Last week a Dutch research channel made an episode out of the PFAS coverup by a former Dupont factory in The Netherlands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3kzHc-eV88 It's a good video in English with some subtitled Dutch interviews containing a lot of official memo's and internal documents from Dupont and 3M. Funny thing is that they already started installing ground water cleaning installations in the 90's because they measured very high levels of PFAS in the ground, even larger than their factories in the US.
On a similar tack, there was a recent documentary by Vice on PFAS in Michigan and how it's shutting down farms, while the source emitters in the industrial space continue operating. https://youtu.be/X9GTa3a-tFo
The thing speculated in the video is the industrial emitter focused on in the video (Tribar) is depended on by the automotive industry (Ford, Chrysler) which would cause factories to pause (job loss, etc.) and such if immediately shut down.
I’m currently in the process of getting a whole home RO system to clean all this garbage out of my water, but I can’t do anything about the water my purchased fruits and vegetables are grown in nor the water the animals raised drinking.
For anyone wondering if this works, the EPA seems to think it does:
>>> High-pressure membranes, such as nanofiltration or reverse osmosis, have been extremely effective at removing PFAS. Reverse osmosis membranes are tighter than nanofiltration membranes. This technology depends on membrane permeability. A standard difference between the two is that a nanofiltration membrane will reject hardness to a high degree, but pass sodium chloride; whereas reverse osmosis membrane will reject all salts to a high degree. This also allows nanofiltration to remove particles while retaining minerals that reverse osmosis would likely remove.
>>> Research shows that these types of membranes are typically more than 90 percent effective at removing a wide range of PFAS, including shorter chain PFAS.
You can dramatically increase efficiency by adding a permeate pump, search Amazon, they can be had very cheaply, they recycle the concentrate, increasing recovery and filter effectiveness.
That’s… not how it works. The RO membrane keeps contaminants on one side of the barrier, but it requires that they still be in solution. It’s not like you isolate all the bad stuff then mix it back in, you’re just siphoning off some clean water from the rest of the mix.
Obviously I don’t feel great about the waste, but I’ve got two kids under 6 and I’m trying to do what I can to avoid dosing them with this crap.
I do my best to make up for it in other ways - not watering any landscaping, scraping but not rinsing dishes, water off while brushing teeth/lathering hands, low flow shower heads and toilets, etc. But I'm not aware of another way to get sufficiently clean water.
The average 4 person house uses 190 gallons per day. About 4 of that is drinking water. So my wastewater contains about 2% more PFAS than a household not using an RO system. Assuming that all of it ends up in my body and not in the toilet.
Yes, I'm agreeing with you that you're doing the only remotely sensible thing. My calculation was considering only alternative disposal options for the RO wastewater, not your entire household water usage. (1 gallon of drinking water per person seems like an over-estimate as well, making your point ever so slightly stronger.)
Sure, but it works :) (except that one company that had a low quality membrane that leached ionomers, lol). Once plastics have leached off their manufacturing chemicals they really are very benign.
The membranes you mention are permeable, basically, only to water. Salt ions are pretty small - if the membrane blocks salt ions, they're going to block just about any molecule [1].
1. for the most part. You can have a molecule that dissolves in the polymer membrane and therefore gets through. A great example is polymer self-diffusion itself (fairly slow) and very short chains of the polymer (faster). But, generally, polymers don't like to mix with anything but themselves (see Flory-Huggins and DeGennes).
My daughter just told me, "If you really stretch it, you can make what you post on social media true."
Alas, I must concede the point: upon actual cursory research, drinking distilled water is NOT a health risk.
(I was once admitted to hospital because of crazy electrolyte levels, while presenting other symptoms as well. Is long story. Perhaps it's time for me to stop worrying about potassium...)
Its not just a US thing, other places in the world have fluoride in their water. In many areas fluoride just naturally occurs in the water at levels even higher than what managed services target. But other countries, such as Hong Kong, parts of Malaysia, Singapore, Ireland, parts of Spain, parts of the UK, parts of Canada, Mexico fluoridates table salt, most of Austrailia, Fiji is rolling out a program, half of New Zealand, about half of Brazil, and most of Chile all have some water fluoridation programs. Many other countries did at some other point in time but stopped doing it.
P.S. Note the "facility" where these products are manufactured are also listed. One might also want to note that [replacement] filters may also have different country origins.
I was quoted around 22k, which is on the high side, you can get whole home ro units starting around $2-3k mark, but storage tank + install puts you around 5k minimum, some higher efficiency units can’t also be had for around $10k.
I am willing to spend so much because of the high efficiency, live TDS monitoring and the $20 per month full maintenance plan.
Some of the higher end systems require a lot of fiddling and knowledge to run properly, and most plumbers where I live know next to nothing about whole home RO, so having the maintenance plan which covers, parts, labor and replacement filters is priceless in my book.
3M is paying about 500 million euros for the same kind of PFAS pollution here in Antwerp and although I was thinking that is a ridiculous amount compared to the $10 billion, after all it's more per capita, so maybe it's still a "correct" amount.
I think the PFAS pollution topic is just starting being discussed in France as well, so although these fines are probably never going to fix everything, I think they do have the potential to give enough incentive to these polluters... writing that though, honestly who am I fooling?
It's going to give them incentive to hide things better and lobby harder next time, and nothing will change until executive get actual prison sentences.
I truly believe that the only way large companies can be made to behave is to make their executives actually responsible of their actions, and to give them sentences that affect them personally. The whole limited company system is harmful today.
I seriously doubt 3M is the only or even dominant contributor to rainwater pollution. Surely there are big Chinese companies, among others, also producing fluorine compounds.
The other polluters should also contribute to cleanup rather than just using this as an excuse to further erode the USA’s industrial base.
That said if someone can convincingly show that 3M all by themselves managed to pollute the entire global water supply to a dangerous level I’ll accept it.
That's not what I was implying (agreed, my initial comment was a bit short). But they have played a part in this. It seems that corporate social responsibility these days amounts to having to pay trivial fines, then washing their hands clean.
I'm a bit mortified that the consequences to 3M for the amount of damage caused amounts to 10.3BN-12.5BN over the course of thirteen years. They should clean up the mess they made themselves - God only knows what that would cost in the end.
The settlement will be paid over a decade and 3M don't admit liability. Feels like another slap on the wrist for Corporate America. Mike Roman should at least be serving prison time as a warning to others.
It's not even a slap on the wrist. 3M will just past the costs of this onto end-users (consumers). Their board and C-Suite won't face and personal liability claims or pay a cent towards the settlement costs, nor will they ever see the inside of a jail cell.
Corporations MUST admit liability if they actually are liable. I get that they could face a barrage of legitimate and fiscally damaging claims if they admit liability...but that's the name of the game. I'm tired of the "we're not technically liable" bullshit. You, the corporation, knowingly created a product that you know contained harmful chemicals, and didn't disclose it. Now that it's been proven that 1. you knew they were harmful, and 2. you sold it anyway, you give up all claims to limited liability. It's just mind-bogglingly dumb to claim that you're not liable. Of course you are.
I run a small business that serves an edible product. If a consumer gets sick and my product is 100% provably the culprit, I don't get to say "we're not liable" in court and dictate the terms of the settlement. If the settlement is too high, I'm out of business and ethically speaking, I'm still on the hook for damages. Why do corporations not get the same treatment?
A big slap on the wrist. Still, the same people stay in charge with the same incentives in place. Instead of paying engineers to solve the problems, they can simply hire better lawyers and focus on fine minimisation in the future.
And once that 10 billion is divided up between all the victims, it will hardly be worth anything at all to them either. So many victims, so much harm, it's barely a drop in the bucket.
102 years ago General Motors started poisoning the entire planet with lead [1] (being helped by DuPont, the same DuPont which manufacture PFAS, to manufacture tetraethyllead-TEL, and in collaboration with Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, now known as ExxonMobil, the same ExxonMobil that predicted very accurately climate change 50 years ago, in the 1970s [2]).
Today, in 2023, General Motors has a market cap of $55B with $156B revenue in 2022; DuPont, $32B market cap, $13B revenue 2022; ExxonMobil $417B market cap, $413B revenue 2022.
