> Despite mounting evidence of widespread contamination and health risks, the EPA has still not set an enforceable legal limit for PFAS in drinking water.
Is that for 'mounting evidence of widespread contamination and health risks' that show the EPA has too low standards? That's the citation I was looking for. Seemed a bit hand-wavy.
The US spends $2B USD/day on the military, but can't pay a few hundred people to do this on a regular basis and put the results on a public webpage for everyone to see.
The priorities are all out of whack. Government-provided water should be government-monitored water (all data for such should be publicly available and accessible immediately).
It's rather easy for connected people extract money out of the military budget than from the water one.
Those people are just thieves, but they also got an entire force that could otherwise investigate this type of fraud busy fighting the "war on drugs".
A whole new world of freedom and responsibility. Innovation in the grannycare space. Families brought closer together. Lots of good things, some bad. A net win.
Now that not nearly as much of your wages have been garnished, you would have had all that money during your working years to invest for your retirement. You could even use a private ss-like setup if you like. Besides having more options, more people would pursue having a family for this reason, so the situation would be rarer. Beyond that, you’d have a much stronger charity network.
What happens today when the money supply is inflated so that SS becomes a lot less useful, or when the system either collapses or is ended due to spiraling costs?
The problem you mention would be tragic, but with the proliferation of charities I think there would be a lot more options.
And like Ron Paul mentioned at one point, when he was working at hospitals in the early 60s they weren’t required to treat anyone and yet turned away no one.
You make it sound like it hasn't already been tried. As far as I know every time you remove the social safety nets you turn society into a Dickensian nightmare where the poorest in society struggle massively, not 'innovation' or 'freedom'.
“Remove the social nets”? Your family is the social net.
Oh it would be much better than what we have now. Not only would you get to keep much more of your money, you’d get to use it to support your family yourself — or even use it to plan for your own retirement, your way. It would, of necessity, bring families closer together and encourage forward thinking. By default the family is the social net: this experiment we are in of shifting that to the massive, bureaucratic state is immoral, and on top of that — not going well.
I wrote a whole paragraph based on that assumption. It's one sentence, but it's a whole paragraph.
They have until July to publish the 2020 results.
A well working system would have them be available soon after collection and not matter much (because issues are prevented or fixed upon identification).
The military is a federally run program where you water supply is municipal, usually city or county. If the citizens of the municipality want that data they can push their local governments to gather it. My county for example creates yearly water quality reports : https://www.cobbcounty.org/water/customer-service/water-qual...
However, it is important to know how the water is being sampled. If all you ever do is report water quality as it leave the treatment plant, then your data is not useful unless you only use the water at that point. To get good and useful data, you need to sample at various endpoint(house/business locations). You want to randomize these testing locations to avoid selection bias but you also want to get several data points out of them to both eliminate and spot irregularities(i.e. spike in chlorine due to heavy rain, spike in lead due to corrosion in pipes.).
Lastly and perhaps most importantly, would you trust the government if they are telling you the water has no issues?
I care a lot about clean water & air, and I know there are a few places in the US where this is a very serious issue. That said, this piece started feeling a little exaggerated as I was reading. Like the first thing I thought was strange is how they sampled a single home in a given geographic area. It’s critically important to find out whether tainted water is coming from the city’s water facility or getting polluted in the pipes along the way. Sampling at the water treatment facility would reveal that. Sampling several homes would do it to.
It also seems to lack a lot of comparative context needed to actually understand how levels of chemical compare, how much is in bottled water, how much is in other countries, how much is in “clean” water systems.
Anyway, I got to the bottom and saw the line about funding of the series and suddenly thought maybe some industry was funding this. I googled for a minute and didn’t see any donor lists, but I did immediately bump into this article by the American Council on Science and Health: (Is this a reputable organization?)
“Toxic America: The Guardian Spreads Chemophobia And Anti-Americanism”
I actually donate to ACSH because during the Pandemic, they had the most level-headed and accurate reporting of any source that I could find.
But they do tend to pooh-pooh any anti-chemical reporting. They are very data-driven so they don't "worry" about things like PFAS because there hasn't been any proven deaths from it, which I find a bit too arrogant. They are also very pro-GMO, which I disagree with. However, I still support them with my donations because we need level-headed reporting like this.
Here's an article from today that I just read that shows their philosophy on anti-hysteria media.
Given that ACSH documents leaked in 2013 indicated that they were offering to put out industry-friendly press releases in exchange for cash, I would wager that they're not a reputable source. They also seem to be vociferously anti-Obama and weirdly pro tobacco.
It seems like a long history. Here's another example from the 90s
> In a 1992 internal memo by Whelan disclosed by Consumer Reports, Whelan directed her staff to ask McNeil Specialty for $10,000 toward a white paper on sweeteners, and she disclosed that her staff would seek "more CCC [Calorie Control Council] money... to help us get new sweetener booklet out". McNeil Specialty Products (now McNeil Nutritionals) owns the US marketing rights to Splenda, the branded name of the artificial sweetener sucralose; the Calorie Control Council is an industry trade association for producers of artificial sweeteners, fat substitutes, and low-calorie foods. The same memo instructs that staffers give "special attention" to "Mr. McDermott at Searle about meat money".
