i do think it’s a little funny when people (mostly usamericans) go oh yea i dont know shit squat about anything because of the horrible state of the education system. like ok yea but uhm after leaving highschool you never got curious about the world around you?
i had a friend that whenever he saw a street or boulevard with a historic sounding name he would write it down and then research about it later. you’re telling me you never felt that kind of curiosity?
“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”
On this day, 29 October 1940 in France, Iranian Muslim diplomat Abdol Hossein Sardari wrote to Vichy collaborationist government officials to try to persuade them that Jews from Central Asia (Jugutis) were not technically Jewish under Nazi race laws. In 1943, as a result of his arguments, the Nazis eventually agreed and exempted them. Sardari began issuing Iranian passports to Jews, without the consent of his bosses, and helped up to 2,000 escape the regime. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.1819457841572691/2121817348003404/?type=3
we need to be loud about this, have an environmental protest. something, anything. we’re ruining our planet. i want to do something but i don’t know where to start
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everyone saying “you can just filter it :)” can wild animals filter it?
YOU CANNOT FILTER IT YOU CANNOT FILTER IT YOU CANNOT FILTER IT
This is the process a person near where an old PFA factory has to do (12:22)
The ways to specifically filter PFAs that work reliably are prohibitively expensive.
GOOD NEWS EVERYONE
According to Scientific American, a new method of breaking down PFAs has just been discovered!
It’s not for every kind of PFA but holy shit it’s a start. Normally these bastards have to be roasted at ~1,000 C/1832 F to even begin to fall apart and even then they leak into the environment, and burying them only - you guessed it! Leaks into the environment.
The new method can break them down at a mere ~100 C/212 F using inexpensive reagents. To quote the article:
“PFASs owe their durability to a series of carbon-fluorine bonds, which are among nature’s strongest chemical bonds. Instead of trying to break this stable bond, Trang and her colleagues targeted a chemical group containing oxygen atoms at one end of the molecule. By heating the compounds in a solvent called DMSO and a common reagent found in cleaners and soaps, the researchers successfully knocked off the oxygen-containing group. This triggered a cascade of reactions that ultimately broke the compounds down into harmless products.”
There are about 12,000 PFAs known to science right now, and the team was able to break down ten of them - including a particularly nasty kind of one called PFOA - and were able to break them down three carbon atoms at a time instead of the presumed one. HOLY SHIT. They recognize using DMSO in wastewater treatment probably isn’t practical on a large scale - right now, anyway - but as John Oliver points out in his video, having a huge filtration system in your home and a guy check it every two weeks sure isn’t going to do much either except mitigate further damage to the owner. The team is also plenty aware this is no final solution, and yet
GUYS WE CAN DO IT. It might be decades, even a century before we fix the rain cycle and get them out of our bloodstreams, but HOLY SHIT WE CAN DO IT
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see this is exactly what i’m afraid of posting responses like this.
YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED. YOU SHOULD BE MAD. YOU SHOULD BE SO APPALLED BY THIS YOU ARE READY TO KILL AND EAT THE PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE.
science isn’t some magical benevolant force that will fix the world’s problems. science is not free from capitalism, it’s deeply entangled with it. that’s how we got undrinkable rainwater in the first place. all of the world’s problems are easily fixable. that isn’t the issue. none of them will be so long as capitalism prevails. we can’t sit back and wait for someone else to fix things, we have to force the change we want to see.
Source: ’New research shows that rainwater in most locations on Earth contains levels of chemicals that “greatly exceed” safety levels. […] Such is their prevalence now that scientists say there is no safe space on Earth to avoid them.’
Source: ‘Chemists have identified how to destroy “forever chemicals” in a low-cost way for the first time, new research says. […] New research, from scientists at Northwestern University, US claims to have done the “seemingly impossible” and destroyed PFAS using low temperature and cheap products. This could be very useful in helping communities suffering from high-level contamination, according to Prof Sunderland, who is not part of the research team.
The team of scientists hope that with further research PFAS could be filtered from drinking water and this new method applied to destroy the contaminants.
However, treatment of high concentrations of PFAS is only one part of the solution.
With PFAS remaining in production it can continue to build up at low levels in fish and other wildlife as it cannot be broken down naturally very easily.
Source (Original Research Article):‘Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been referred to as “forever chemicals” because of their resistance to most biological and chemical degradation mechanisms. Most current methods use very harsh conditions to decompose these compounds. Trang et al. found that there is a potential weak spot in carboxylic acid–containing PFAS: Decarboxylation in polar, non-protic solvents yields a carbanion that rapidly decomposes’
META-RATING:RELIABLE
The first two sources listed are from the BBC, a state-owned yet publicly funded (it’s too complex an issue to go into here) highly reliable source of information. Whilst occasionally they are guilty of jumping on the ‘shiny science’ bandwagon, their editorial guidelines temper it down more than some science infotainment media. They can be biased towards the establishment in more directly political matters (environmental science is indirectly political due to the debate on climate change etc*), but this is not a directly political matter and so their bias is likely to be towards established science rather than alternative theories.
*The debate between anthropogenic climate change, natural climate change, and outright climate change denial is ultimately a political one, even if the vast majority of science agrees with the stance that it is mostly anthropogenic. I must refer to it as a political debate due to its use as a political tool. For me to suggest it should not be so would be to inject my own opinion and would introduce a source of bias.
The second two sources are from the EPA, the US government department for the environment. Whilst any government department is ultimately biased towards justifying its own existence, their requirement to publicly publish research and statistics regardless of whether they support the government’s/department’s agenda means they are at least decently reliable; to accuse government departments of bias is far beyond the scope of this post and can start to lead into governmental mistrust and conspiracy, which I will not cover here.
The final source given is the original paper. The principal author is Shira Joudan PhD, who has been publishing on environmental toxicology/chemistry since 2015 and has attended conferences on environmental toxicology etc since 2012. She has multiple publications which have been cited many times, multiple awards and scholarships, and has worked with multiple universities. As far as I can tell there are no conflicts of interest and I am satisfied that the paper itself is highly reliable.
I am not an environmental scientist nor chemist, and so if you have more experience in the field and can offer further information, please do.
This blog is a trial of a meta-analysis of ‘is-the-post-reliable’, to ensure tha tthe sources that the blog cites are at least partially reliable, and to disclose where there may be biases, controversies, or conflicts of interest.
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