These planetary-scale terrorists are killing you, your children, and any possible future for a few trillions, and you have been conditioned to sustain, maintain, defend, extend this criminal system.
These world-destroyers thinly masked as "companies" should have been dissolved literally 100 years ago. But in the words of the contemporary ponderer, George W. Bush, after receiving "$1.5 million from the oil industry for his 2000 presidential campaign, at the time, the largest donation from the industry to a single political candidate" [3], and asked by Manmohan Singh, India's Prime Minister, why must ExxonMobil approve India's largest state-owned oil company to buy into the Sakhalin-1 energy project in Russia and "why don't you just tell them [Exxon] what to do?" Bush replied: "Nobody tells those guys what to do."
I do wonder exactly what level of corporate malignancy is needed to result in jail sentences. Outside of financial misconduct I can't think of more than a couple (and I'd have to check they actually resulted in custodial sentences).
Union Carbide did I think? I'm off to google it later.
Has anyone made an attempt at accounting for all the harms and benefits of PFAS? Something I feel is often missed in reporting about similar issues is that the products in question have tremendous benefits. Yes, they have caused significant harm. But so have fire, the wheel, and the automobile. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to forget that we used these things in so many places for good reasons.
Perfluorinated chemistry is very nasty and not benign at all.
The issue is not teflon, or similar plastics, but byproducts and precursors of their manufacture.
They're chemically super-stable (since, like teflon, they are perflorinated) and super unreactive. That means that they persist for a very long time (until enough UV deteriorates them).
However unreactive doesnt mean harmless. Sure, they have very low acute toxicity, but they still take up volume. Therefore, they interfere with the chemical reaction rates and pathways in your body.
Its called steric interference, which is a fancy way of saying "something is in the way". Think of a very busy line kitchen and some guy is randomly and blindly walking into things and people.
That's not the issue. These chemicals -they're not just teflon- were put into basically everything, like asbestos was. Cleaning products, spray grease, fabrics, paper, shampoo and cosmetics, stain-resistant coatings. They've already been phased out but the damage is done.
PFOAs are a type of PFAS in the same way as squares are rectangles. Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) is a polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS). PFAS is a higher level category of chemical compounds of which perfluorooctanoic acid is a member of. Like a mouse is a mammal.
Not sure what harm you attribute to the wheel, but the harms of fire and combustion engines are currently world-class problems, such as the climate. Very much "if we knew then what we know now" situations, and with PFAS and the like, we have the opportunity to act before it becomes an issue.
History is full of examples of acting without evidence, with disastrous results. Thankfully, in this case, we can have high confidence that the absence of PFAS is not a health risk. So the cost of action without evidence is purely financial. It’s not clear to me the global economic impact of banning these chemicals, but I’m struggling to forecast anything large enough to care. For this reason, I support banning these chemicals. The case for historical claims is murkier without evidence.
Problem here is not a product, but ammount of it. Corporate greed and obsession of maximalisation of income, driven by whole ad industry needs to be addressed.
We certainty all do not need teflon pans. Or cars. Without massive production, such problems would be "just" local anomaly.
That seems a big stretch, especially for the purposes of lumping it in with fire and combustion engines. Being crushed under a wheel has more to do with circumstance than the wheel itself, whereas fire and combustion engines (though the more I say that, the more I realize they're both the same thing) are a negative impact by their very usage.
If we go by circumstance, anything can be a danger, or a non-danger. And the solution is to be more mindful of our circumstances. What we're trying to identify in this thread are the practices that, while being immediately beneficial, are also immediately negatively impactful, even if it took us years (dozens, hundreds, or thousands thereof) to learn about the negative impacts. And following that, to be more mindful of which practices may have similar negative impacts, and be forward thinking about that possibility rather than reflectively regretful.
Fire and wheel has a 'little' more benefit than an artificial, proprietary, lied to be unharmful, avoidable substence manufactured for huge profit and not for an overwhelming benefit and demand from the society. It could have been substituted with something else perhaps, with clearly know risks like fire or automobiles, in all or in almost all use cases, and in many many cases in marginally important use cases (cookware, packaging, water repellence, etc.).
Not the same. Really not the same, overwhelmingly not the same.
Justifying the damage caused by their production and use by pointing to the usefulness of the final product seems very risky. There are plenty of ends we might value, but they don't inherently justify the means.
I'd argue though that the customers are just as guilty/responsible as the company making the product that they demand/buy and maybe they should share in the financial burden of damages if that is the path we are on.
This would be true if the products were clearly labelled, and safer existing alternatives weren’t pulled off the market by centralized decision makers at large companies.
As it is, if you buy a “ceramic” pan, you get some teflon knockoff instead of Le Creuset style stuff.
I'm not sure how that would work exactly, but sure if customers were properly informed and knew what they were buying had such bad side effects some of the blame would land on them.
That'd be a hard sell though since it seems like part of the issue was manufacturers burying research and denying any knowledge of problems while selling these chemicals as a miracle cure of sorts
None of the materials you listed are fluorinated polymers.
EDIT:
If you meant that I cant turn PEEK into a plastic (as in having plasticity) - sure.
But read my comment carefully. Im not saying fluorinated polymers don't have their use cases. Im just saying that for many (but not all!) applications of perfluorinated polymers, there are alternative ways of doing things. For example wool and stainless steel make excellent alternatives for jackets and frying pans.
Should nuclear (re)processing plants ditch teflon when dealing with UF6? Probably not. Should my gas fittings need teflon tape? No, alternatives exist.
Not even- Teflon breakdown is a much smaller source, you just happen to maybe eat it. PFAS have been phased out of use already.
These chemicals were put into basically everything, like asbestos was. Cleaning products, spray grease, fabrics, paper, shampoo and cosmetics, stain-resistant coatings.
PFAS have been phased out of use? Where? You have to hunt for PFAS-free ski or bike lubrication, it's in your contact lenses, and on all of your non-stick pans.
Hi. Irrelevant with this thread, but can you please reply to me here if you got the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35955336
Search for my username and you will find my question! Thanks!
Sure - the *Client would be a class or library intended for import/use by consumers of a resource exposed by a service. The exposed API should be viewed as usable independently, but it can sometimes be useful to add a layer of abstraction via a Client to would hold any logic required for interacting with a specific API.
Say you have an API that lets you bulk fetch an Item (`getItems(Collection<UUID> itemIds, int pageNumber, int pageSize)`), but the API enforces pagination and also requires authentication. A Client could require instantiation with whatever is required for authentication (`ic = new ItemClient(authToken)`), and provide a method to retrieve a huge list of Items without worrying about pagination (`ic.getItems(itemIds)`).
Here's an alternative explanation, one which I find much more likely: when being LGBT is widely accepted, people who would previously have been in the closet are more inclined to come out.
I'm pretty sure my father wasn't turned gay by PFAS and other forever chemicals (which weren't even in widespread use when he was born), it's that he grew up in an area and an era where coming out as gay could get you murdered (if you were merely ostracized, you got off easy), and it wasn't until societal attitudes had shifted that he felt safe enough to leave my mother and be with who he wanted to.
If I had to worry about that, I (a lesbian) would probably still be in the closet, too. And I probably would have married a man to deflect suspicions, much the same way my mother was a beard to my father.
I don't think ignoring evidence is the path to finding answers
The explanation given above (increased acceptance, decreased violence/killing) seems more likely than the initial explanation for increased LGBT presence
But you are of course free to present whatever studies you wish
>I'm convinced that a significant amount of the rising LGBT identification in the youth is partly due to increasingly large amounts of Endocrine diruptors found in everything.
Hello? Sagan called and wants to know which specific literature has convinced you to hold these beliefs.