The first pull quote merely demonstrates the Guardian relating America to other countries, and while their criticism may be fair or unfair, calling it "Anti-Americanism" makes me feel like the author is playing identity politics. It smacks of a refusal to be honest about America's failures in service of playing the side-taking game.
> It’s critically important to find out whether tainted water is coming from the city’s water facility or getting polluted in the pipes along the way
All of the above.
Water facilities seem to get tainted the way Flints water facility was tainted, cost cutting. Some things, like brain eating amoebas are hard to get rid of in totality, but in the right environment they could thrive.
Water mains and lateral lines get damaged from over and under pressurization constantly. Fire hydrants are a big source of this. This damage can be difficult to locate without real time digital water meters because pressurization across the system is constantly in flux.
Source: worked at a digital water metering company
Flint's issue was the pipes. When they were supplied by Detroit, anti-corrosion chemicals were added by the water facility. But when they switched to own river's suppliers, the anti-corrosion wasn't added and caused lead in the pipes to flake off/absorb into the water.
It takes years to build up the protective layer that retains lead in the pipes. Unsure how long it takes to decay, but I guess Flint was a real-world study of that since it usually isn't removed once added.
I think that's a matter of perspective that you're arguing, and a bit pedantic to say the least. People that work in infrastructure will tell you that replacing and repairing infrastructure is an impossibly imbalanced equation, it simply degrades too fast. So, lead pipes are to be expected, among other things. Lead pipes are just fine as long as there's chemicals in the water that build up a rusty layer. Flint, when it switched plants, did not use the chemical they had in their previous plant. I can't remember if it was because a machine was broken or if it was more direct cost cutting, but both come down to cost.
In my hometown link, they have replaced lead watermains and are replacing functional lead-based residential supply lines still out there. Replacing lead-lines is the only way to keep water 100% lead-free on its way from supply to tap.
Fittings/brass fixtures are another story, but the move from copper to PEX is playing a big role there.
Yeah, but lead pipe replacements are only one of numerous improvements that are required to water infrastructure. Additionally, mainly lead lines are lateral lines, which in many municipalities fall under the home owners responsibility to replace and maintain, just like in sewage.
> Replacing lead-lines is the only way to keep water 100% lead-free on its way from supply to tap.
Sure, but treating the pipes brings lead consumption down to 'acceptable' levels. Acceptable in this case means that it can be filtered through a household carbon-based filter. I've never read your 90% figure anywhere, generally the figure that's cited is:
> The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) has reduced the maximum allowable lead content -- that is, content that is considered "lead-free" -- to be a weighted average of 0.25 percent calculated across the wetted surfaces of pipes, pipe fittings, plumbing fittings, and fixtures and 0.2 percent for solder and flux.
This is not a zero-sum game, so while the EPA and Congress acknowledge that lead is dangerous, there are other components which compound this problem. Hence the search for mitigation. This is common throughout any infrastructure problem, not just water.
I'm glad your town raised the funds to do that, but it's certainly not the norm and probably shouldn't be considered an expectation as you'd immediately price out most of America doing that.
PFAS is a pretty serious problem with US (and global) water supplies. There was a great documentary a couple years ago that covered it [0].
Even though they 'stopped' using these chemicals in manufacturing 10-15 years ago, there's still an incredible level of contamination - 26,000 sites listed by EPA [1]. But that's sort of irrelevant, because these compounds don't break up over human time scales. Eventually every place in the world will be contaminated, and with how harmful they are it's not clear if the old adage "the solution to pollution is dilution" will hold up. It's hard not to be alarmist about this, PFAS contamination is genuinely terrifying.
Is there a way to break them down? Let's say I have X liters of contaminated water I want to drink, how can I clean it, preferably without expensive or difficult to obtain equipment?
there are a lot of frustrating tradeoffs with these kinds of filter pitchers. they can remove a lot of nasty solutes, but they can also introduce bacteria.
here's a study that found that brita-filtered water contained more bacteria than the tap water only a week into the filter's service life: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8740859/
I used to be a religious brita user, but now I just stick to tap. hard to assess the relative risk, but it's cheaper than buying filters.
I didn't read past the abstract, but yes, they found that the bacteria count was also higher when stored in the fridge. presumably by less than the room temperature pitcher.
Undersink RO is not that difficult these days, and might be a good solution for you.
I use Zerowater and I can tell when it gets a slight smell (bacteria I assume) , I just change the filter at that point even if it hasn't been ~3 months.
> In some cases colony counts in the filtered water were 10,000 times those in tap water.
like I said, hard for me to do a good comparison of the relative risk, but that sounds pretty bad too. some bacteria is normal, but this is like drinking from a stream vs drinking from standing water.
It's not extremely clear, but it seems like the most effective way to remove PFAS from water is to essentially electrolyze it.
> The electrochemical oxidation system used boron-doped diamond electrodes, in a process breaking down the contaminants’ formidable molecular bonds and cleaning the water while systematically destroying the hazardous compounds
It's possible filtration may remove some of it, but this appears to be the only way to completely break it down at commercial scale.
Breaking them down doesn't work that great. It might even oxidize precursors into the bad stuff
Here's what works:
> The following processes were found to be effective for the removal of PFOS: GAC (up to > 99 percent removal), membrane separation - high pressure membranes such as nanofiltration and reverse osmosis (up to > 99 percent removal), anion exchange (up to > 99 percent removal), and powdered activated carbon (up to 99 percent removal).
