Good because as we just seen in the latest Vartasium video [1], even chemicals or elements we know are toxic for hundreds of years get pushed into the public and cause huge harm.
We recently moved into a house with large garden out the front, so I thought I'd grow some vegetables this summer.
I started to till the soil and noticed there was a lot of plastics. I dug deeper and soon realized that our yard was once an area where the previous owners incinerated their rubbish as I started to dig up very old and rusted steel drums which was the incinerator. I spoke to neighbours and they told me everyone used to do this in the area. We excavated the top soil and disposed a lot of it, I still didn't trust it. but it looked nicer.
I decided to pave the area and make raised garden beds and fill them with new soil. It's basically impossible to build them out of wood without lining them with something which may have negative health effects to humans or plants.
In the end I found an old stone / concrete planter, there's probably something in there bad for me too, but I just couldn't believe that even glazed pots contain lead?
> I just couldn't believe that even glazed pots contain lead?
In the US, even pottery intended for use with food may contain lead, to this day apparently:
"..there are no U.S. regulations (to my knowledge/correct me if I am wrong!) that specifically regulate the overall content of lead in pottery—even for pottery pieces intended for use with food and beverages."
Because lead is in the ground like everywhere. If you dig up some random clay somewhere there's going to be some lead content and who knows what else. This silly idea that pottery is somehow better than mass produced glass is just bad naturalism.
Those are vintage before the effects were known, for the same reason stuff was glazed with pure uranium oxide commonly (which makes a nice bright orange).
> It's basically impossible to build them out of wood without lining them with something which may have negative health effects to humans or plants.
There are plenty of known-safe materials to line garden beds with. Even unlined treated timber has been shown to be safe with only tiny trace amount of treatment making it into the plant. You might be being too paranoid for your own good.
The research is clear here. Modern CCA treatments (the only one with arsenic) require preservatives to be applied first which prevent leaching of arsenic. There has never been a study that I can find which shows a genuine risk of arsenic toxicity from eating from a treated garden bed where crops are planted at least a few cm from the edge of the bed.
And if that's not enough, choose one of the many other treatment options, or line your bed with a proven-safe polythene liner, or use untreated timbers that are resistant to rot like cedar/macrocarpa. If you have any real research to show that any of these options are unsafe I would love to read it.
> It's basically impossible to build them out of wood without lining them with something which may have negative health effects to humans or plants.
Not so! Many types of wood (cedar is a big one) can withstand direct weather/soil exposure for extended periods of time (multiple years at minimum). Yes you'll need to maintain them every so often, but surely you aren't going into gardening not expecting to maintain equipment.
> The Brussels effect is the process of unilateral regulatory globalisation caused by the European Union de facto (but not necessarily de jure) externalising its laws outside its borders through market mechanisms
TIL. I didn't know there's a term for it, but it makes sense, it's a common phenomenon. Hopefully it catches on even more, especially with digital laws like GDPR, and the upcoming Digital Markets and Services Acts.
UE = Union Europea, or Unione Europea, or Union Européenne, or União Europeia i.e. European Union using the Romance language acronym
RoHS = Restriction of Hazardous Substances, a directive that restricts the materials that can be used in electronic devices, forbidding manufacturers from using many known toxic materials. Initially adopted in the EU but then globally due to the necessity of exporting to the EU.
In romance languages (and possibly others) the order of adjectives/nouns is reversed compared to english, in those languages European Union gets abbreviated to UE (instead of EU), the comment is probably by someone who uses one such language natively
It's kinda hard to notice because it's so short and similar, I hadn't noticed myself until I read your comment.
ROHS is the acronym for a 2002 EU law called "Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive"
Whiskers were an early problem, but the biggest issues right now are:
- Lead-free solders don't wet/flow as well as leaded, which causes lower manufacturing yields.
- Lead-free solders are generally more brittle and subject to earlier fatigue failures than leaded solders, so the lead-free units often fail prematurely (compared to leaded ones).
Solder whiskers are more likely at low pressure and low temp, but they happen with lead-free solder (more slowly and at a lower frequency) under standard conditions as well [1]. Given the number of connections on any given PCB, and that we have no way to prevent or predict whiskers, the failure rate over reasonable time-frames of any ROHS PCBA converges to 100%.