So does it "make no sense" or is it just "probably not" true? e-EDCs are a known but not yet well studied issue. How can you claim that increased estrogen does not have any effect on sexuality? To your point about the lack of feminization in women, I think that just shows your lack of knowledge of endocrinology. Men and women both have estrogen receptors; one aspect of sexual dimorphism in humans, however, is that females produce more estrogen than males. Female estrogen receptors are therefore usually activated while estrogen receptors in men are less activated (to simplify). Increasing estrogen in females whose estrogen receptors are largely already activated will have no effect. In fact, estrogen-like endocrine disrupting chemicals are less potent than say 17β-estradiol. So increased faux estrogen may predict decreased net "femininity," for lack of a better term, in females, as their estrogen receptors are then bound to weaker e-EEDCs, and this is supported by the literature[0]. This is also why soy products may increase breast size in men but not in women. But your conclusion that the whole discussion "makes no sense" is forgone, and not based on an analysis of any data.
[0] Colon I, Caro D, Bourdony CJ, Rosario O: Identification of phthalate esters in the serum of young Puerto Rican girls with premature breast development. Environ Health Perspect, 2000; 108: 895–900
Their reasoning makes no sense, because they assume LGBT = gay men & trans women.
The probably not is in reference to PFAS making people LGBT not to people being feminized.
Thanks for the very basic explanation of endocrinology, unfortunately it does not support the OPs claim, you're at worst arguing with an invisible post or at best, stating something that doesn't disprove anything in my claim.
And I'll reiterate the claim is not that PFAS does not feminized people, the claim is that if we were to see it affecting our sexuality, SPECIFICALLY making us move from being straight to LGBT then we should see be able to see clear data showcasing how females produce more testosterone & having more male-align brains which would make them more likely to become Lesbian, Trans or Bisexual against control - which to my knowledge no study have shown.
>This is also why soy products may increase breast size in men but not in women
If you mean breast size as in they work out and get bigger muscles in the chest area because of protein that came from soy-based products, then yes I agree.
If you're making the argument that it increases estrogen because soy contains "plant estrogen" then no afaik you're wrong.[1][2]
Breast growth, erectile dysfunction and decreased libido in a 60-year-old male who drank about six pints of soy milk per day. With no other cause indicated. His symptoms ceased after he stopped consuming all this soy.
Sorry but this is not a study, it's a case report.
As they could not determine his testosterone levels before he started to ingest soy milk, it's impossible to know if the man was already suffering from low testosterone.
And in my sources they have studies that specifically look into people that are 60+ and there was no such link found.
In the papers you linked, I can't see any studies where the subjects were consuming an equivalent amount of soy to the 60-year-old soy milk enjoyer. Looks to be much less in all of these trials.
So it seems the question hasn't been conclusively answered. But the case study hints at the possibility of an excessively high intake of soy having an estrogenizing effect, even if we don't know why. Maybe he had some particular configuration of gut bacteria that helped this process along, or something. More research needed.
No because your source isn't a study but a case report.
And again even if we take your source at face value it's a 60 year old man (which mean less testosterone production) who consumed an absurd amount not something most people will consume.
Every PFAS study I read seems to be pointing to ever increasing accumulation and harm. It's not hard to imagine a phase shift to a PFAS effect pandemic if we don't seriously consider PFAS curtailment as a regulatory priority.
It’s a good thing that claims be sourced, but we should put in a minimum of effort to a conversation. Especially one with a large body of evidence.
If person A claims “the earth is round”, person B can find sources to prove it faster than it takes to write a comment. If person B did search and found the studies lacking, they should open with that and ask for clarification. Otherwise it looks like they’re waiting for person A to do all the work so they can nitpick every source and derail the conversation away from the broader, productive, important points.
I searched for “microplastics marine ecosystems” (taken directly from your parent post) and my engine returned more studies than I know what to do with. The first five links:
That's not how sources work. You can't just google a few and copy/paste.
I can tell you didn't even read your "sources" since the one I randomly picked, the 2nd one, has the conclusion "Bioavailability and the efficiency of transfer of the ingested POPs across trophic levels are not known and the potential damage posed by these to the marine ecosystem has yet to be quantified and modelled."
I didn’t claim these were sources of either point, I said these were the first five links. Not even the first five studies, but the first five results. Thus illustrating how a minimum of effort can be employed to engage in good faith with another’s point. It was a deliberate choice to not editorialise what was returned.
Rest assured I am aware of the conclusion of each, just as I am aware of which ones are the best choices to nitpick.
But you said "There is abundant evidence that microplastics are destroying marine ecosystems."
"Destroying". So clearly your position is based on studies. Why would you just share search results and not the studies that prove microplastics are "destroying" ecosystems.
>Meanwhile, the total fertility rate worldwide has dropped by nearly 1 percent per year from 1960 to 2018.
That can't possibly be also due to demographic changes[1]? Fertility in the west started to drop way before the invention of PFAS compounds, and the worldwide rate dropping can easily be explained by the rest of the world experiencing the same demographic transition.
Of course it can possibly, and almost certainly is at least in part, caused by demographic changes.
Do the demographic changes also explain plummeting sperm count?
We don't need to be looking for a singular answer here. Yes there are obviously demographic, cultural, and economic components. But we also know that PFAS are hormone-disrupting and they're all over our food, water, and material supply.
tl;dr the data does show a vague decline, but it's also very noisy so it's hard to know whether it's really happening. Also, it's not clear that "plummeting" sperm count would lead to "plummeting" fertility. A 50% drop in sperm count doesn't equate to a 50% drop in fertility, as long as there's "enough" sperm. So far even with the drop it looks like there's "enough".
> Of course it can possibly, and almost certainly is at least in part, caused by demographic changes.
From the GP:
>With all the inconclusive studies it compels me to believe that even if it's harmful, it's no so harmful.
The claim that isn't that there's zero harm from PFAS, it's that the harm is negligible. However, the article you linked seems to suggest that PFAS is single handledly cutting the world fertility rate by half.
We have mechanistic knowledge of PFAS’ impact on human health though! It’s not like we’re looking at (noisy) sperm count or fertility data and then looking at what’s in our environment and randomly picking out PFAS and other EDCs. They’re being named because we know that they disrupt reproductive systems and we know that they’re everywhere.
Looking at those two pieces of information alone, it’s naive to say “well we haven’t conclusively drawn a causal population-scale link between cause and effect.” It is incredibly difficult to eliminate all confounders at that scale and time horizon, which would be really dooming to the hypothesis if we didn’t already have separate knowledge of the mechanics.
The Bayesian priors are: PFAS are poisonous to humans (known). PFAS are everywhere in our environment (known). We are seeing population-scale effects similar to what you’d expect to see from population-scale PFAS poisoning (noisy).
The difficulty of finding sound causal links at generational, population scales cannot prevent us from taking action on things — again — we already know are poisonous to people and to which people are frequently exposed.
>The Bayesian priors are: PFAS are poisonous to humans (known). PFAS are everywhere in our environment (known). We are seeing population-scale effects similar to what you’d expect to see from population-scale PFAS poisoning (noisy).
It's a leap in logic to go from "PFAS impairs reproductive health" to "PFAS is a significant contributor to fertility decline". Your bayesian logic does not make sense. We know of dozens of other factors that are also casually known to lower fertility, and are pervasive in our society/environment. They can be contributors, but they can't all be significant contributors.
Again, repeating my prior comment: I'm not claiming PFAS generate zero effects on fertility. I claiming that there isn't good evidence that it's a significant factor in fertility decline.
Hmm okay welp yeah I guess until we prove (somehow?) that they’re a significant (how significant?) cause, then it’s reasonable to continue to expose everyone to known-harmful chemicals. Right now we only know that they hurt individuals and we’re probably seeing population-scale harm similar to what we see in individuals. But yeah it could be like weddings are too expensive and millennials like their lattes too much to reproduce — let’s not act on known toxins in our food supply until we rule out those hypotheses.
I mean yeah? If we think that declining fertility rates is a serious problem, but there are dozens of equally plausible explanations, why would we prioritize your pet cause (ie. PFAS) above all others? How does it going to work when everyone says that their pet cause is responsible for 50% (or whatever significant fraction) of the fertility decline?
Note, this doesn't necessarily mean that we should do nothing about PFAS. We just have to be honest about the potential impacts. In other words, instead of gesturing that PFAS is the primary cause for fertility decline in the past few decades (like the linked scientific american article), you admit that the impact is unclear/low, but we should still work to remove it just in case.
> why would we prioritize your pet cause (ie. PFAS) above all others?
