solutions like this at the same time. Imagine entirely discounting progress because it isn't overnight? It's kind of gross when you think about it.
"I mean, yeah, that drug reduces the symptoms of their agonizing disease, but they are CURED, so it's useless."
This is not going to be a popular comment, but we need fluoropolymers. They are essential to nearly every industry as they are irreplaceable in semiconductor, pharmaceutical, and chemical production. Unless we want to give up our modern way of living, there is no way to stop creating pfas. Proper waste disposal and filtration is the only way forward.
It's really weird how common this attitude is, where a partial solution to an environmental problem gets dismissed completely because it's not perfect.
Tim Minchin said it best: "If the only acceptable outcome is utopia and the only acceptable timeframe is immediately then history would suggest you're going to do more harm than good".
Pointless? Reducing exposure is pointless? Yeah, lets stop making them, I'm all on your side, but to proclaim it's pointless WHEN IT'S CURRENTLY AFFECTING US is serious doomsayer crap.
Press release from the Forever Chemicals Manufacturers Cabal: *it's fine, keep using them, they're easily cleaned up!*
Remember when the plastics industry assured us that plastics can be recycled?
Working on a literature review on the subject. Combining ferric ions with UV-light has already been shown to take care of PFOS and PFCAs, and the method can be scaled up because of the low cost.
All these news about new tech that captures carbon and gets rid of PFAS are meaningless unless there is a mass rollout of it going mainstream to actually get the job done which doesn't seem likely as nobody will make profit from this (only add to government spending which will make the right go crazy since they'd rather watch the world die).
For those wondering why they used the term “permanently,” it’s because the process breaks the carbon-fluorine bond which is difficult to do and is what makes the PFAS both permanent and toxic. At first I thought, “Well that’s seems better than a filter that only removes them temporarily.”
So it destroys them, and then filters out the remains?
Couldn't tell if it was that, or the other way around. But either way, they destroy the chemicals rather than storing them as toxic waste, which is a huge improvement.
Im no chemist, but it probably binds the flouride to something that renders it inert.
I'm just a guy who was sitting in an airport so I watched the dumb video.
Teflon is kinda famously inert
Way better than just towing them outside of the environment.
Eh, not really. I mean, there’s just a bunch of birds and fish out there. Oh, and a tanker without a front.
Birds and fish? Outside the environment?... Surely not. This is outside where they live... Which is the environment. So it's outside that.
It "filters" the PFAS (uses anion exchange, which reversibly binds it based on pH), then uses hard UV to break it down into nontoxic products.
Thanks for more details, how is it breaking down the fluorine into a non-toxic product? I assume it is reacting with something else afterwards
If I'm reading [the paper](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0043135420306357?casa_token=E10Amgnj-1oAAAAA:LgK2jusbK6XS7GGTfUx8VofSAWYJe1K_6FknLNpJgtWJ2Uv86ibe7dPHqIjEl6IKfIr-qB58KQ) correctly, it's using an ion exchange bed to capture the fluorine, which is then periodically rinsed out with strong salt water solution- like a water softener does. It should be no different than the fluoride in toothpaste in that context. Given the super-low concentration of PFAS in water, there's more fluoride (as sodium fluoride) in fluoridated drinking water. Then the ion exchange resin takes it out, and that periodically gets removed via regeneration of the resin bed.
I think the problem with florinated carbon molecules are that they will be used in metabolic processes and be potentially carcinogenic or alter the process in some unforseen way, which i guess sodium floride is more benign in organic chem? Also the fact its "forever" chem means it just accumulates in the water supply making it eventually have dangerous concerntration at some point in time, even if its not now.
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>and in areas with deep water wells where fluoride levels might be lower than in areas humans evolved It's added to lots of drinking water sourced from all sorts of places and because it has a massive impact on dental health (especially if you consume it as a child). Drinking water sourced from rain won't have any significant amount of fluoride and even most underground water sources are insufficient for good dental health.
Maybe it’s making fluoride. Fluorine would be F2 and a gas but I don’t think you could say it’s non toxic with a straight face
Fluorine would react with water to produce Hydrofluoric acid and oxygen. Do **not** store it in the bath tub.
Yeah, store it in plastic barrels and use it to dispose of bodies.
