We really ought to show more care and test more when we are creating chemical marvels and new materials. At a certain level of scale a lot of the inventions of the last 50 years turned out to be quite damaging to our health and environment. We don't seem to have the balance right yet comparing freedom to release whatever and complete lockdown until something is proved safe and we keep damaging people and the biodiversity of the planet on which we depend.
You could make the argument that we really need better methods and technology for determining the health impact of what we put into our environment. The problem as I see it (as a total layman) is that the health sciences are not good at determining the effects of almost anything in the future. The best we can do is wide-scale studies that try to control for different variables (and largely fail, because the set of variables is incredibly large).
I have a feeling we aren’t going to solve this problem anytime soon, as the simulations required appear to be so large they are beyond our reach. I am optimistic that we can massively increase the data collected as time goes on, and that will increase our accuracy of studies of things that occurred in the past.
> is that the health sciences are not good at determining the effects of almost anything in the future
For this particular case I think the real problem is that no one really spent much effort seeing the effects of particular PFOAs in cell culture prior to marketing it. We've had cell culture for over 100 years, so this lack is basically because people either didn't even think about it, or didn't care thanks to dollar signs or greater fear of another threat (household fires).
I've been hearing about the dangers of Teflon for at least a quarter century.
Lawsuits were being settled in the 9-figure range as far back as 2001 - they kept making it, and actively covered up what they knew, tobacco firm style.
I haven't watched it yet, but 'The Devil We Know' apparently goes in depth on this, with very highly rated reviews. I don't need to be that angry right now though; I know enough about Du Pont for "strong opinions" as it is.
Teflon itself is safe to use as long as you don’t heat it too much (stay well clear of 260°C/500°F) - it’s technically a PFAS but polymerised into to molecules that have a high molecular weight so have no biological activity and it is chemically inert. It’s the shorter chain PFAS chemicals used in the production process that has caused the huge problems - especially to workers and to people living near the plants (due to groundwater contamination and other environmental release of PFAS)
Teflon itself is safe to use as long as you don’t heat it too much
The problem is, people make mistakes. All it takes is a crying child, a burned pot, a mistake in cooking (not thinking about it), and you've hit the wrong temp.
And then the pan is dangerous, leeching, trouble.
The whole thought about the approval was "Well, people can be trusted to not let a pot get too hot! And to know 100% to throw it away if it does!".
Right. Trusted. In a country with warning labels like 'coffee is hot' and 'water is wet'.
Edit: my point is, the above means "teflon isn't safe for home use". Engineers know, also, to have safety tolerances. For something like this, I'd expect the 'danger zone' to be 2x the max possible heat a consumer could apply by accident.
As burners can get crazy hot, that probably means I'd call teflon unsafe, unless it broke down at 2000F.
This is how we can approve things safe or not. Not "trust people will constantly monitor how hot their pan got".
Just as an aside, I was at a hotel the other day, and someone was trying to put buttered toast in the hotel toaster!
Nothing is safe in that range - that's why it's unrealistic. The cast iron would decompose, shatter, and light a commercial kitchen on fire, let alone a residential tinder box.
You all may be arguing against a strawman. A completely hypothetical one, at that.
The actual danger temp, 260c / 500f, is trivially achievable on most home cooking equipment.
And even if the danger temp were 2,000 degrees, there would still be the major dangers from manufacturing and the associated pollution, as has been noted.
Kilns work because they lose far slower than then generate it. You could conceivably reach very high temps due to the heat source being in direct contact whereas the pan must lose heat through convection. I doubt it would ever reach 2000° but 600-700° seems easy enough.
TikTok challenge...shave off some Teflon, burn it, and consume.
> The problem is, people make mistakes. All it takes is a crying child, a burned pot, a mistake in cooking (not thinking about it), and you've hit the wrong temp.
Then you turn off the cooking pot, and air the room. Burning teflon releases nasty stuff, but not much worse than burning oil. Unless you heat it up all the way until its thermal decomposition (your pan will be visibly glowing red at that temperature).
Also, it's time to switch from natural gas burners to electric stoves that can have automatic protection.
The most common mistake made when cooking is to apply far too much heat. A pan can easily be accidentally heated past 500° on a stovetop. The only save is that it takes time to harm you and the cause is impossible to directly attribute. DuPont's lawyers now have all they need.
When you're in the mood for some anger towards DuPont, check out "Dark Waters" (2019) too. The cinematography, acting, and pacing are great — my favourite DuPont rager so far.
A Civil Action, 1998, is not directly about DuPont, though DuPont did manufacture the same chemical that the film concerns itself with, trichloroethylene. Duvall was nominated for best supporting actor for his role in this, and the film was nominated for best cinematography.
Or outdoor textiles, or toilet paper, or paper food boxes, or furniture with stain repelents, or cosmetics, or school uniforms, or breast milk, or microwave popcorn bags, or carpet cleaners, or candy wrappers, or pizza boxes, or cattle, or agricultural fields and products, or houshold dust, or water, or firefighting foams, or dental floss, or air ... better to stay away from it all.