Because it's the best available theory and even if it's wrong we're eliminating known toxins from our environment?
What other theories have an established mechanism of action and established population-scale exposure? That's why this one should be prioritized above others (at least any that I'm aware of?). Which other theory has these?
Another reason: if any portion of decline is due to these, the damage builds across generations. If this is any problem at all, it will grow to a big problem.
We’re talking about future generations not just getting poisoned during their lifetimes, but being born poisoned, too.
This is either not a problem at all or it should be extremely high priority, and I think the former position is completely non-viable at this point.
The article says a lot of the money is going to be used for monitoring, and then that monitoring, if it found pollution, would be allocated to better fitlering systems.
Maybe per year? Paid out by all former executives from the point PFAS were manufactured?... after all, if they claim responsibility and the associated bonuses for the good stuff, they should be held accountable for the bad too, right?
A charitable reading suggests this is paid out to just one city, which would seem to be about right (If you value a house at $100K, then $1B would cover ruining the water supply of 10,000 houses. A city could easily contain 100,000 such buildings.
A less charitable reading is that it covers 300 cities. Maybe they can filter the municipal water supply of that many cities in perpetuity with currently unavailable commercial filter technology?
If it is nationwide, then $10b is a bad punchline.
We need to have something on the order of a fiduciary responsibility of executives for externalities. It’s tough to find a basis for harm in these cases, as so many people were responsible over so long of a time.
I see your point, but the whole purpose of an LLC is, yes, to prevent undue liability on those acting on the behalf of corporations, but at the same time, there needs to be a point where as a society we say "well, you can't claim limited liability because you knew directly what you were doing, and the negative effects of your actions, and you admitted as such in writing, so yes, you are liable".
Because otherwise, I could incorporate as XYZ LLC and say that any blatantly illegal act that causes real harm is just a byproduct of me doing business, and that I'm not actually liable for anything that happens to anyone else during me committing said illegal acts.
The slope here is so slippery it's effectively made of banana peels.
Because we know, and have known, murder is illegal, and is illegal under a criminal statute.
PFAS wern't always known to be bad, and even after knowing chances are everyone reading this has some in their blood -- and most of you are doing just fine. Maybe 0.01% crappier than if you didn't have it in you, but it's a far cry from getting stabbed to death by a hired goon.
It’s a tricky legal ground. Companies DO make decisions which they know will kill people. Sometimes, they downplay the risks in less than ethical ways- sometimes they actively cover up the risks/reality.
I don’t think that it is so far fetched that a corporation should be held criminally liable, and that executives should be criminally liable when they discover one of these risks and do not accurately disclose it and mitigate the risk.
It doesn’t strike me as intrinsically different to hit an LLC provided that the company knew about the impact of PFAS.
Yeah I don't get why people think holding LLC's and top ranking execs liable is problematic. If you work for an LLC and hold any sort of professional license you are held liable, but the executives who make all the policy decisions around you are not, even if the issue you are held liable for is really their fault.
Are you claiming that value of any home in one of these towns with PFAS in the water is now $0? This seems straightforwardly untrue, people are happily buying those homes. Whatever penalty 3M should pay ought to be based on actual damages PFAS causes.
What are the actual damages of millions of gallons of water? What about in 30 years?
How can you accurately estimate any of this?
What they should be made to do is provide free filters to all of the governments to filter PFAS until a time when no PFAS is detected. Or if that's not possible, R&D until some form of it is possible then do that.
But that would probably damage the company forever, and that's bad.
We don’t know yet the actual, long term damages. Maybe this is like leaded gasoline - very bad for everyone, but it takes long term accumulation to really show the effect.
We have a meme in Europe that a visit to the US means you will gain a few pounds of extra body fat that’s harder to lose than usual. That’s just anecdotal, of course. But as a result, my suspicion is that dietary compounds (mainly HFCS) are the culprit.
Generally my experience as well. Working in Asia and Australia I lost weight, and then ballooned when I got back to the US. Especially noticeable when I got back to the East Coast.
HFCS is sugar, yes, an especially unhealthy form. Probably pushed for political/economical reasons in the US because it can be made domestically from corn, it’s way less prevalent in other areas. Eg in Germany, it has to be declared as glucose-fructose-syrup starting at 5% fructose, and as fructose-glucose-syrup starting at 50% fructose. The overwhelming majority of products I‘ve encountered contains just „glucose-syrup“ or plain sugar (usually from sugar beet, which is grown domestically).
Fructose is ok to consume in amounts that are typical for fruit (which is less than you‘d think), but is a metabolic disruptor in higher amounts. Liver cells have to do a lot of work to metabolize fructose, compared to glucose which needs quasi no conversion. As to health effects of fructose, I‘ve found it hard to determine which studies are reliable, because there is just so much money in this industry, and high interest to influence research. But the metabolic complexity it brings is undeniable, and one could argue that fructose is kinda like a poison we have adapted to - if we lack key enzymes, we can’t metabolize it.
Glucose is harder on the pancreas and chronic high insulin seems to be really bad, so I‘d avoid that too of course. But a reasonably healthy liver can quickly buffer excess glucose (hepatocytes) and rather easily convert to glycogen and store it, in big amounts.
Market value != worth, unless you believe that market capitalism is the only way to determine worth
The value of those houses (as a place to live) is $0 to anyone who cares about not consuming PFAS, and thus should be $0 until the problem is fixed. I guess you can rent them out to people you don’t care about, which would make them worth >$0, but also clearly unethical.
In a society that’s functioning correctly, sane people would pass a law prohibiting consumption of water with PFAS; those houses would be declared uninhabitable, the same way a fire marshal now can declare a building uninhabitable as it violates a fire code.
Yes but you still use tap water for cooking I presume. And it's used for agriculture. So you'd still end up ingesting PFAS if the water supply is contaminated, since it does not break down with heat.
lol like there isn't PFAS in the plastic that houses that bottled water. esp. if it sat in the sun for a while, since plastics don't biodegrade they photodegrade.
No, true, but that's separate to the issue of PFAS in my drinking water making my house worthless. Presumably if there are PFAS is bottled water then everyone's water is contaminated as I'm not aware of anywhere people don't drink bottled water.
If that's a result of some organization contaminating the local water supply, then I'd call it "secondary damage" and vote billing said org for it.
Otherwise, you either live in an unusual location that makes any kind of water-related infrastructure projects very expensive - like, idk., a small settlement at a summit of a mountain, or in the middle of a desert - or something is very much broken about that place.
bro I can't tell if you're being sarcastic but your answers make it seem like you're living in a contaminated hellhole and terrified of contact with the local water
it's not a good defense for indiscriminate contamination of water, if that's what you're trying for
You're suggesting that bottled water is worse for me than non-drinking water from the tap? Billions of people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water. You're lucky if you do.
… I already proposed a better system. Let the government adjust market values via passing laws as needed.
Obviously humans aren’t rational actors, so assuming as much would be dumb to use as the basis of an economic system. People generally are shortsighted- they build on flood plains, for example, or use toxic building materials that cause damage long term (ex: asbestos), or whatever.
Nor should humans be expected to be rational actors. (!) You shouldn’t need a PhD in biochemistry in order to evaluate water quality impact to health, in order to buy a home. If we require people like software engineers to be full blown doctors just to rationally evaluate a place to live, we have failed as a society.
Allowing the government to declare homes uninhabitable is clearly better than a pure market based system.
> The federal district judge [...] has ordered the parties to begin mediation in an attempt to facilitate a settlement and avoid overwhelming the federal judicial system
I didn't realize even judges go out of their way to try to make parties settle out of court.
They definitely do. I know a judge personally and he's very proud of his 'settlement rate', the fraction of all cases he sees that end up being settled without a judgment rendered.
Trials burn a large chunk of the judge's time. The more cases settled out of court, the faster the judge can move through cases, and the less delay between bringing a case and the case being resolved.
That's absurd, and tantamount to a judge not doing their job, which is to oversee the proper discovery and application of precedent. I'd even make the contention that this fundamentally deprives people of their right to due process, and if it is the case that the judiciary cannot handle case loads, we need to start talking about the structural reasons resulting in that.