Tin whiskers also occur on earth at ambient temperature and pressure.
I’ve personally experienced tin whiskers growing between adjacent TQFP pins (resulting in product failures).
We successfully mitigated this with (1) electronic redesign so the whisker was likely to fuse (self-destruct melting via resistive heating) if it made contact with the adjacent pin in question, and (2) urethane conformal coating.
>"The EU is doing the right thing though. Lead is bad for us and cumulative. And RoHS was about a lot more than just solder."
If you're worried about lead used in electronics and electrical systems, the focus should be lead-acid batteries, which use >10x more lead than circuit assemblies ever did. Lead-acid batteries were, however exempted from RoHS, while circuit assemblies were not.
Yes but this lead is in contained units that can be removed and recycled separately. Not spread all over the entire device.
Also at the time there was no alternative for these. Now that even UPSes are starting to use lithium, I think these will be banned sooner rather than later too.
Nearly all lead acid batteries are properly recycled as required by law. Passing laws like that for electronics using leaded solder would be way more intrusive and annoying than just telling manufacturers to use a safer alternative.
I've definitely noticed how lead-free solder looks/feel much more brittle. So the EU is basically guilty of vastly increasing E-Waste for most of the electronics made in the last 20 years (which is probably is more than we've made in the time before).
This is not the only thing that happened in the last two decades. Everyone started manufacturing for the lowest possible price in China and started designing for planned obsolescence. In my opinion these were much larger factors in e-waste.
Tin whiskers are absolutely not "ironed out" and there still is not a good answer besides alloying with either lead, or antimony, both of which are toxic.
But it's a tradeoff, because without the lead or the antimony, tin whiskers will eventually form. There is no known way to stop them, on a long enough timescale they will 100% certainly grow whiskers and eventually that will cause a failure.
Conformal coatings can reduce the rate of growth, but they don't stop it, and the conformal coating can itself cause failure as the tin whisker still grows and will exert mechanical pressure as it does.
That's my problem. Utterly exhausted with safety culture overreach, as if the single most important thing possible is maximum safety, to the detriment of all other factors. Solitary confinement is very safe.
In case of lead solder it's the problem of you also the (potential) problem of:
- Spouse, Child or anyone sharing your apartment
- Technicians or similar which might enter your apartment
- Anyone living in your apartment after you
- Anyone to which you might sell the desk, used tool and similar
- In case of gross negligence you might also contaminate public transportation or e.g. a desk at a restaurant
- Police/Firefighters (in case they have to enter your apartment)
- ...
also many young people which start soldering as a hobby are not really aware about the health risk of solder, in which case lead free solder is still a better choice.
So no it's not just your problem.
And it doesn't matter if you specifically handle it correctly, most hobby soldering people do not and this is a general decision which is mainly about lead in hobby use cases (there are a bunch exceptions for companies).
Well and it's also about sold devices, because that also matter, children get there hand
on them and there are various (sometimes surprising) ways how lead from soldering can get into the life of people using the product, instead of producing it.
This sort of over-zealous thinking is why I bought a loaf of bread last week that came with a warning stating it "contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer". BREAD.
In case anyone is wondering it's because of acrylamide.
I'm not sure if I understand what the problem is here. Would you rather not have this information available? It allows you to look up the info about the chemical and decide for yourself if you're ok with it.
But at what level of increased cancer risk do you draw the line? 2x higher risk? 5 / 100 000 higher incidence? Whatever you pick, it won't be the risk level that is acceptable to everyone (as the pandemic shows, people have different tolerance to risk). I think I prefer a world where the consumer is given more information, ideally with sufficient context to make an informed choice.
> I think I prefer a world where the consumer is given more information, ideally with sufficient context to make an informed choice.
So a bag of potato chips should come with a Safety Data Sheet? Maybe a big red tag attached to persimmons in the produce department warning you they can cause bezoars? I prefer a world where that's considered insane. The human race has made it this far without this degree of coddling. And no, I'm not suggesting we go back to the days of steak and cigarette sandwiches but people should be entrusted to make reasonable decisions without the need for scare tactics.
> So a bag of potato chips should come with a Safety Data Sheet?
Or a QR code w/ link to SDS for those who care.