Distillation is also said to work since these nasties have very high boilings points. Just don't run out of water in your distiller and let the temps get really high.
>Even though they 'stopped' using these chemicals in manufacturing 10-15 years ago
Citation needed. PFCs are EVERYWHERE, in TODAY's products. Everything from water-resistant workout pants, to your Chipotle burrito bowl container, to teflon-coated pasta extruders used in food manufacturing (which you cannot examine the way you can a non-stick pan to see whether it's degraded or not) to Glide dental floss that you put in your mouth daily.
You won't find PFCs on the label of any of these examples, either. But they're there.
I've really enjoyed my water flosser, my only complaint has been how loud it is. Also, if you use a strong mouthwash in the reservoir there is the possibility it will etch and eat into the reservoir tank. I typically try to flush mine out with fresh water after each use.
A moderator will probably berate me for this meta-commentary, but there is a robot that comes along and down-votes all of my new comments regularly. I don't know if it is just me or every recent comment.
Ultimate floss from oral b sold overseas has been great, it’s hard to get but it’s like a dry fabric type of material that is porous and grippy rather than slick and coated floss like glide.
Yes, absolutely true. I've re-read some of the US history, and it was much more recent (if even). The EPA put pressure on DuPont and 3M to begin a phase-out in 2002, but it wasn't until 2015 that they stopped manufacturing it...
Except that they produced a new formula (Gen-X) that exists in a regulatory grey-zone that they produce as much or more of then they ever did C8. [1] Plus, DuPont spun off that division into its own separate org to shield themselves from liability. [2] What's concerning is how short both Wikipedia articles are, it tells me they've had continued success flying under the radar.
I've been aware of PFAS contaminants in water supplies but had no idea it's found in dental floss too. Thanks for the info.. What is the FDA doing? But then again, having worked in the federal workforce. I am not really surprised.
Nothing. PFCs are not federally regulated by any federal agency that I'm aware of. Despite many different NGOs defining "no safe levels" in the water supply AKA 1 ppt is bad.
That documentary sounds interesting, I need to watch that.
Apart from that, it's quite obvious that most US tap water is not drinkable since it has this foamy, soft texture with a lot of chlorine. I wonder if there is any connection to that or if that is just a correlation.
I'm going to weight in because my partner is an environmental engineer who performs remediation of PFAS contaminated sites for the EPA and other Federal entities.
> Even though they 'stopped' using these chemicals in manufacturing 10-15 years ago, there's still an incredible level of contamination
They haven't stopped using them, the chemicals are still used in stain and water resistant carpeting and textiles. They're used in cosmetics and sunscreens among other things. One of the biggest sources of contamination is fire retardant foams used in fire suppression.
If you look at some of the sites in that report listed as having contaminated water, many are located near military bases, like Oceanside CA. These bases are the largest sources of ground water contamination of all sorts but specifically PFAS because they routinely practice fire suppression exercises.
> 26,000 sites listed by EPA [1]. But that's sort of irrelevant, because these compounds don't break up over human time scales.
PFAS is an emerging contaminant and isn't strictly regulated yet. Keeping track of these sites however is not irrelevant, it's extremely important that we know of and track these sites because they can and are being remediated.
The current method of remediation involves setting up hundreds or thousands of ground water monitoring wells around a contamination site to track the plumes and then using pumps to remove the ground water and filter it through activated carbon filters. The filters are treated as hazardous waste and incinerated.
> It's hard not to be alarmist about this, PFAS contamination is genuinely terrifying.
I wouldn't say you're being alarmist at all, if anything the current response to PFAS is insufficient and we should be treating it as a public health crisis at least on par with Lead.
>If you look at some of the sites in that report listed as having contaminated water, many are located near military bases, like Oceanside CA. These bases are the largest sources of ground water contamination of all sorts but specifically PFAS because they routinely practice fire suppression exercises.
I read a report recently that suggested the DoD was scrambling to incinerate its firefighting foam supplies, to avoid a PR disaster. However, the safety of incineration as disposal method has been called into serious question, namely that it doesn't sufficiently break it down and instead distributes it more widely through the environment. Any insight from you or your partner?
According to my partner, the purpose of incineration is to break down the sulfur bonds rendering the resultant chemicals inert. However one of the attractive characteristics of PFAs is it's stability, so breaking these bonds requires a tremendous amount of energy.
No particular insight into the DoD's disposal but it's entirely possible, and wouldn't be surprising, to find that the DoD is carrying out the destruction improperly.
> so breaking these bonds requires a tremendous amount of energy.
Nope. C-F bonds are chemically very stable, but they exhibit high thermal reactivity and degrade far below proper incineration temperatures. Proper incineration, where the flu gasses are maintained at over 800 deg C, will easily drive all flourinated organics to their mineral endpoint, which is HF.
And none of this has anything to do with the sulfur. For one thing, most end-use PFA products don't contain any sulfur. PTFE, for example, has no sulfur in it, yet many of its thermal degradation products are quite toxic.
Sulfur is only present in chemicals used as surfactants, such as the water repellent coatings and fire retardants. But there is no evidence that merely cleaving the sulfonate group would make the compounds harmless.