>It takes a long time to bring a case to trial. I think that at least part of the bottleneck is the judges' time, but I cannot prove that.
By and large, it takes as long as it does, especially based on cases between actors with drastically different resource pools from which to pool to acquire legal representation, because of fundamental limitations on the ability of information to be unambiguously extracted by a legal team (defendants team in finding docs that match criteria for discovery), the plaintiffs team (to comb through the discovered docs for meaning; thos is where malicious compliance or poorly worded queries can be disasterous for the amount of work it takes to sift through paper), transformed (arranged into a cross ref'able set of docs to be used in further proceedings), and loaded (brought before a jury).
The work of a trial is simple given good faith on the parts of all parties. I wager that happens much less frequently than we'd all like to believe.
When the prime arbiters of the judiciary start resorting to "just bypass us" there is a terrible, terrible problem here.
chromium-browser --temp-profile or the equivalent for your distro to get a fresh browser without any extensions. You'll enjoy glorious game after that.
There are loads of valuable businesses inside 3M, it will continue operating no matter what, so probably not all employees will be affected by a bankruptcy. The responsible executives have probably already taken their profits and bailed. Focusing on that might feel good, but it's not what needs to happen.
What needs to happen is that shareholder value is eradicated. Pension funds, banks, hedge funds, retail investors, they should all lose their money. Every last cent of it. Only if shareholder value is eradicated will shareholders start demanding executives follow procedures that prevent disasters like this from happening.
Holding the executives responsible is fun, but we all know the next executive is gonna be ruthless and try and get away with it anyway.
Putting executives in jail will be a much better deterrent than what we're doing currently. Fines aren't even a slap on the wrists. It's a cost of doing business. A cost the company does not pay, the market does.
Which is good. You can't poison half the planet knowingly for generations, dump the stuff you know is toxic into the rivers for decades, and then expect to walk off with a tiny slap on the wrist.
I mean thats how it often ends up, but extremely happy its not happening now. Maybe they will make sure form now on they don't do this highly amoral and criminal stuff, and maybe other companies will notice too. Jail time for CEO at that time would be a bonus, but we are not there yet.
For comparison, DuPont alone saw around $1 billion in annual profits from its PFOA products back in 2016.[0] It's unlikely that 3M saw its PFOA/PFAS profits wiped out by this settlement alone, although you might very well get there if some of the estimates of the company's liability--up to $30bn--are anywhere close to accurate. There are dozens of additional cases out there, and likely many more to follow. Even though many will probably get dismissed, the ongoing litigation costs alone are going to be a pain. Then there's political pressure, damage to 3M's brand, and more. It's all going to add up to a truly massive number.
Not sure if it'll do much to dissuade any companies from embarking on the next massive environmental fuckup, but one can hope.
For comparison, DuPont alone saw around $1 billion in annual profits from its PFOA products back in 2016.[0]
That claim seems suspect. Dupont booked around 4 billion in profits in 2016[1]. If the claim was true, it would mean PFOA made up around a quarter of their business. However, if you look at their net sales/profit by business segment[2] along with segment descriptions[3], there's basically no way that PFOA made up a quarter of their profits. They make too much other stuff for that to be the case.
Does insurance cover things you knew were bad? Like, can I use my car in a bank robbery and after it being totaled by cop bullets and crashing into a pole get insurance to pay for it?
Depends on the insurance contract. But also, insurance is more likely to cover liability for your acts, even if knowing, than to cover your self-inflicted damages.
Fines? We've been issuing such fines for decades and the behaviour persists. Why? Because ultimately the companies and insurance companies don't pay those fines...we do. Sooner or later. One way or another. Those costs find their way to us. Simply put, we - the market - pays those fines.
Unless executives lose freedoms (i.e., go to jail) nothing is going to change. The problem is, that wealthy ruling class can buy freedom when they need to. Those that miraculously lose freedom go to country clubs. On the other hand, if you or I rob the local convenience store (using a fire arm?) we will likely go to jail.
When they endanger the health and welfare of a child...millions of them...we pay the fine. Anyone who calls that justice is a fool.
Even without a firearm if you rob anyone you go to jail buddy. Also if you or I dumped forever chemicals into public water supply, knowingly doing so, we'd be called terrorists. Probably rightfully so.
Funny, I say similar about tobacco. That is, if a terrorist said, "I'm going to come to your country,and I'm going to sell an addictive carcinogen..." There would be protests in the streets demanding that terrorist be drone-strike'd to hell and then some.
As it is, the state and federal governments allow the product, *and* profit from it (via taxes). Talk about a page right out of an Orwellian novel.
There are no insurance towers with over $2b of limit. As a consequence this is going to seriously hurt 3M. In addition this will drastically increase the cost of their (and their peer's) insurance policies over the next 10 years.
I didn’t remember correctly. PG&E had just above a billion tower. 21bn is the total capacity of the new California Wildfire Fund, that provides liability insurance to the California utilities.
The deleterious effects of PFAS on the body are well established. It’s the tobacco story all over again, companies that know the harmful effects of their chemicals then willfully flood our waterways with it because it’s profitable. What are you gaining from being dissembling about this entire thing? What about it rubs you the wrong way so much that you’re rationalizing its ills by spreading falsehoods?
There are also piston powered diesels that burn either jet-A or regular automotive diesel, neither of which have lead. They are becoming more common.
Leaded avgas is for older gasoline piston aircraft. There’s still many around but overall it’s not that significant and is slowly on its way out. The exhaust is mostly released high in altitude where there is ample time for extreme dilution.
The concern is mostly for people who work at small airports, live near them, or work with these aircraft as mechanics etc.
I think there’s an unleaded 100 octane formulation in testing that will probably replace leaded gas but the general aviation industry is small and slow moving.
That does sound like false advertising, yeah... I don't know how much of the opioid crisis is due to reduced access to opioids though. Once someone is forced to buy from the dark web once, they've now learned how to use the dark web.
I know people who only became curious about the dark web after I used it a couple times. It just spreads, I guess.
The reason they were curious is because after some really invasive dental surgery (with lasers!) they were given a laughably small number of pills, a supply that would only last about 3 days at the recommended schedule, for an operation that the doctors know and warned them would hurt for around a week after.
I still believe harm reduction is the answer, but we're still years (possibly decades) away from a legal implementation. And it's not a full solution because you'll still have junkies, but it might become easier to help them once they don't have to totally hide themselves.
Purdue paid doctors to give out Oxy like candy, a drug that they knew was incredibly addicting while selling it as non-addictive, turning regular people into addicts and when they couldn't get more Oxy they would buy substitutes on the street. They put a flame thrower on the opiod crisis while their family took out billions in profits.
> The deleterious effects of PFAS on the body are well established.
Which PFAS? At what concentrations? What's the effect size? QALY loss per person affected?
> What are you gaining from being dissembling about this entire thing? What about it rubs you the wrong way so much that you’re rationalizing its ills by spreading falsehoods?
These insinuations are horrible and unnecessary. Stop attacking the motives of people who question something, that's very much against the hacker spirit.
Many people just like questioning everything, particularly things others seem to care deeply about.
This would have prevented every single technology from being made and used. We have never proved that modern selectively bread bananas[1] aren't harmful to health, we have never proved that wearing clothes or being near fire isn't harmful to our health.
To be honest it’s very unclear to me why we hold medicine to the standard of “demonstrably more helpful than harmful” but we hold the material your pill bottle is made out of to the standards of “innocent until proven guilty”.
I can’t help but think that’s an oversight from lack of imagination and lack of intuitive understanding of how much leaching and abrading goes on.
There are regulations on quite a number of things but the evidentiary standards are not equal because a treatment has to demonstrate a health benefit whereas a packaging additive just has to "demonstrate an absence of harm" which is actually a lax criteria because proving a negative is inherently "impossible".
The practical implication is that your bloodstream is filled with relatively few small-molecule drugs and relatively many synthetic chemicals.
There are regulations on quite a number of things but the evidentiary standards are not equal because a treatment has to demonstrate a health benefit whereas a packaging additive just has to "demonstrate an absence of harm" which is actually a lax criteria because proving a negative is inherently "impossible".