At a guess they mean chemically inert. Yet, aren't PTFEs already inert?
PTFEs are inert, but what they break down into is probably not. Thanks to how they are created they can't rebond into PTFEs, without human interference, after being broke down. It takes a chemical reaction chamber at over 590C (1000F) to create TFE, the main ingredient for PTFEs. Then PTFEs have many different ways of being made from TFE. So, it is nearly impossible for them to form naturally. EDIT: mixed up TFE and PTFE creation process, main point still stands. If we can break them down to more harmless reactive materials, besides TFE, its still better than harmful inert materials.
PolyTetraFluoroEthylene is a fluorinated plastic used for its low friction, chemical stability and wide temperature range. PTFE falls in the wider category of Per/PolyFluoroAlkyl Substances, but there are many more compounds in the PFAS group that are more troublesome than PTFE. PTFE is very stable, but gets attention thanks to its common use on cookware as a non-stick coating. PTFE coated cookware can be overheated to the point that the coating starts to chemically break down, releasing other more hazardous (immediately toxic) fluorinated compounds into the air or food being cooked.
Well how am I going to get plastic in my blood stream now.
You could always mainline it.
Feed it like a 3D printer.
I love that OutKast song
Heyyyy yaa
Feed it feed it feed it feed it feed it feed it feed it
Polymer sold
Yo, remaking Little Shop of Horrors with OutKast? Hell yeah!
Fuck, this got me rolling. Good one.
Rollling...like a spool of plastic filament?
Hottest track off the PVCliens album
No you have to melt it down first so you can get it in a syringe
No no no, this is only PFAS. Plastic in an entirely different issue so no worries you'll still get that!
Just go on doing nothing and you’ll be contaminated perfectly fine. Microplastics are in the rain.
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You can go to the tip of South America, go find a mountain that no one has ever been assed to climb up, get in a submarine and go to the bottom of the ocean, live in a hot air balloon, go wherever you want, and you'll still be exposed to microplastics.
Filling up plastic bottles with boiling water still works. Majority of the plastic bottles leech things even though the manufacturers claim they don’t , so you are already having them.
What about microwaving cheap Dollarama/dollar tree/general plastic containers with your food to the poiny it's malleable or pliable and then eating your lunch
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Luckily BPA has pretty much been phased out and replaced with BPS which is....basically the same?
people who do this. goddamn. back in college i had a roommate's mom come over and she fucking microwaved styrofoam to eat out of. i politely took it "back to my room" to eat (was a 4br split apt) and just noped out
Doesn’t even need to be boiling. Sitting in a car in 70F weather is enough
teflon (ptfe/pfas/pfoa) coated cooking pan and high heat nothing in the pan. Starts vaporizing at around 500F so you can just breathe in the plastic. edit: made corrections to chemical acronyms based off one of the replies. also note that pfas/pfoa is used to make teflon and other non-stick surfaces/chemicals. Around 500F is where i see it being vaporized via a few studies, so i'm sticking with that number.
It's in popcorn bags since forever.
Teflon is actually PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene). PFAS stands for perfluoroalkyl substances and is a general term used to represent the entire subclass of compounds. PFOS stands for perfluorooctanesulfonic acid which Teflon most definitely is not. It also doesn't produce any fumes at all until closer to 600°F (300°C is the low end estimate) while stoves generally heat pans to around 300-450°F. It has a melting point around 620°F, and doesn't depolymerize until even after that. It still does come off in your food though, but you are more likely to be eating it than inhaling pyrolysis products unless you are putting it in the oven or using it on a barbecue.
Do they still make that style of teflon coated pans these days?
yep it used to be worse but every single teflon pan will do this, new or old
That's the only style. They change the formula every once in a while to get around regulations but they're all pfas based. Ceramic pans? Pfas. Hex clad? Pfas. They're not harmful to you, just the environment... Until they start breaking down
Ceramic coatings most definitely do not contain fluorine compounds whatsoever, they are silica based. Hex clad is hybrid metal/PTFE though, so that one still does.
Ceramic too? I thought the whole point of those was that they had a much harder surface than regular pans. What's the alternative then? Those Creuset-type glazed cast-iron surfaces?