"Results indicate that, within procedural quantitation limits, no statistically significant evidence was found that the PFAS studied were created during the incineration of PTFE. Therefore, municipal incineration of PTFE using best available technologies (BAT) is not a significant source of the studied PFAS and should be considered an acceptable form of waste treatment."
I don't know which form of incineration is being used but for very harmful substances it is usually pyrolysis within a sealed container rather than being burned in open atmosphere.
So the results of whatever the process may be are not released but can be disposed of in whatever way their new chemistry dictates.
This doesn't really make sense. Removing the sulfonate group would render the chemical non-polar, but the effect on biological activity is still unknown.
Aside from that, and to answer the question, proper incineration will completely destroy all fluorinated organics. The only fluorine left is HF, which will be removed by the scrubbers.
Thanks for sharing and putting it in perspective. Would you recommend any articles/books/papers to learn more about the reality of PFAS contamination, especially when it enters the broader water supply (ie. outside bases)?
AVG Disability Check $1,200mo
AVG Unemployment Check $300week
Current CARES Unemployment bonus $600 week.
Total,30k Per year w/o CARES, $61K per year w/CARES.
AVG Salary of a dangerous physically challenging job at the water department.
$25K-$35k per year
Gee I wonder why we have these problems when you can be paid more to sit at home and level up in World of Warcraft or whatever. All of these totals of course vary quite a bit depending on state but they overall the story I am telling remains disturbingly consistent. So basically your drinking water is prepared exclusively by people that are too honest or too stupid to manipulate the system.
That was exactly my point. Too bad there is 0% chance that all of a sudden county/city governments across the nation suddenly decide to double to triple the pay for those positions so that they can be filled by competent people.
IDC either way I already have my own way to produce clean drinking water.
You live in a fantasy world. People who're on disability aren't living their best life at 60 or even 30k a year. Their main worry is whether they're going to be able to afford their medicine, rent and food, whether they're going to end up homeless in the near future, and whether they're going to receive their stimulus checks any time soon.
I knew your comment would be one of the first. lol.
Even without that I illustrated that it is not difficult to make a quick distinction that you can make more money not working than actually working. especially at a job that is hazardous and physically difficult.
Funny though that a job working around heavy machinery and dangerous chemicals (water works) is also going to put those workers in a high likelihood to be out on disability from the water job in question anyway. Not to mention that the government of the US itself has self admitted that the disability program is filled with "rampant abuse" and even casual investigation has shown roughly 1/3 of cases are fraudulent. Not that this diminishes those legitimately on disability.
Saying no detectable lead is a bit hard to interpret without also listing the lower limit of detection for the measurement. I assume based on the sig figs it might be less than 0.5 ppt or something around that.
Isn't that trade-off already made on the CDC guidance of 5µg/dL? This is pretty much an economic decision, because the reference value is changed to match the .975 quantile of blood lead observations. It was 10µg/dL until 2012.
Which is also a useless statement without knowing the lower threshold for measurement.
There certainly exists an amount of lead that's safe. One molecule won't harm you. Two won't either. But where the limit is nobody knows. And nobody will know for a long time because current trends in lead exposure are rife with confounding factors (i.e. poverty) and the proliferation of statements like "no safe level" dis-incentivize research (finding a number won't matter if nobody cares about your number because "there's no safe level).
No, you are misinterpreting the situation. Blood lead levels have a linear relationship with decreased cognitive function. The least detectable levels of lead have measurable impact on mental development. You can't say that "one molecule won't harm you" because you don't know that and all the evidence we have indicates you are wrong. 1 molecule may very well equal 1 fucked-up synapse.
> Blood lead levels have a linear relationship with decreased cognitive function.
I've read the opposite:
> It is also critical to note research indicates the relationship between BLLs and IQ deficits is not linear; rather, the first small elevation of BLL in young children apparently causes most of the neurological damage, with additional higher exposures causing disproportionately less additional IQ reduction (Maas, 2005).
Well, you got me on the English usage point. I need a word other than "linear". What I am trying to communicate is there is no threshold, nor is there a beneficial amount, like there is with other metals like copper. You should eat a milligram of copper. You may eat a gram of copper and nothing will happen. If you eat a kilo of copper, you'll die. There isn't any amount of lead so small that it will leave you unharmed.
The arsenic limits are unscientifically low and came about as part of a campaign to stop mining. Many parts of the world have natural environmental levels far exceeding these limits with no discernible impact on human health. Which makes sense since arsenic is a necessary micro-nutrient, albeit poorly understood, with a profile similar to selenium -- also highly toxic but also necessary in trace quantities, often from the water supply.
The 3 ppb (or 10 ppb) limit the EPA wanted to use is pure scaremongering and is essentially unachievable in some geographies.
There are also plenty of natural geographies with dangerous levels of some compounds.
The question really is "what is the optimal level of this compound" followed by "how far are we happy to deviate from the optimal amount in either direction to make water production cheaper while having minimal health downsides?"
Seems like an opportunity for a hardware startup to develop a water quality tester that continuously monitors home water supplies. Can't seem to find anything on the market that can test any of these specific chemicals -- including lead. All I could find were TDS meters.
There is a gap in the market in general for "health testers".
