About a quarter of new pharmaceuticals are PFAS, and we can’t make modern chips, autos, or airplanes without them. Once politicians learn that the half life for “forever” chemicals varies by 7 orders of magnitude, we will have more nuance about the issue.
Huh, TIL. I was going to rebut this but I looked into it. I didn't realize simply the presence of a -CF3 group is enough to classify the whole molecule as a PFAS according to new definitions.
> More recently (2021) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) expanded the definition, stating that "PFASs are defined as fluorinated substances that contain at least one fully fluorinated methyl or methylene carbon atom (without any H/Cl/Br/I atom attached to it), i.e. with a few noted exceptions, any chemical with at least a perfluorinated methyl group (–CF3) or a perfluorinated methylene group (–CF2–) is a PFAS."[3][4]
That's a super popular moeity in medchem for whatever reason, so yeah, RIP all thing trifluoromethyl.
Difluromethylene can be degraded much more quickly as long as the molecule can be "unzipped" (needs a break point where nucleophilic attack can occur), so it's possible we may be able to sub in -CHF2 or -CH2F to "cap" molecules and render them less persistent.
I don't know what you're talking about. I'm like 95% sure we could choose to chemically break down PFEs instead of dumping them into rivers, it might double the cost of some plastic, there must be dozens or hundreds of ways to prevent it.
>Once politicians learn that the half life for “forever” chemicals varies by 7 orders of magnitude, we will have more nuance about the issue.
So long as they can use an issue to lead the line of lemmings into the polling place you will never see nuanced opinion from politicians on an issue.
Politicians in Texas know full well how rare and irrelevant late term abortions that aren't medically necessary are. Politicians in California know full well how rare and irrelevant murders by people wielding military style arms are. But they still spew falsehoods because that is what is politically useful.