That makes no sense.
Of course a "packaging additive" only has to prove a lack of harm. What else would you prove?
You focus on just one of the applications whilst we've been applying PFAS/PFOS to just about every food container and waterproof piece of apparel. Not to mention that 3M attempted to hide[0] the impact on the areas surrounding production sites. They knew.
It doesn’t seem that crazy to focus on the application of PFAS that sprays it by the truckload directly into the open environment in liquid form when the other applications you cite are solid materials that seem unlikely to end up contaminating water supplies in any significant way.
You may have a leg to stand on if these were small groups being studied. Those underlying studies have ns of between 5000-100,000 with significant concurrency in results. You can’t just hand wave that away.
Yes you can, because they're all small effects, and we are unsure what other confounding, or correlated factors may occur with the studied chemicals.
It is _not_ the tobacco story all over again, because the health effect of long-term tobacco use "as directed," and as occurs normally in real-life, results in an extremely massive increase in the risk of death from lung cancer, with a staggering 1 out of 4 long-term smokers (using more than 5 cigarettes a day) dying of lung cancer - something like a 5000% increase.
The health linkage between regular tobbaco use and negative health outcomes is overwhelming.
It is not the same thing here. These are small effects and difficult to notice, and there could be other confounding factors. (Maybe people in environments with lots of PFAS chemicals are exposed to other chemicals common in polluted water sources).
"A doubling of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) in maternal serum was associated with a 39% (p < 0.001) reduction in diphtheria antibody concentration in children (age 5 yr), with increased odds of falling below clinically protective values against diphtheria and tetanus at age 7 yr."
> A study of heavily exposed workers (n = 462, geometric mean serum PFOA of 4048 ng/mL) detected significantly increased incident mortality for cirrhosis (relative risk = 3.87, 95% CI 1.18–12.7) and liver cancer (relative risk = 6.69, 95% CI 1.71–26.2)
These are NOT small effects. These are strong p-values with large hazard ratios over and over again throughout the entire review.
What is this biased way of reading CIs? Are you paid by 3M?
Yes, it shows that with 5% probability the risk is only 1.18 - why choose to focus on those 5%? According to the study there is an equal chance that the relative risk is 12.7 times normal, why should we ignore that?
You really think pointing out how large a CI is, is "biased"?
Your reading of the CIs is off. It isn't telling you that there's a 5% chance that the real risk is 1.18. It's saying there's a 5% chance the real risk doesn't lie in the CI, and could be anywhere outside the CI, including 1 (no effect).
Here's the main point. Increase the significance level slightly, say to 97% (if this is a 95% CI, or 92% if this is a 90%, etc). Then a CI that large and that close to 1 at the left edge will turn into a CI that includes 1. The effect is not significant at all at that level. It wouldn't be saying the true effect is significant with some probability or whatever you seemed to be interpreting CIs to say. It would be saying there's no effect.
This is markedly different from the case of cigarettes, where the p-values are astronomically small. Since earlier comments seem to compare these chemical to cigarettes.
Without having read the study, but going on experience reading other studies of this general type, that’s a common pattern with CIs derived from predictors in logistic regression-like models (which are often used for this kind of analysis)- the CI calculations often end up having a log in there somewhere which results in higher tails. And a RR of 1.7 is still nothing to sneeze at depending on the base rate of whatever is being discussed…
But again, I haven’t read the paper! Just chiming in with some half-forgotten epidemiology. :-)
They're not small values, but where are the real-life effects? Last I checked diphtheria levels in Western world remain at single digits per year levels, and the rare exceptions are almost invariably antivaxxers, not because the DPT vaccine has stopped working.
We've been using PFAS for 80 years now. Are the children of heavily exposed people actually contracting diphtheria or tetanus at measurably higher rates?
Again, the headline figure you're quoting sounds alarming, but if it's accurate and applicable to the broader population, then we should be seeing that effect outside the lab as well.
> We've been using PFAS for 80 years now. Are the children of heavily exposed people actually contracting diphtheria or tetanus at measurably higher rates?
Should we wait for that to happen if the risk is obvious?
We agree table salt (sodium chloride) is generally safe to eat, right? Like, you probably sprinkle it on your food and what not? If I asked you to chug a gallon of water that was 26% salt by weight, you're going to drink it without care? No? I guess you should stop eating foods with sodium chloride!
There's loads of things I use in every day life that I wouldn't want to ingest in odd quantities. I handle gasoline and paint thinner and dishwashing detergents and hand soap every now and then but if you tried to get me to even drink a teaspoon of it I'd probably turn you down. Is the rule now if you wouldn't drink a glass of it you should never handle it in any way?
By the way, please do not drink that 26% salt brine. It will do very terrible things to your body and probably significantly hurt you.
It's one thing to make an academic case in an online forum, that PFAS are not detrimental (at low levels) to human health. But when it gets down to it, would you rather avoid PFAS, or you just don't think they're a problem?
> Is the rule now if you wouldn't drink a glass of it you should never handle it in any way?
Some things are not safe at any level. Lead (Pb) for example. So what about PFAS? Does it accumulate in the body? What are the effects of long-term ingestion?
My question was intended to see just how serious people were, who were making the argument that PFAS weren't a thing to be concerned about.
Sure, I would like to avoid PFAS on things that I regularly eat like takeout containers and the like. I'd probably not go for the Scotchgard coating on my next couch as fibers from the couch's fabric usually get flung into the air and I end up breathing in small tiny amounts and it's a high contact thing overall. But if PFAS improved engine seals means my car will last longer, then sure that sounds great.
I'd avoid drinking a glass of motor oil as well, but I still prefer having my car lubricated at the end of the day.
My point is the highlight that harm, concentration, risk, and damage or not binary but magnitudes. One molecule for glass is negligible and a Pure Glass would be suicide.
correct, and you should price the different concentrations you're willing to imbibe, so communities already ingesting them can apply the same pricing structure to calculate damages for unwilling exposure
Yes, it's a heavy paper for a layman and I neither have the expertise to read it nor the opportunity to read it right now. The reading I have done in the past hasn't been clear that problems occur at real-world concentrations, so I was hoping you could clarify if that's the case or not.
Did you read the abstract? It uses longer words than necessary, but I’d guess it is still written at an 11-12th grade reading level:
> Epidemiological studies have revealed associations between exposure to specific PFAS and a variety of health effects, including altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, and cancer. Concordance with experimental animal data exists for many of these effects. However, information on modes of action and adverse outcome pathways must be expanded, and profound differences in PFAS toxicokinetic properties must be considered in understanding differences in responses between the sexes and among species and life stages.
If I'm not mistaken, it says it in the part with "epidemiological". It means that the study is made by observing real life developments instead of poisoning people in the name of science.
Interesting. Does that imply a study of the "average person", so to speak? Or might it be a study of people whose (say) PFAS exposures were suspected to be high, for whatever reason?
"So much time" has been like half a day, much of which is in the middle of a work day? No, I genuinely haven't had the time to sit down and read this in detail. Do I need to detail what's going on in my life here?
"A doubling of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) in maternal serum was associated with a 39% (p < 0.001) reduction in diphtheria antibody concentration in children (age 5 yr), with increased odds of falling below clinically protective values against diphtheria and tetanus at age 7 yr."
> A study of heavily exposed workers (n = 462, geometric mean serum PFOA of 4048 ng/mL) detected significantly increased incident mortality for cirrhosis (relative risk = 3.87, 95% CI 1.18–12.7) and liver cancer (relative risk = 6.69, 95% CI 1.71–26.2)
If I understand that correctly, is that not a different thing? It sounds like that's a derivative (the rate of absorption/metabolism/etc.), rather than the concentration at which the chemical become harmful? Or is the concentration itself also included in the "kinetics"?
Literally none of that answers the questions posed - which is actual risks based on actual concentrations (and how likely those concentrations are to occur).
ahhh ok, it's just a matter of concentration. So let's fill up the earth and oceans until we reach the safe concentration level and see what happens.