I want a $1 chip I can put a bit of an Apple on and have it tell me how many pesticides, how organic, and stuff like that.
It seems all the tech is possible for that kind of thing (microfluidics, micro gas spectrometry), but there isn't a big enough market to sell it all for rock bottom prices
Depends what is "rock bottom". I do believe there's a huge untapped opportunity. And I assume that some tech entrepreneurs will figure it out. We have the computers in our palms. We just need the sensors. I think there's be a strong demand at the $500 price point - assuming that the consumables don't cost too much.
Is there any decent way to filter PFAS and other chemicals without a RO system? It seems like filter jugs at best filter heavy metals. Very hard to research with the amount of blog spam.
activated charcoal works. It's cheap stuff and should be available as inline filters. Put a cheaper filter in advance of it to get more life out of it.
I'm not willing to buy bottled water. But I'm also growing concerned about the quality of my tap water. So I'd like to hear from others who have researched whole house water filters. I am familiar with Pelican and Rhino.
I'm on a well in the CO mountains. We have radon and high TDS. I installed a cheap carbon radon mitigator for the whole house and a Hague RO system for the kitchen. Tests went from scary to mostly zeroes. Water tastes amazing.
The UK is pretty much a world leader in lead reduction:
> The percentage of homes in the US with a lead service line, lead pipe or lead gooseneck has been estimated to be between 3 and 6% (Triantafyllidou & Edwards (2012).
> The UK has the most accurate information and understanding of the extent of lead concentrations in drinking water as a result of widespread sampling at consumers' taps for over thirty years.
> In contrast, many other European countries have very little knowledge of the extent of the problem because they have not routinely monitored at private residences, or have done so only after flushing the pipework (CIWEM, 2012). However, on the basis of evidence gained by an international research network (COST Action 637) it appears that problems with lead in drinking water are widespread in Europe (Hayes, 2014; H. C., 2009).
> Estimates suggest approximately 25% of houses in the EU have a lead pipe, putting 120 million people at risk in today’s 27 member states. Overall, it has been estimated (IWA, 2010) that up to one in four children in Europe could be at risk from lead in drinking water (CIWEM, 2012).
No idea how things are outside of N. America and Europe.
Given that you can install a machine at your water treatment plant to pump in orthophosphates to build a protective layer on supply/household piping to get a 90% lead reduction (takes a couple years), I'm not sure what the excuse is for any water system that has lead pipes/solder/brass fittings.
Without discounting the risks such chemicals cause, I often wonder how general environment toxicity changes over time. Victorian England for example sounds awful, with soot from burning coal everywhere, lead being used for babies’ dummies (its soft and all), and general lack of appreciation of hygiene. Dangerous chemicals like mercury and lead were used all over the place because they were cheap, and I guess no one knew any better.
When we are now concerned about those toxic chemicals, to what extent is that an absolute concern, and to what a relative one?
Can someone please recommend the best method of filtering PFAS + Lead and other toxic crap from drinking water, is it a multi-stage filter with activated carbon and reverse osmosis? Or is it making distilled water + adding back in electrolytes and storing in a lead-free glass container? Someone make this into a startup and I’ll pay for verified toxin free tested water, is there a market for this?
I’m on a mission to get the purest water at home and there is so much misinformation and outright fraud and snake oil salesmen in the water filter industry it is beyond absurd how they prey on emotions to get you to buy their crap. They don’t list where the raw filter materials were sourced (usually “made” in China), where the materials they are using inside the filters are mined from... any toxins leeching into my filtered drinking water here?
No I won’t take your word on it, show me the safety data from a reputable lab with legit standards and what are all the raw materials used in production and methods to create these filters (injection molding high heat plastics? BPA and other chemicals here? otherwise it’s a black box I can’t trust.
So I just drink my black box “filtered” water and hope I don’t get cancer in my 50’s from the unfiltered toxic industry byproducts in the filters themselves + PFAS types of things that aren’t filtered at all.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadBut likely in negligible amounts.
CR = 10 ppt
EPA = 70 ppt
Level found in testing = 80 ppt
Why not use EPA’s? Oh, because there wouldn’t be a story.
> Despite mounting evidence of widespread contamination and health risks, the EPA has still not set an enforceable legal limit for PFAS in drinking water.
https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/drinking...
> EPA has established the health advisory levels at 70 parts per trillion
> What's a health advisory?
> ... health advisories are non-enforceable and non-regulatory ...
80 ppt is probably worth watching but when the limit is 70 ppt it’s much less alarming (11% over limit) than if the limit is 10 ppt (8 times!!!)
The priorities are all out of whack. Government-provided water should be government-monitored water (all data for such should be publicly available and accessible immediately).
Edit: looks like I insulted the HN golden calf lol
The problem you mention would be tragic, but with the proliferation of charities I think there would be a lot more options.
And like Ron Paul mentioned at one point, when he was working at hospitals in the early 60s they weren’t required to treat anyone and yet turned away no one.
1: https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
https://www.epa.gov/ccr
If your interest is in looking at the report, 2019 is linked on https://www.cityofflint.com/what-you-should-know-about-lead/
They have until July to publish the 2020 results.
A well working system would have them be available soon after collection and not matter much (because issues are prevented or fixed upon identification).