> Maybe a big red tag attached to persimmons in the produce department warning you they can cause bezoars?
Great idea! I have not known about unripened persimmons causing bezoars, thank you!
> The human race has made it this far without this degree of coddling. And no, I'm not suggesting we go back to the days of steak and cigarette sandwiches but people should be entrusted to make reasonable decisions without the need for scare tactics.
Why put warnings on cigarettes / alcohol at all then? Why isn't that "too much coddling"? Human race will survive even if we go back to using leaded gasoline and asbestos (after all, it survived a period when that was common), so if that's the only goal you have, I think we're already there and the warnings are not reducing our chances.
> (...) people should be entrusted to make reasonable decisions without the need for scare tactics.
And how do you make sure that they do? What's reasonable for you is not the same as what's reasonable for me. What you think may be common knowledge may not be as common for others (TIL about persimmons).
From what I understand, there are penalties for failing to display that message when such substances are present, but no penalties for displaying it when they aren’t, so even if you see it it may just be covering backsides rather than actually useful.
Out of curiosity I’ve locked up the list. It includes: “alcoholic beverages”, “bitumen”, “leather dust”, “testosterone”, “unleaded gasoline”, “wood dust”, and I can also recognise several medicines on the list.
I wonder if it’s even possible to avoid all these things?
"Although researchers are still unsure of the precise mechanisms by which acrylamide forms in foods, many believe it is a byproduct of the Maillard reaction. In fried or baked goods, acrylamide may be produced by the reaction between asparagine and reducing sugars (fructose, glucose, etc.) or reactive carbonyls at temperatures above 120 °C (248 °F)." [1]
And that is why California is an object of mockery by the rest of the world.
Keep reading the wiki article for proof that the concern is not CA-specific.
"On April 24, 2002, the Swedish National Food Administration announced that acrylamide can be found in baked and fried starchy foods, such as potato chips, breads, and cookies. Concern was raised mainly because of the probable carcinogenic effects of acrylamide."
"In 2016, the UK Food Standards Agency launched a campaign called "Go for Gold", warning of the possible cancer risk associated with cooking potatoes and other starchy foods at high temperatures."
"From this, they [WHO & FAO of UN] concluded acrylamide levels in food were safe in terms of neuropathy, but raised concerns over human carcinogenicity based on known carcinogenicity in laboratory animals."
"Risk communication
The Consultation would encourage transparent and open risk assessment and risk management processes and recognises the importance of involving interested parties (consumer, industry, retail etc.) in this process at some stages. Risk communication policy could facilitate the crucial communication process between risk assessor and risk manager and among all parties involved."
I’d be concerned if the bread actually contained any acrylamide.
"""It is highly toxic, likely to be carcinogenic,[6] but its main derivative polyacrylamide is nontoxic. The possibility that this innocuous bulk chemical contains traces of its hazardous precursor has long attracted attention.""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide
I note another comment saying this has indeed been found in various foods, typically when heated for long periods over 120 C. I don’t think bread gets that hot (when it does it’s called toast).
I imagine some people believe that right when you cross the invisible California border, your face starts melting as all the CA-only cancers start initiating.
I almost think we should have a whitelist of good chemicals instead. Within another 30 seconds, carcinogenic chemical number 12001 will make its way into something.
Afaik there is already a fundamental difference to how the US and EU approach that.
In the EU new products need to follow the precautionary principle [0] and proof that their product is safe for consumers, before being allowed to be sold on the market.
While in the US the product is assumed to be benign until evidence to the contrary surfaces, which is then usually solved trough civil law suits suing the company using something that is discovered to be nasty.
> To make it harder for chemical firms to avoid having individual chemicals banned, the European Chemicals Agency prefers dealing with chemicals in groups.
> Otherwise, firms can use a tactic called "regrettable substitution -- altering the composition of chemicals to create sister chemicals that could be just as dangerous, The Guardian reported.
> The toxins will be part of a regularly reviewed rolling list, according to the European Commission.
For some known risky categories of chemicals - definitely! It should not be possible to tweak chemicals known to be dangerous just slightly and expose the public to them until enough evidence accumulates that surprise this version was also poisonous in exactly the same way.