> I have a feeling we aren’t going to solve this problem anytime soon, as the simulations required appear to be so large they are beyond our reach.
That's what we need quantum computers for!
Seriously, crypto breaking problems tend to get all the attention when we are talking about quantum computing, but one of the most promising application of quantum computers is modeling quantum systems. Studying the health impact of substances involves a lot of chemistry, which is a quantum process. A quantum computer could help with modeling the interactions between artificial substances and biomolecules.
Maybe, but isn't it an intrinsically hard problem to model? How close are we to growing organ tissues at scale? Can we dose these things and correctly ascertain an expected outcome?
I would argue there are enough companies that have continued creating these cash cow chemicals even after there was sufficient evidence of substantial harm that additional testing would be useless, except to class action lawsuit plaintiffs to prove what the defendants already know.
Movies that cover this topic: Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, Dark Waters. More recently the talc powder lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson.
Hell, the Bay Area is littered with EPA Superfund Sites where all of the old chipmakers and their suppliers were. Good luck to Chandler, AZ (where the new American chip fans are being built). I hope you learn at least a little something from the SF peninsula’s mistakes of the 1960s-1990s.
A former naval base in my area has been decommissioned for years but still hasn’t cleaned up the firefighting chemical runoff that has seeped into the ground. Sometimes there simply isn’t a healthier substitute for a chemical or there is no legal method to prevent an organization from screwing up the environment (good luck suing the Navy for something they did 50 years ago before the harm was known).
I would agree that better testing and health trials could have identified these health risks before the companies started using these chemicals, but companies don’t have emotions or ethics. They are sociopaths seeking maximum returns and will turn a blind eye (or worse) if their profits are threatened. There is a ton of motivated reasoning within and around companies that produce and use harmful chemicals, especially if they are the only industry in a region.
There are multi-million dollar homes and a school facility built on top of (parts of) the EPA Superfund site near the old El Toro MCAS in Irvine. Another set of million dollar homes nearby was built on top of a nursery that was founded in the early 1900s. In both cases, residents are warned not to plant edible fruits or vegetables directly into the soil.
Because we don’t close the loop. We find out asbestos and plastics and whatever else is dangerous actually and then go “ah shit” and that’s all. We don’t prosecute the makers of it or charge for cleanup. Yeah we have superfunds for breathtakingly poor resource and conservation management, but with micro pollutants don’t have the same kind of knee jerk visceral reaction a major radioactive waste site does.
We should have laws that say “if you make something, you own its entire lifecycle, including its safe and ecologically sound disposal.” That would turn the page on wasteful production almost overnight.
What about the BP Oil Spill?
How would that go, reparation and paying someone money like the government isn't going to benefit nobody and especially not the world.
After the Fukushima incident they just dropped the radioactive water back into the ocean. yayy ...radioactive seafood :/
> Kettering was elected as president with Midgley as vice president. However, after two deaths and several cases of lead poisoning at the TEL prototype plant in Dayton, Ohio, the staff at Dayton was said in 1924 to be "depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program". Over the course of the next year, eight more people died at DuPont's plant in Deepwater, New Jersey. …
> The risks associated with exposure to lead were known at least 150 years before, when Benjamin Franklin wrote about his experiences as a typesetter.
Holy cow. I always chocked up leaded gasoline as one of those “well how could they know” kind of things but people were dropping dead just making it, and Midgley himself was sickened from it by researching its production. Absolutely fucking evil people.
I think we've known about the dangers of lead since Roman times so it's even worse. Quoting Vitruvius [1]:
> Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead [PbCO3, lead carbonate] is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system. Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome. That the flavour of that conveyed in earthen pipes is better, is shewn at our daily meals, for all those whose tables are furnished with silver vessels, nevertheless use those made of earth, from the purity of the flavour being preserved in them
We've known about the danger of the fumes for over two thousand years!
Wow, first time hearing of this.. so terrible.. no money in the world is worth the lasting damages he contributed to.
There are few of such people still alive in the world, without which we'd have millions of less deaths and people left disabled..
Hope someone finds out and the PR stops them from continuing somehow :/
> In 1923, Midgley took a long vacation in Miami to cure himself of lead poisoning. He said, "I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air."
I don't think it'll ever be the case. There's an infinite number of unknowns and unknown unknowns. It's a lot easier in our economic system to solve a bounded problem by throwing money at it than for regulations to be enforced politically on what would be 99% speculative problems.
Something that blows my mind is that you can get a patent on a new "state of matter" (implying intrinsically that it has novel properties) but then claim to regulators that it doesn't need new safety testing because it's similar to something existing.
Aren’t we totally ignoring this with the renewed push for nuclear energy? If we insist nuclear waste can safely be stored than surely we can safely store PFAS.
There's a pretty big difference between the two. Nuclear waste is always tracked and treated carefully. PFAS are on store shelves and in homes and in landfills and are entirely untracked. Nothing's being ignored, it's just an entirely differently kind of situation.