However, it is important to know how the water is being sampled. If all you ever do is report water quality as it leave the treatment plant, then your data is not useful unless you only use the water at that point. To get good and useful data, you need to sample at various endpoint(house/business locations). You want to randomize these testing locations to avoid selection bias but you also want to get several data points out of them to both eliminate and spot irregularities(i.e. spike in chlorine due to heavy rain, spike in lead due to corrosion in pipes.).
Lastly and perhaps most importantly, would you trust the government if they are telling you the water has no issues?
It also seems to lack a lot of comparative context needed to actually understand how levels of chemical compare, how much is in bottled water, how much is in other countries, how much is in “clean” water systems.
Anyway, I got to the bottom and saw the line about funding of the series and suddenly thought maybe some industry was funding this. I googled for a minute and didn’t see any donor lists, but I did immediately bump into this article by the American Council on Science and Health: (Is this a reputable organization?)
“Toxic America: The Guardian Spreads Chemophobia And Anti-Americanism”
https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/07/01/toxic-america-guardian-...
But they do tend to pooh-pooh any anti-chemical reporting. They are very data-driven so they don't "worry" about things like PFAS because there hasn't been any proven deaths from it, which I find a bit too arrogant. They are also very pro-GMO, which I disagree with. However, I still support them with my donations because we need level-headed reporting like this.
Here's an article from today that I just read that shows their philosophy on anti-hysteria media.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/04/01/abc-news-terrible-scary...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Council_on_Science_an...
> In a 1992 internal memo by Whelan disclosed by Consumer Reports, Whelan directed her staff to ask McNeil Specialty for $10,000 toward a white paper on sweeteners, and she disclosed that her staff would seek "more CCC [Calorie Control Council] money... to help us get new sweetener booklet out". McNeil Specialty Products (now McNeil Nutritionals) owns the US marketing rights to Splenda, the branded name of the artificial sweetener sucralose; the Calorie Control Council is an industry trade association for producers of artificial sweeteners, fat substitutes, and low-calorie foods. The same memo instructs that staffers give "special attention" to "Mr. McDermott at Searle about meat money".
All of the above.
Water facilities seem to get tainted the way Flints water facility was tainted, cost cutting. Some things, like brain eating amoebas are hard to get rid of in totality, but in the right environment they could thrive.
Water mains and lateral lines get damaged from over and under pressurization constantly. Fire hydrants are a big source of this. This damage can be difficult to locate without real time digital water meters because pressurization across the system is constantly in flux.
Source: worked at a digital water metering company
It takes years to build up the protective layer that retains lead in the pipes. Unsure how long it takes to decay, but I guess Flint was a real-world study of that since it usually isn't removed once added.
It's not a 100% regular thing. My hometown just started adding it in 2018: https://www.hamilton.ca/home-property-and-development/water-...
It only mitigates instead of preventing. But orthophosphate/phosphoric eventually yields a 90% reduction: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18957781
In my hometown link, they have replaced lead watermains and are replacing functional lead-based residential supply lines still out there. Replacing lead-lines is the only way to keep water 100% lead-free on its way from supply to tap.
Fittings/brass fixtures are another story, but the move from copper to PEX is playing a big role there.
In Flint, it was direct cost-cutting/oversight.
> Replacing lead-lines is the only way to keep water 100% lead-free on its way from supply to tap.
Sure, but treating the pipes brings lead consumption down to 'acceptable' levels. Acceptable in this case means that it can be filtered through a household carbon-based filter. I've never read your 90% figure anywhere, generally the figure that's cited is:
> The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) has reduced the maximum allowable lead content -- that is, content that is considered "lead-free" -- to be a weighted average of 0.25 percent calculated across the wetted surfaces of pipes, pipe fittings, plumbing fittings, and fixtures and 0.2 percent for solder and flux.
This is not a zero-sum game, so while the EPA and Congress acknowledge that lead is dangerous, there are other components which compound this problem. Hence the search for mitigation. This is common throughout any infrastructure problem, not just water.
I'm glad your town raised the funds to do that, but it's certainly not the norm and probably shouldn't be considered an expectation as you'd immediately price out most of America doing that.
Even though they 'stopped' using these chemicals in manufacturing 10-15 years ago, there's still an incredible level of contamination - 26,000 sites listed by EPA [1]. But that's sort of irrelevant, because these compounds don't break up over human time scales. Eventually every place in the world will be contaminated, and with how harmful they are it's not clear if the old adage "the solution to pollution is dilution" will hold up. It's hard not to be alarmist about this, PFAS contamination is genuinely terrifying.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7689910/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_subst...
Some volatile compounds may get through though.
here's a study that found that brita-filtered water contained more bacteria than the tap water only a week into the filter's service life: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8740859/
I used to be a religious brita user, but now I just stick to tap. hard to assess the relative risk, but it's cheaper than buying filters.
I use Zerowater and I can tell when it gets a slight smell (bacteria I assume) , I just change the filter at that point even if it hasn't been ~3 months.
Unless the bacteria is actively causing harm or a variety known to be harmful to humans I'd still rather take my chances with the filters.
like I said, hard for me to do a good comparison of the relative risk, but that sounds pretty bad too. some bacteria is normal, but this is like drinking from a stream vs drinking from standing water.