(and let the future generations clean the mess if it turns out we missed a few factor in the computation of the "safe" level).
come on. At some point we will have to understand that, no, we can not accept an hypothetical risk because the objective gains are bigger. Hypothetical risk should be made objective before starting any kind of production of chemicals at any large scale. The world is already filled with dangersous stuff. Enough is enough.
The big issue is that usually the balance is: "a bit of a health concern" versus "huge economical benefits". We're comparing apples and oranges.
Production and toxicity is less than 1/2 the story. We don’t need to let large quantities of every single chemical into the water supply. That’s where they really fucked up.
Florine chemistry has been killing chemists and factory workers for hundreds of years, but reasonable precautions let people use many horrifically toxic substances without significant issue. Yet for cough some reason people keep a thing like new = safe when by default it’s been obvious that stuff containing Pb or F is probably risky in some situations.
Yeah, there’s a sweet spot. Fluoride in toothpaste and drinking water needs to be kept very low or it causes problem, but within that sweet spot it’s helpful.
They conducted en masse poisoning of the global population. For what benefit? Non-stick surfaces?
How were they supposed to know? How about the deformities in animals around their factory runoff? How about studies prior to mass production?
Frankly we should be considering life imprisonment for the executives, regulatory attorneys, and chief engineers, and the corporate death penalty for the company.
Perhaps the situation merits a lot of righteous wrath, but let's not wish the visitation of the sins of parents on their children. Maybe they grow up to do more of the same, or maybe they're part of the solution. Let their own actions speak for themselves.
I guess you strip executives / owners of their dynastic wealth because it incentivises the next bunch of executives / owners to do everything in their power to ensure public safety.
However safety is not absolute and corporate harms are not always clear cut, as you point out. Perhaps the standard should be something like: does this do more harm than good, maybe weighting good by ~10x. Autonomous cars don't need to be perfect, just 10x+ better than human drivers.
Asset seisures should be in addition to jail for the most egregious cases, such as the Sackler family, who got off lightly for all the harm they caused.
> They might! There is certainly some evidence of that, but the evidence is not remotely clear cut. This is not as simple as the linkage between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, for instance.
Wasn’t that exactly big tobacco’s and then the global warmers’ playbook? And yet, it turns out that the effects are very real but much damage done and hundreds of billions earned while we were discussing the wrong thing.
Good god, this response of yours sure is something: "it's been happening since a hundred years ago'', ''we dont know if there is any danger'', ''the evidence isnt 100% clear cut'', ''even if there is an impact it's less harmful than smoking'', ''why go after the producers of dangerous chemicals''. It's like i'm reading a reply from the PFAS lobby.
Who says you aren't? It's cheap to lobby on HN, especially if you can use LLMs. In fact, HN's current model of authentication might not be sustainable.
Settling for almost twice their net annual income (and similarly large lawsuits against Dupont's subsidiaries) does not strike me as the government not touching them.
This is certainly a better result than the Purdue opioid lawsuit where the Sackler family received immunity and in exchange for a $6B settlement.
The real damage is going to be so much more to the US and world populace. 3M (along with Dupont) should get the corporate death penalty and their boards/C-levels should never be allowed to work or advise in industry again.
That's the bare minimum we should set. China/USSR had a more severe consequence for officers of the company that isn't likely feasible here in the US but is probably the real deterrent to this behavior in future criminal endeavors.
>That's the bare minimum we should set. China/USSR had a more severe consequence for officers of the company that isn't likely feasible here in the US but is probably the real deterrent to this behavior in future criminal endeavors.
Completely agree. In China, it's pretty straightforward - you become the nail that sticks out. If you fuck with the population at large and make people sick, or you rob them blind, etc... it doesn't matter if you have or you haven't given The Party their cut of the action - your C-Suite will all disappear. A few will be lucky enough to be re-educated.
Whereas in America if you beat the regulators or catch them sleeping on the job, you'll have one side of the political aisle cheering you on no matter how many people you kill.
There are some actions (e.g. killing people, poisoning entire communities, getting thousands addicted to drugs, etc) that if perpetrated by an individual, society generally either puts the perpetrator's lives on pause for decades by imprisonment, or actually ends them altogether. Yet companies do the same things and are fined a few months' worth of revenue (and the shareholders who received profits due to the crimes keep them anyway) due to limited liability.
I was surprised to learn that PFAS are in dental floss, used to help in glide between teeth easily. This study linked using such floss and higher blood concentrations of PFAS: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-018-0109-y It's not strong enough evidence to suggest we should stop flossing, but they do make plain floss without PFAS, ex: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005IHMXEQ/
> 3M said its participation in the settlement "is not an admission of liability"
These kind of statements always crack me up, like "oh, really, so you just decided to give away X millions/billions of dollars out of the goodness of your hearts?". Would love to see some kind of policy that ends this kind of absurd post-settlement spinning.
If they admitted liability, people could sue for individual damages on top of the settlement. It's a buy-out, water under the bridge kinda thing, because individual lawsuits would cost years, would cost each individual thousands, and could cost 3M even more once all added up. It's a legal logistical nightmare.
Instead, people are offered a one time payment to basically drop the case. I think a lot are happy to take it because it means they don't have to fight a tedious legal battle.
Surely, lot of words about how these chemicals don't degrade naturally, but none about the actual impact. Same like microplastics. Not denying that PFAS can't be harmful, but how can we prosecute just on the basis of the fact that these chemicals exist, when the evidence of harm is inconclusive? Stuart Ritchie is my favorite health journalist to refer to whenever it comes to things like these [1]:
> Some of the evidence comes from animal studies: studies have claimed that exposing rats and mice to the chemicals has negative effects on their ability to reproduce. The problem—aside from the inherent problem with comparing non-human animals to human ones—is that the concentrations of the chemicals are normally far, far higher in the animal studies than they are for humans in everyday life. As with all “toxins”, the dose makes the poison: something that is harmful to health at high levels could be entirely safe if the average person never has very much of it in their system.
> The Guardian – which has published dozens of articles about these “dangerous”, “potentially toxic” chemicals in the last few years – called the new research “the first known study on the effects of PFAS on female fertility”. That’s a little odd, since earlier this year a review study put together 13 previous such studies, drawing the conclusion that “increased levels of PFAS exposure are associated with reduced fertility in women”.
> As with all such reviews, that conclusion is dependent on the quality and consistency of the underlying 13 studies. Unfortunately, the studies we have are all over the place: even though on average they point to an association of PFAS with lower fertility, the estimate of the size of the association varies a great deal from study to study.
I cannot claim to understand the state of research ... But I think we _can't_ wait for the harms to be fully measured if we're to compensate those impacted. Suppose that drinking PFAS contaminated water decreased your life expectancy -- but to measure that effect with certainty, a meaningful number of people who were impacted would necessarily already be dead and therefore unable to be compensated for the harm done to them. Suppose a fetus whose mother drinks contaminated water has a higher risk of some form of dementia late in life -- only many decades later would the harm be fully understood and the company might no longer even exist (and IANAL but perhaps there are also statutes of limitation?) Waiting to _fully_ characterize the harm seems like a recipe for injustice.
In the mean time, "the water in my district has an extra chemical in it, which doesn't need to exist in any amount, and no one's sure whether or not it's dangerous at this concentration" seems like it's already a form of damage. No one wants to drink it, the land is less valuable, etc etc. Similarly, if sewage contaminated your water, you'd be rightly upset even if that particular sewage doesn't cause a cholera outbreak.
I would go further and argue the parent comment is being deliberately disingenuous. Medical statistics are always circumstantial and clouded by uncertainty. That’s why we have rigorous study designs in people and a shit load of mice studies.
There is a lot of money that is interested in making PFAS look not bad (for very obvious reasons if someone gets sued $10B) so its not unreasonable to assume they would pay people to post disinformation on hacker news.
Yeah, sure! Someone bribed a 11y old account, from India, risked everything just to post on a forum no one in the general public cares about. Typical HN brains! When you can't fight with facts, just paint it with an idiotic conspiracy.
These chemicals accumulate over long periods of time in you body, reaching ever higher levels. They are silent killers. But, isn't a large part of the scandal that these companies knew for decades from their own studies there was a huge concern about health safety for employees and the environment? They never shared the alarming results to any authorities. So, they themselves knew very well about detrimental effects decades before they were discovered independently by academic research leading to revised standards and law.