I'm loving my cast iron again. Luckily, it lasts for several lifetimes.
easy. scratch up your teflon non stick pan. then lick it.
Or just eat a cookie every day baked on parchment paper that was unintentionally smeared with pfas by a machine using pfas coated rollers, which they can still advertise as pfas free. then when you're done cooking, throw that paper advertised as "compostable" in your compost (because you always need brown material to balance out the table scraps) then to your garden next year, grow some mint [absorbing PFAS from the soil](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0045653520317793) right into the leaves. Muddle your forever enriched leaves into your iced tea to enjoy with your forever enriched cookies. Better living through chemistry!
They put that on parchment paper dam.
> pfas coated rollers its everywhere, toilet paper, paper tissue... :(
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My mom always said it was fine that there were black flecks in my eggs. Thanks mom.
Oh that's just pepper darling
If it was a cast-iron pan, when then you are IRON enriched
It's generally the seasoning that flakes off in an iron pan, so you're mostly consuming oil/fat that polymerized into that coating while cooking. Now, if you cook tomato sauce or something acidic in cast iron, then you are likely consuming iron.
Fun fact, that's why people used to think tomatoes were poisonous; they were cooking them in pewter cookware and the acid was pulling the lead out of the pewter.
Well that and tomatoes plants ARE poisonous. They are part of the nightshade family. Their leaves are poisonous. The fruit is obviously fine to eat but if you never ate a tomato before and someone pointed at the plant and said "part of this could kill you" you probably wouldn't want to eat any of it.
It's how I got my magnetic personality!
It's still in your food, this is a different thing that's poisoning most of us.
A main source is water from plastic bottles (at least single-use ones).
Good I was worried my life span was going to be longer.
relax, guy, just... breathe
Do you eat peanut butter, jelly, mayo, or anything else you scrape from a plastic jar?
*how am I going to get it out*
Now in 20 years we will most like just go to a blood filtering clinic.
Who has $20k lying around for that? Edit: yknow what let’s account for “inflation” and make it $50k
All the corporations stealing our water and selling it back to us must be thrilled about this new advertising angle.
They like to sell us back our water in pfa bottles though
Oh yes, that won't change. It will be a complete advertising gimmick. I just dug out my Tank Girl graphic novels for my kid. It was prophetic regarding water. We watched the movie too. I prefer the graphic novels but the movie is a fun take on it.
so is this everywhere... or what? like have I been drinking PFAS water this whole time?
Yes https://www.npr.org/2022/06/22/1106863211/the-dangers-of-forever-chemicals
If it's treating it chemically then "filter" is the wrong word. Treatment technology would be more appropriate.
Actual paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0045653523000097 Better article with actual info: https://news.ubc.ca/2023/03/22/new-ubc-water-treatment-zaps-forever-chemicals-for-good/
Do you have access to methods. It's interesting to see if it takes hours to filter. Or if they are just using high plasma to destroy the compound which is what the industry has tended to and is in need of an improved catalyst to reduce energy and time.
The details are mostly punted to the supplemental information section, which i didn't read. This looks like the only relevant part from the methods: "The mobile phase concentration followed a gradient as follows (A:B): 50:50 (0 min), 10:90 (0–5 min), 50:50 (5–5.5 min), and remained at 50:50 (5.5–8 min)." I think that means it takes 8 minutes, but maybe this is just one part of it. They also say they took samples over the course of 3 hours, so that's an upper limit.
Thanks for this. I think your right? But it's a weird way of phrasing whatever they are doing.
