>PFOS—perfluorooctanesulfonic acid—is referred to as a forever chemical, because it accumulates in soil, rivers, and drinking water and is almost impossible to get rid of. She had about 300 micrograms of it per liter in her blood, more than 60 times the level recommended as safe today by the European Union.<p>Almost impossible, but not impossible. It has been found that giving blood (and then throwing that blood away) significant reduces PFOS levels. Not that I'm defending 3M or any of this. My favorite rivers where I fish turned out to be full of PFOS due to a leaking 3M waste dump and this was only announced in 2021. So I spent some time looking for solutions.<p><a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790905" rel="nofollow">https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...</a><p><a href="https://www.aabb.org/news-resources/news/article/2022/04/26/regular-blood-or-plasma-donation-may-reduce-pfas-levels-in-blood-serum" rel="nofollow">https://www.aabb.org/news-resources/news/article/2022/04/26/...</a>
After reading the series "A Chemical Hunger" by the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, I'm pretty convinced that chemical contamination is a global-warming level threat to humanity. The authors talk about the evidence that chemicals released into the environment by human activity (such as PFAS) are causing obesity, and they present compelling evidence that this is plausible. They are also working on research to confirm this hypothesis.<p>But regardless of whether obesity is caused primarily by environmental contamination, chemical contamination is a huge risk for a few reasons:<p>-Once in the environment, chemical contaminants can react in unforeseen ways, creating new chemicals that we will have no idea how to monitor for.<p>-Health data prior to industrialization is not good and is confounded by poor medical practices, so we may think we've "solved" chemical contamination when in fact we haven't (e.g. maybe heart disease would go away if it weren't for some chemical that we started using in 1910 but we can't tell because everyone was dying of dysentery).<p>-The solution, in some most cases, may mean giving up significant technological advances, especially polymers and heavy metals extracted from the ground.<p><a href="https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/" rel="nofollow">https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...</a>
3M PFAS has poisoned the Westerschelde estuary here in the Netherlands and Belgium to the point where you can no longer eat fish from there, and the only thing 3M has done about it is complain to anyone who will listen that they unfairly haven’t been allowed to reopen their plant.<p><a href="https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/05/health-body-says-avoid-eating-fish-shrimp-caught-in-the-westerschelde/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/05/health-body-says-avoid...</a>
Nothing will change until there are prison sentences, and the very deliberate system of shielding managers and corporations from responsibility is changed.<p>It was known for decades that Asbestos and cigarettes causes lung cancer, that adding lead to gasoline is a terrible idea, that burning oil warms the atmosphere. The truth was suppressed through intimidation, lawsuits and bribes. Regulatory agencies are corrupted by the revolving door system. You cannot trust these organisations.
It would be an interesting future historical study to see what caused more harm:<p>-Manufacturing the best firefighting chemistry (e.g. military purchases for missile warehouses, resorts, apartments, etc.)
-Using the chemistry to actually fight fires<p>It might be a case where sometimes second best should have been the way to go, but it’s hard to know beforehand I imagine, especially in safety scenarios where people are laser focused on optimizing for that.
We had some scandals here in Sweden also - mostly around military airports (perhaps normal airports also) that practice with putting out burning airplanes.
Dark Waters is an entertaining movie about PFAS and PFAO
<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/</a>
It also causes shortage of 3M fluorinert that is needed by semiconductor manufacturer <a href="https://www.barrons.com/articles/chip-production-plant-shutdown-3m-pfas-51649361014" rel="nofollow">https://www.barrons.com/articles/chip-production-plant-shutd...</a> <a href="https://www.thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=4082" rel="nofollow">https://www.thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=4082</a>
*Stands on soapbox*<p>I've been kicking around an idea I've been tentatively calling
"techno-conservatism". The tl;dr: "Like Amish, not Luddites." It's
becoming more and more clear that each of our technologies has
trade-offs, and the uncritical acceptance of those trade-offs has lead us
to poison ourselves and the world in several fairly significant ways.
This would seem to me to make a more considered and conservative
relationship with our technology imperative.<p>There are movements like the "Slow Food" movement, and of course the
Amish are famously conservative in their acceptance and use of modern
technology.<p>The general idea is to start with a simple and ecologically harmonious
low-tech (but sophisticated!) lifestyle and then add essential technology
(in a kind of "progressive enhancement", eh?) to increase QoL (Quality of
Life) without, y'know, poisoning anything.