> The electrochemical oxidation system used boron-doped diamond electrodes, in a process breaking down the contaminants’ formidable molecular bonds and cleaning the water while systematically destroying the hazardous compounds
It's possible filtration may remove some of it, but this appears to be the only way to completely break it down at commercial scale.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-_and_polyfluoroalkyl_subst...
Here's what works:
> The following processes were found to be effective for the removal of PFOS: GAC (up to > 99 percent removal), membrane separation - high pressure membranes such as nanofiltration and reverse osmosis (up to > 99 percent removal), anion exchange (up to > 99 percent removal), and powdered activated carbon (up to 99 percent removal).
https://tdb.epa.gov/tdb/contaminant?id=10940
Distillation is also said to work since these nasties have very high boilings points. Just don't run out of water in your distiller and let the temps get really high.
Citation needed. PFCs are EVERYWHERE, in TODAY's products. Everything from water-resistant workout pants, to your Chipotle burrito bowl container, to teflon-coated pasta extruders used in food manufacturing (which you cannot examine the way you can a non-stick pan to see whether it's degraded or not) to Glide dental floss that you put in your mouth daily.
You won't find PFCs on the label of any of these examples, either. But they're there.
Except that they produced a new formula (Gen-X) that exists in a regulatory grey-zone that they produce as much or more of then they ever did C8. [1] Plus, DuPont spun off that division into its own separate org to shield themselves from liability. [2] What's concerning is how short both Wikipedia articles are, it tells me they've had continued success flying under the radar.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenX
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemours
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/dental-fl...
Nothing. PFCs are not federally regulated by any federal agency that I'm aware of. Despite many different NGOs defining "no safe levels" in the water supply AKA 1 ppt is bad.
I've been using Glide for years. Going to throw it all out today. Thanks for the info
Apart from that, it's quite obvious that most US tap water is not drinkable since it has this foamy, soft texture with a lot of chlorine. I wonder if there is any connection to that or if that is just a correlation.
> Even though they 'stopped' using these chemicals in manufacturing 10-15 years ago, there's still an incredible level of contamination
They haven't stopped using them, the chemicals are still used in stain and water resistant carpeting and textiles. They're used in cosmetics and sunscreens among other things. One of the biggest sources of contamination is fire retardant foams used in fire suppression.
If you look at some of the sites in that report listed as having contaminated water, many are located near military bases, like Oceanside CA. These bases are the largest sources of ground water contamination of all sorts but specifically PFAS because they routinely practice fire suppression exercises.
> 26,000 sites listed by EPA [1]. But that's sort of irrelevant, because these compounds don't break up over human time scales.
PFAS is an emerging contaminant and isn't strictly regulated yet. Keeping track of these sites however is not irrelevant, it's extremely important that we know of and track these sites because they can and are being remediated.
The current method of remediation involves setting up hundreds or thousands of ground water monitoring wells around a contamination site to track the plumes and then using pumps to remove the ground water and filter it through activated carbon filters. The filters are treated as hazardous waste and incinerated.
> It's hard not to be alarmist about this, PFAS contamination is genuinely terrifying.
I wouldn't say you're being alarmist at all, if anything the current response to PFAS is insufficient and we should be treating it as a public health crisis at least on par with Lead.
I read a report recently that suggested the DoD was scrambling to incinerate its firefighting foam supplies, to avoid a PR disaster. However, the safety of incineration as disposal method has been called into serious question, namely that it doesn't sufficiently break it down and instead distributes it more widely through the environment. Any insight from you or your partner?
No particular insight into the DoD's disposal but it's entirely possible, and wouldn't be surprising, to find that the DoD is carrying out the destruction improperly.
Nope. C-F bonds are chemically very stable, but they exhibit high thermal reactivity and degrade far below proper incineration temperatures. Proper incineration, where the flu gasses are maintained at over 800 deg C, will easily drive all flourinated organics to their mineral endpoint, which is HF.
And none of this has anything to do with the sulfur. For one thing, most end-use PFA products don't contain any sulfur. PTFE, for example, has no sulfur in it, yet many of its thermal degradation products are quite toxic.
Sulfur is only present in chemicals used as surfactants, such as the water repellent coatings and fire retardants. But there is no evidence that merely cleaving the sulfonate group would make the compounds harmless.
Causes harm to humans too. But birds happen to be particularly susceptible.
Looks like the research agrees with you re: incineration: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004565351...
"Results indicate that, within procedural quantitation limits, no statistically significant evidence was found that the PFAS studied were created during the incineration of PTFE. Therefore, municipal incineration of PTFE using best available technologies (BAT) is not a significant source of the studied PFAS and should be considered an acceptable form of waste treatment."
So the results of whatever the process may be are not released but can be disposed of in whatever way their new chemistry dictates.
Aside from that, and to answer the question, proper incineration will completely destroy all fluorinated organics. The only fluorine left is HF, which will be removed by the scrubbers.
That's entirely possible. We're playing a game of telephone between a software developer and a civil/environmental engineer.
It's not emerging, it's been around a while. Big business just keeps regulation at bay.
The term "Emerging Contaminant" doesn't mean we're only just starting to use it or that it's only just starting to become a problem.
It means we're only just starting to realize the gravity of the situation we've put ourselves into by using it heavily for decades.