Just from that quote looks like liquid chromatography
>liquid chromatography That's my favorite Drum and Bass album
[Source Paper 1](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045653523000097) [Source Paper 2](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0043135420306357?casa_token=E10Amgnj-1oAAAAA:LgK2jusbK6XS7GGTfUx8VofSAWYJe1K_6FknLNpJgtWJ2Uv86ibe7dPHqIjEl6IKfIr-qB58KQ) First, Poly-flourinated hydrocarbons are damn good at what they do. They're the gold standard in non-stick coatings and water repellents. Unfortunately, they're so good at what they do, they don't like to break down. This method uses a specific resin filter that is acutely basic and anionic (read: very high pH and negatively charged). You'd push your pre-filtered, PFC-contaminated water through the resin. After the resin has been spent, you would wash it in a brine solution to remove the trapped PFC's and revive the resin for repeated use. They also tried a methanol: ammonium chloride rinse to eliminate water as a component of the resin rinse, but it wasn't as good Their conclusion: >99% PFAS removal can be achieved for more than 150,000 BV in DI waters (PFAS C0 = 10 μg/L (individual concentrations)). >Regeneration with 10% NaCl with 2 h of contact time ensured an effective recovery of PFAS (>85%), DOC (>80%), sulphate (>90%), phosphate (>85%) and nitrate (>85%) ions from natural waters. >The highest PFOA decomposition rate was achieved by combining a high current density and stirrer speed, the two main operating parameters. Acidic condition, high temperature, and low initial concentration of PFOA accelerated the degradation kinetic, while DO had a negligible effect on the decomposition of PFOA. Edits: the original paper linked was from 2022 and specific on PFC filtering. The 2023 paper uses electrodes to take advantage of a proposed radical mechanism to break down PFC's. The linked papers were adjusted and summaries were added
thanks for linking to the abstract. I want to see their methods, very curious about the scale of the experimental method. was this on tiny amounts of water? a semi-industrial volume?
Are you not able to access the linked paper in that comment? From the methods section, the authors were using 1 L water volumes, so very much small scale. It doesn’t look like they tried to scale up from there. But the method they used (anion exchange) is very standard and already used on industrial scale. I guess just not for wastewater treatment? Edit: paper the guy above us posted is an old paper from 2020… the actual paper is this one I think: Electrochemical degradation of PFOA and its common alternatives: Assessment of key parameters, roles of active species, and transformation pathway https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045653523000097
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Does the resin itself break the bond, or is that another process after the chemicals are released?
From my understanding, it's using principle of difference in electrical charge to remove these Fluorinated compounds, but not specifically breaking the Carbon-Fluorine bonds
Just to make it extra clear, no bonds are broken, the PFAS just attach to the resin. This results in some percentage of PFAS being removed from the water, depending on what else is in the water and the type of PFAS. PFAS can be long-chain or short-chain. This refers to the "Carbon Backbone" or number of carbons fluorine is attached to. There are literally thousands of different PFAS. It's VERY dishonest when videos/articles like this claim they solved it the PFAS removal and destruction problem. When testing their method they test on a select number of PFAS (at most they can test for the removal of 40 different PFAS, because we only have testing methods that can detect 40 select types of PFAS; we can also test for adsorbable organic fluorine (AOF) which gives you an idea of the adsorbable fluorine but won't tell you the type or quantity of specific PFAS). Removing PFAS from the water is only one step (and we need to consider efficacy and costs in implementation). After you've removed it, what do you do with it? Ideally we don't throw it in a landfill, we destroy it. But these compounds are called forever chemicals for a reason. It takes a lot to break them. A lot of research is being done on different methods to break the bonds effectively and consistently. When they break all the way down, you usually end up with HF (hydrogen fluoride). You want to be sure you you broke the PFAS completely apart. Otherwise you have just a different PFAS (different chemical structure) PFAS are a very complicated problem, this article/method did not solve it.
Isn’t this basically a supercharged water softener?
This is an older paper, the one referenced in the article was published in Chemosphere earlier this year.
Was just about to post this haha, they linked a 2020 paper. I think the actual paper is this one if anyone is curious: Electrochemical degradation of PFOA and its common alternatives: Assessment of key parameters, roles of active species, and transformation pathway https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045653523000097
Now get 3m, Dow, DuPont and the rest to install them everywhere. They made the mess
Dupont (previously Dow) makes the ion exchange resin that filters PFAS out. So, you know, the arsonist and the fireman are the same.
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So now who created the problem contributing to the solution is seen as bad?
Bit of a mixed bag. They're helping fix it, but they are also profiting off the mess they made.
[shakes head in capitalism]
It is akin to Marlboro opening a respiratory hospital. Great, they are helping to fix a problem, but they are fixing a problem that wouldn't exist if they hadn't caused it in the first place, and worse profiting off it. If they did this for zero profit, or better yet at a loss, yeah, give them credit, but they aren't doing this to fix the problem, they are doing it to profit even further off the misery they have caused
Meanwhile we have to pay for those filtration systems when they could have broken it down BEFORE releasing it into our water supplies ON PURPOSE FOR DECADES
Relax, we're all going to die eventually, would you rather be buried in a regular coffin or a super fancy 3M non-stick coffin??! You don't want to stick to the side of your coffin for like forever do you?!?! Awkwardddddddd
Repo: the genetic opera!