You think that ''chemicals that your body cant dispose of is a bad thing'' is an extraordinarily claim? Do you also still drink water from lead pipes, and huff a piece of asbestos every day?
They are toxic because your body can't deal with them, microplastics are -maybe counterintuitively- still large enough to only cause smaller issues like indigestion. For the problems with pfas, read any source from the rest of this thread.
In the end if your body could get rid of X, X generally isn't a problem. Sometimes it's chemical (i.e. lead/carbonmonoxide/etc) sometimes it's physical (i.e. asbestos/microplastics), accumulating enough of anything not meant to be processed/disposed in your body will be a problem.
I thought the detrimental effects of pfas on immunity was accepted fact by now? Even the mechanism of toxicity is well understood. Surely, we can agree that you don't need instant dead effects to establish a compound to be accepted as detrimental for your health? And not only your health, but that of your offspring as well. The internal documents of 3m and Dupont actually acknowledge as much. That's what the actual outrage is about, they already knew for decades, then tried to hide it because liability costs.
By which I merely meant, "you don't drop dead, like arsenic poisoning". But that makes them even more dangerous imo. All seems fine, while they accumulate in the evenvironment, foods, people, their offspring,... And when the disastrous effects slowly manifest themselves we already have epidemic levels of impact radious. But, I accept you point.
Not in the sense that it accumulates in your body (concentration keeps increasing over time). Water is in steady state with your body, its concentration over time is practically constant.
The issue with this topic largely has to do with political & financial interest.
(1) who benefits financially?
(2) who benefits politically from the finances & who’s potentially at legal risk?
(3) who’s career is advanced / harmed?
Ultimately, with this topic (as with many others), there are no neutral observers. There are multiple camps competing for influence - which these studies benefit.
Recall doctors and studies were supporting tobacco and cocaine as good for you. They even had doctors / PhDs advertising and publishing it as such. Many argue the same with climate change (lots of political & financial interest), Covid, etc.
Study of PFAs have a similar challenge because it was heavily & widely used. Similar to DDT, it takes time for these things to roll through and change. PFAs are generally understood to be toxic & lead to endocrine disruption. Most of the papers I’ve read conclude as much
Surprisingly, some of the most convincing studies indicating the dangers of PFAS come from 3M themselves[1][2]. These studies were of course never intended for public release:
> In 1961, company lab tests linked C8 exposure to enlarged livers in rats and rabbits. DuPont scientists then conducted tests on humans, asking a group of volunteers to smoke cigarettes laced with C8. “Nine out of 10 people in the highest-dosed group were noticeably ill for an average of nine hours with flu-like symptoms that included chills, backache, fever and coughing,” the researchers noted. “Concerns about the potential toxicity of C8 had been raised internally within DuPont by at least 1954, leading DuPont’s own researchers to conclude by at least 1961 that C8 was toxic and, according to DuPont’s own Toxicology Section Chief, should be ‘handled with extreme care,'” Bartlett’s February 2013 suit against DuPont alleged.
> In one study, for instance, Olsen looked at blood tests of 3M employees at the company’s plants in Antwerp, Belgium, and Decatur, Alabama, both of which made PFOA and PFOS, among other products. By the late 1990s when Olsen was embarking on this research, these chemicals were known within the company to accumulate in humans and alter cholesterol levels in lab animals. Because the workers had undergone three separate rounds of blood tests, Olsen was able to trace the levels of the chemicals in workers’ blood over time. And by combining his results with various clinical measures the company had been tracking in its workers, he was able to see whether there was a relationship between the chemical and these health outcomes. Olsen’s findings, written up in an draft report in October 2001, were clear. There was a positive association between the amount of PFOA in workers’ blood and their levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, states the report, on which Olsen is listed as the principal investigator.
They've also taken some... drastic measures regarding which factory workers are allowed to be exposed to certain PFAS despite publicly denying any connection with birth defects[3]:
> In a November 1982 memo, DuPont's chief medical director, Dr. Bruce Karrh, expressed concern over employee exposure to C8. The company then barred women of child-bearing age from working around C8.
Far be it from me to condemn an abundance of caution, but the timing seems odd when you consider what happened a year prior[3]:
> When Bailey returned to work in 1981, she discovered a memo on a bench in the women's locker room. It detailed a study by 3M, which sold C8 to DuPont, that detailed eye deformities in lab animals whose mothers were fed C8 during pregnancy. Bailey went to the plant's medical doctor and asked if this is what happened to [her child born with an eye deformity]. The doctor denied a connection, according to Bailey, but arranged an appointment at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore.
> DuPont scientists then conducted tests on humans, asking a group of volunteers to smoke cigarettes laced with C8.
This is definitely not my area, but ... was this a good experiment to do? I don't just mean from an ethical standpoint (though that seems super sketch), but purely as an experiment to understand how this chemical impacts the human body, this seems not great?
(a) if you smoke a cigarette, isn't the actual dose of C8 taken in by each subject likely to be both variable and hard to measure? Different subject would have just exhaled vs absorbed different amounts of C8, right? So it seems like you get a less precise dosing than most other means of getting it into the body?
(b) couldn't this have been toxic in the lungs in a way which wouldn't have been relevant to other/more typical means of exposure? Does reacting badly to something inhaled as smoke really imply anything about the impact of touching or ingesting it? I'm pretty sure e.g. that cayenne smoke would cause you problems that touching or eating that same substance would not cause.
Not sure what you’re romanticizing here, but Soviets were not sending the people who would be at fault here to the gulags. It was political prisoners, counterculture agitators (artists, satirists, etc), criminals, rich people who wouldn’t go along, etc. Politically connected people wouldn’t end up there.
It’s a joke about the upside down interpretation of law in either of the systems. In Soviet Russia, you sent your underlings to the gulag. In America, you just pay a fine. Neither of which is proper justice.
Not to mention a fine that is not an existential threat. 3M has grown massively in comparison to $10B. Recently 50% of the US tap water supply was found to be tainted with PFAs <link pending>
Sheesh, these kind of environmental pollution problems can have a detrimental effect on entire populations of hundreds of millions of people. It doesn't seem like a fine is the correct category of punishment here. Doesn't it seem like prosecutors should be considering life in prison, or something more severe, for the 3M executives and lawyers involved?
From TFA, a big reason for the high concentrations in waterways is due to firefighter training exercises. Did 3M have any oversight into how much firefighting foam firefighters dump into the waterways with their training exercises? Seems like culpability is more with the user of the product than the producer of the product.
There is a difference in knowledge that a fire department Vs a company producing the material have. First, it's a choice to include these in the product. Second, it's a choice whether to appropriately inform fire departments on how to handle such material. Third, an individual fire department cannot invent removal/capture methodologies, this is again something that would need to be offered by the producer.
I'm astonished how easily the narrative is shifted to blaming the little guy. Is a customer expected to re-verify the toxicity of the products they buy and set up their own recycling system?
Honestly hard to imagine the many comments here spreading doubt on the well-established dangers of pfas and arguing how innocent 3m is are disinterested comments.
I can buy a giant load of bleach today and dump it into my local river. Is Clorox to blame for any negative impacts that result? No, that is 100% on me.
Now I admit this isn't a perfect analogy, but I definitely don't think it's on the other end of the spectrum from this case (where 3M seems to be getting 100% of the blame).
imagine if you sold utensils made of a new material you invested that was 100% compostable. and you tested it and observed it was toxic to rats. but it didn’t seem to kill humans at first glance. so you sold it to restaurants to use as a better alternative to plastic utensils. but over time they are toxic.
now replace utensils with pots, and the material with teflon/teflon precursors (ptfe/pfoa) and you now you have reality.
A better analogy is that you sold bleach tablets as safe to dump in rivers, while knowing they were unsafe. The people who bought them aren’t at fault here, because you misled them.
Bleach does end up in the water, but it's highly reactive and breaks down into harmless stuff. Chlorox would be to blame if it was causing long term harm and they knew it. Even without customers deliberately dumping it into the water.