In layman's terms "Oh fuck".
Precisely, the military has used PFAS in firefighting foams on aircraft, ship fires and training.
Here is a map of the military sites that showed elevated levels of PFAS:
https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2020-military-pfas-site...
AVG Disability Check $1,200mo AVG Unemployment Check $300week Current CARES Unemployment bonus $600 week. Total,30k Per year w/o CARES, $61K per year w/CARES.
AVG Salary of a dangerous physically challenging job at the water department. $25K-$35k per year
Gee I wonder why we have these problems when you can be paid more to sit at home and level up in World of Warcraft or whatever. All of these totals of course vary quite a bit depending on state but they overall the story I am telling remains disturbingly consistent. So basically your drinking water is prepared exclusively by people that are too honest or too stupid to manipulate the system.
IDC either way I already have my own way to produce clean drinking water.
Even without that I illustrated that it is not difficult to make a quick distinction that you can make more money not working than actually working. especially at a job that is hazardous and physically difficult.
Funny though that a job working around heavy machinery and dangerous chemicals (water works) is also going to put those workers in a high likelihood to be out on disability from the water job in question anyway. Not to mention that the government of the US itself has self admitted that the disability program is filled with "rampant abuse" and even casual investigation has shown roughly 1/3 of cases are fraudulent. Not that this diminishes those legitimately on disability.
Is 1 ppt lead really bad for you? There is lead in everything, see: https://www.fda.gov/food/metals-and-your-food/lead-food-food..., note many of the LOD reported there are 1000x higher...
The question is where is that level?...
There certainly exists an amount of lead that's safe. One molecule won't harm you. Two won't either. But where the limit is nobody knows. And nobody will know for a long time because current trends in lead exposure are rife with confounding factors (i.e. poverty) and the proliferation of statements like "no safe level" dis-incentivize research (finding a number won't matter if nobody cares about your number because "there's no safe level).
I've read the opposite:
> It is also critical to note research indicates the relationship between BLLs and IQ deficits is not linear; rather, the first small elevation of BLL in young children apparently causes most of the neurological damage, with additional higher exposures causing disproportionately less additional IQ reduction (Maas, 2005).
p. 20: https://www.hamilton.ca/sites/default/files/media/browser/20...
Mass, 2005: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1497727/pdf/161... (ugh, which just refers to another source for the statement).
The 3 ppb (or 10 ppb) limit the EPA wanted to use is pure scaremongering and is essentially unachievable in some geographies.
The question really is "what is the optimal level of this compound" followed by "how far are we happy to deviate from the optimal amount in either direction to make water production cheaper while having minimal health downsides?"
I want a $1 chip I can put a bit of an Apple on and have it tell me how many pesticides, how organic, and stuff like that.
It seems all the tech is possible for that kind of thing (microfluidics, micro gas spectrometry), but there isn't a big enough market to sell it all for rock bottom prices
https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/reducing-pfas-drinking-wa...
Also, ion-exchange resins.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-under-sink-w...
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-faucet-water...
I have the Aquasana AQ-5300+ but the filters are expensive. It’s currently $75 to replace them and they last about six months.
The convenience of a sink mounted filter is nice however.
> The percentage of homes in the US with a lead service line, lead pipe or lead gooseneck has been estimated to be between 3 and 6% (Triantafyllidou & Edwards (2012).
> The UK has the most accurate information and understanding of the extent of lead concentrations in drinking water as a result of widespread sampling at consumers' taps for over thirty years.
> In contrast, many other European countries have very little knowledge of the extent of the problem because they have not routinely monitored at private residences, or have done so only after flushing the pipework (CIWEM, 2012). However, on the basis of evidence gained by an international research network (COST Action 637) it appears that problems with lead in drinking water are widespread in Europe (Hayes, 2014; H. C., 2009).
> Estimates suggest approximately 25% of houses in the EU have a lead pipe, putting 120 million people at risk in today’s 27 member states. Overall, it has been estimated (IWA, 2010) that up to one in four children in Europe could be at risk from lead in drinking water (CIWEM, 2012).
p. 13: https://www.hamilton.ca/sites/default/files/media/browser/20...
No idea how things are outside of N. America and Europe.
Given that you can install a machine at your water treatment plant to pump in orthophosphates to build a protective layer on supply/household piping to get a 90% lead reduction (takes a couple years), I'm not sure what the excuse is for any water system that has lead pipes/solder/brass fittings.
When we are now concerned about those toxic chemicals, to what extent is that an absolute concern, and to what a relative one?
I’m on a mission to get the purest water at home and there is so much misinformation and outright fraud and snake oil salesmen in the water filter industry it is beyond absurd how they prey on emotions to get you to buy their crap. They don’t list where the raw filter materials were sourced (usually “made” in China), where the materials they are using inside the filters are mined from... any toxins leeching into my filtered drinking water here?
No I won’t take your word on it, show me the safety data from a reputable lab with legit standards and what are all the raw materials used in production and methods to create these filters (injection molding high heat plastics? BPA and other chemicals here? otherwise it’s a black box I can’t trust.
So I just drink my black box “filtered” water and hope I don’t get cancer in my 50’s from the unfiltered toxic industry byproducts in the filters themselves + PFAS types of things that aren’t filtered at all.