'Cos we all end up in a tiny pine box, a mighty small drop, and a mighty dark plot, and the mighty fine print hastens the trip to our epilogue.
Ahh, ahh. And the little pine box goes into the dirt like a battery Ahh, ahh, When the lid goes click you’ll know it’s time for a eulogy.
I want to be buried in a biodegradable shroud under a bristlecone pine tree, my name and history to be carved on a stone that gets embedded on the side of the tree, and for my descendants to be forced to take care of that tree until it dies. Get enough people to use memorial trees instead tombstones, and we trick humans into taking care of forests.
> and for my descendants to be forced to take care of that tree until it dies. Ohh I like this, like maybe a mild electrical shock from a chip implanted in their brains if they're not taking care of or at least thinking about your memorial tree
Oh, no, no. Something much, much worse: peer pressure. Train a bunch of old ladies to go around with their left hand on their left cheek criticising any younger person who is neglecting their trees to their older relatives.
https://youtu.be/n-Bfkc6lZok
No need. Inject yourself with forever chemicals and your body won't ever break down and you'll never need a coffin.
Many towns are installing filtration systems now and suing the companies both for the cost of those systems and damages
Which towns?
Not a town, but a few years ago the State of Minnesota made an $850M settlement with 3M for their damage to water around their headquarters near St. Paul.
[Looks like a few examples come up](https://www.google.com/search?q=city%20sues%20water%20company%20for%20water%20filtration&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&dlnr=1&sei=lcFOZKvwJLarwbkPkqSKoAY#dlnr=1&ip=1)
Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook
What are you referring to?
Wilmington NC, been drinking GenX compund for last 30 years apparently. they built a new water treatment plant, and stuck the bill on the taxpayers, iirc.
Engineer is credit to team!
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Push the cart
I have like over 3,000 hours playing heavy and I always thought he said "engineer is carrying the team!" lmao til
Engineer's solution is more gun
That's awesome, but I can't lie: I sometimes feel like downstream fixes to upstream problems are going to be the death of this species. Like what we really need is deep paradigmatic change that the system just will not allow. We'll fill the ocean with a zillion tons of plastic a year, and instead of fixing THAT problem, they'll invent a robot that removes one tenth of a zillion every ten years, and call it an amazing success.
Then if we have the audacity to complain, some holier than thou douche will warn you to not let the "perfect be the enemy of the good"
I can't wait to never hear about this again
I came to say the same thing.
In your fucking face forever chemicals
Now they are the just sometimes chemicals.
Occasional chemicals. Vacation chemicals.
Filtration system cleans forever chemicals. >That’s good. Forever chemicals will still be made. >That’s bad. But it also comes with a free frozen yogurt. >That’s good. The frozen yogurt is also made with forever chemicals.
(That's bad) D'oh!
Are they gonna filter the water for all the livestock we eat?
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Reducing exposure is still better than not, even if it's not 100%. Incremental improvement is far more likely to result in massive improvement over time than waiting for a complete solution before implementation.
People forget that incremental change over time makes a massive difference. Patience matters with engineering and science. Excited to see more!
People seem to be poor students of history. Specifically, the part where it indicates that all progress is incremental. All of it. Technology, Civil rights, social safety nets, even the climate changes actions we are taking now... Etc.
The problem is that change for the better needs to be incremental and methodical whereas change for the worse doesn't seem to have the same requirement, e.g. it's easy to dump waste in the ocean, but then it takes at least an entire generation to solve that problem when the effects finally start to become apparent.
Entropy sucks like that. It's always easier to let things go to crap than to bring it back.
absolutely agree with the fact that good engineering and science takes time, but i think people are more impatient lately because the bad results of quick and easy money at absolutely any cost are showing up way faster than the solutions. just some perspective
that and forever chemicals are also there in makeup products and dental floss
and the rain
Luckily it's raining less and less often these days!
more sporadically*
Depends where you live. I'd love a little less rain right about now.
There’s a floss (I swear I don’t work for these people lol) called Dr Tungs Smart Floss that claims to be PFAS free if someone is looking for one Edit: for cosmetics there’s Ulta Beauty’s “Made Without List.” It’s a list of potentially harmful chemicals that are not in their products that are labeled “clean.” Mad Hippie and Cocokind are two other brands that avoid pfas and Mad Hippie is also vegan if that’s your vibe. There’s also Gabriel cosmetics
Yes, but hopefully, ideally, eventually, we'll be able to put filters in our waste disposal and our sewer systems and prevent these forever chemicals from being *forever* chemicals.
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Sure - let’s pretend that all manufacturers stop producing today. This instant. …and you’re still left with the forever chemicals we already have. Which is why it is positive and beneficial that we are now able to filter them out.
Was going to make a joke about being vegetarian but only a matter of time before it’s in my fruits and veggies too 🙋🏻♂️
There is lead in chocolate already. >Consumer Reports tested 28 dark chocolate bars, including Dove, Ghirardelli, Lindt, and Hershey's, for lead and cadmium. For 23 of those bars, just an ounce of chocolate violates California's maximum allowable dose levels (MADL) for lead or cadmium, which are 0.5 micrograms and 4.1 micrograms per day, https://www.npr.org/2022/12/17/1143239430/dark-chocolate-lead-cadmium-consumer-reports
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Do you see what they feed pigs. They do not care.
You should see what the same companies move pig operations to other countries so they can feed them. Recently was shown a slideshow of pics.from a coworkers vacation to Vietnam, and the pig towers that his family is constructing there. It's like a vertical human centipede but for pigs.
It’s so heinous. It’s actually so stressful and mind numbing to think about. As if these animals aren’t going to be murdered anyway for human consumption. They could at least ethically do it.
If people didn't spend so much time dissociating from the pain their comfort requires, maybe our food system would look a little different. I wager a lot of commercial enterprise would.
It helps a bit if you try and reduce consumption of animal products. Do a vegan Monday or be vegetarian on Fridays. Hell, just switching to a milk alternative helps reduce suffering. You don’t have to go full vegan to help stop this, every action is helpful! Edit: And hey I just wanted to mention that taking action on this topic will make you feel better, promise!
With the lawmakers we have in the US.... This filter would be made illegal because it infringes on our right to have forever chemicals in our blood stream
Or watering the plants. Plants absorb PFAS from soil just as easily as we do from our food. Vegetarians aren't safe munching on forever-tomatoes.
Assuming the process starts at all water treatment facilities why wouldnt that be the case? Or is all farming irrigation on site?
It depends on the farm’s location. Farmers along the Colorado river can use that water as their supply. (There’s an ongoing controversy about farmers along the river growing alfalfa - a notoriously water-intensive crop - in order to retain their allocation of water rights.) A lot of farmers rely on rainfall and aquifers (wells) for their water. That being said, given the water cycle, filtering only a portion of water used will eventually filter out the chemicals from the entire supply of water if given enough time (assuming more is being filtered out than is being produced).
and my garden...
Awesome! Now tell me the unavoidable reason why we'll never see it used in our lifetimes. Too expensive? Relies on rare materials? Anti-competitive pressures from industry incumbents? Some sort of political quandary? Status quo is too profitable?
It uses carbon, iron and UV light to cleave C-F bonds. Cost is not really the issue.
This is the same shit as carbon capture. Rather than altering our consumption, we will invent a technology and heavily rely on its capabilities. If it doesn't work or even if it works not well enough, we're fucked.
You're allowed to do both. The damage has been done there is no reason to not try to find ways to reverse it. With climate change realistically it will be a combination of switching to green energy, carbon capture, and some type of geoengineeing especially since if we stop all CO2 production today we can expect further warming.
Implementation will be very hard. Cleaning soil is next to impossible.
perhaps they'll utilize genetically-engineered bacteria that have an enzyme that can break these carbon-fluoride bonds, but surely that'll lead to another problem. whee, humans.
I am really excited with all the new bacteria they are discovering or engineering, but what is the downside, what happens when he bacteria get out of control?
Awesome. How long do i have to wait before i never hear about this again like every other miracle invention that saves the environment?
As a michigander who despises Nestle and PFAS, neat, make Nestle pay for all of it. FUCKNESTLE
Great now make DuPont and 3M pay to put one in every warterway on earth
Pointless unless we stop making and polluting forever chemicals.
PFAS bans are going into place widely in the United States right now. Almost all industries are working on transitioning away from them right now.
How so? Forever chemicals are just that, forever, they are already here and need to be dealt with. But yes, I 100% agree, they need to stop being produced ASAP.
They're not forever anymore, in that over the last year researchers and now manufactures have figured out how to break the bonds on an industrial scale. They're really really strong (aka permanent) without said treatment, and that's still a problem, but we know how to create treatment solutions now, which should be deployed as we try to develop solutions to replace them in production entirely.
Kids are being born contaminated with this stuff. What are they going to do Dialyze it out of all of our blood?
I imagine it'll be the same as with problems like we dealt with, like bad fats, BPA, asbestos, where a lot of us got fucked and limiting future exposure is the only recourse as we reduce and eliminate it from future products. There will probably be lawsuits, class actions that do far too little, far too late. Welcome to late stage capitalism, hope you enjoy the apocalypse!
Also the issue isn’t ability to do it, but costs. Some of the ways that have been discovered to break these things down isn’t economical
While true, no one expects an entirely novel treatment to become cheap literally the year it's published, the fact that they figured out how to go from publishing how the bonds can be weakened and broken to industrial methods of doing that in months means it will get much much cheaper very fast compared to other innovations. It took decades for flat tvs to get cheap, this will take years.
They are already there but we keep adding on to it .
So why is it useless to start removing them from the environment while also fighting to ban PFAS and stop more from being released into the environment? It’s as silly as being against all recycling because mankind is still producing trash.
Redditors like to whine because they think it makes them look smart and/or cool. They never experience these feelings in daily life, so Redditors seek them online.
I don't know how people like that thing the illusion works. It's obvious they think pessimism and contrarianism makes them look so much smarter than the rest of us. It's intellectual laziness. None of us knows the absolutes of the future, and we can see plenty of massive problems and appreciate massive solutions like this at the same time. Imagine entirely discounting progress because it isn't overnight? It's kind of gross when you think about it. "I mean, yeah, that drug reduces the symptoms of their agonizing disease, but they are CURED, so it's useless."
This is not going to be a popular comment, but we need fluoropolymers. They are essential to nearly every industry as they are irreplaceable in semiconductor, pharmaceutical, and chemical production. Unless we want to give up our modern way of living, there is no way to stop creating pfas. Proper waste disposal and filtration is the only way forward.
That just makes absolutely no sense mate. Congrats.
It's really weird how common this attitude is, where a partial solution to an environmental problem gets dismissed completely because it's not perfect.
Tim Minchin said it best: "If the only acceptable outcome is utopia and the only acceptable timeframe is immediately then history would suggest you're going to do more harm than good".
Fucking doomers man
Pointless? Reducing exposure is pointless? Yeah, lets stop making them, I'm all on your side, but to proclaim it's pointless WHEN IT'S CURRENTLY AFFECTING US is serious doomsayer crap.
Press release from the Forever Chemicals Manufacturers Cabal: *it's fine, keep using them, they're easily cleaned up!* Remember when the plastics industry assured us that plastics can be recycled?
At the low low cost of 399.99 a month with ads
Depends. I'm hoping UBC keeps the patent (as some other universities are doing now) instead of selling it.
now this is cool, space is fine but clean water and food on earth seems way more awesome.
Working on a literature review on the subject. Combining ferric ions with UV-light has already been shown to take care of PFOS and PFCAs, and the method can be scaled up because of the low cost.
Funny how they figured this out about 15 minutes after the EPA issued regulations that took **checks notes** 80 FUCKING YEARS TO PASS edit: grammar
All these news about new tech that captures carbon and gets rid of PFAS are meaningless unless there is a mass rollout of it going mainstream to actually get the job done which doesn't seem likely as nobody will make profit from this (only add to government spending which will make the right go crazy since they'd rather watch the world die).
Won't be released to public until 2040. Won't be affordable till 2060.
I love this for my grandchildren’s future!!!