I think these kind of analogue laws are dangerous because it's difficult to define what an analogue of some chemical is, and if there are set rules, then you again give out a playbook of how to avoid them.
The reason why a regulator hires from industry in the first place is because that’s where the knowledgeable people are.
The alternative you’re suggesting ( if it even works at eliminating the collusion in the first place), is to staff such with lower qualified people, which has its own pitfalls.
No you can’t take politics out of a political institution, so it’s actually questionable how good this will end up being, and will it place the EU further behind other parts of the globe, especially if an alternative chemical can not be found for some necessary process.
It's fine to have people flow between industry and regulation at the lower levels.
The only barrier that is needed is from the top of regulation -> industry.
Top of industry -> top of regulation is fine as long as one divests all relevant assets simultaneously.
Allowing poison in children's toys for the sake of profit is also "dangerous". I don't think the playbook argument holds water. It's arguably easier to avoid the rules if there are none to begin with.
Toxic, yes, but also probably highly useful too otherwise there would be no reason to use them in the first place. For example:
> Chemical category groups like PVC plastics, flame retardants and bisphenols are included in the EU's plan.
So... building houses are going to get a lot more expensive? (I'm assuming this means you now have to use copper piping for new houses instead of PVC since it would be banned).
PVC is used for most incoming supply lines and mains, also many houses use CPVC pipes for hot and cold water in the house. (CPVC is Chlorinated PVC pipe, it can withstand hot water, it's a light yellow/orange in color compared to PVC which is white, and it's sized like copper pipe wheras PVC is sized like iron pipe.
PVC is used everywhere in the USA. You can probably name almost any common household item in the USA and there is a PVC version of it if not the dominant form. It's because there are very large PVC manufacturers in the USA which is why it is pushed so hard and people kept in dark about the dangers. You've surely heard of "vinyl" but maybe didn't realize that was PVC.
Some of the many common things it's used in - shoes, notebooks, office supplies, bags, backpacks, toys etc.[0] Gee, I had no idea it and its additives, e.g. phthalates[1], had health effects until just now. What sounds even worse is what happens when it breaks down and contaminates water[2].
It's a different argument though, it's an organic material to start with which existent long before the industrial revolution. It's also 100% required for our survival.
Fire retardants which are known to cause cancer or birth defects, I'm not so sure. Then there's the fact that Oxyten is literally everwhere, do you want those retardants to be everywhere too, in your lungs?
> Fire retardants which are known to cause cancer or birth defects, I'm not so sure.
On the other hand, they’re very good at stopping you from burning to death. Even the ones we have banned (or will ban) and replaced with others are very good at preventing a really really bad way to die.
Also, quite a lot of toxic things are also organic, regardless of if you’re using that word in the chemical sense or the “it’s natural” sense.
They also save the families of those smokers, and people like my sister who knocked over a candle and had enough time to put it out despite not having a fire extinguisher, and people like me who forgot food on the stove one time, or people like my dad who missed when pouring burning brandy onto a Christmas puddings.
If you still find this unconvincing, ask yourself why life expectancy has gone up rather than down since the invention and mandated use of fire retardants.
My argument is the net harm of coating everything in carcinogens and endocrine disruptors outweighs the fringe benefit. Flame retardants don’t eliminate fire, they give you an extremely small chance of preventing one in very specific scenarios.
And where on the planet do you find oxygen in such concentrations? It doesn't build up in the environment to a lethal degree, unlike most local pollutants.
CO would be a better comparison, and we have actual detectors for it in houses.
> And where on the planet do you find oxygen in such concentrations?
That shouldn’t matter. My point is the standard being called for is ridiculous because it would also ban oxygen for being (1) toxic and (2) accumulating in the environment.
> for being (1) toxic and (2) accumulating in the environment to a harmful degree
I'm sure the actual standard surely takes accumulation levels into account otherwise it wouldn't make any sense at all, as you say. Unlike in the US, EU laws aren't usually written by idiots.
It's partial pressure not concentration. Air is toxic if you have 60 m of water above your head, but nowhere on earth do you have oxygen at 1.4 atm of partial pressure.
(Oxygen toxicity is really the one thing in recreational scuba diving training where they tell you "do this and you will positively die").
Oxygen does not accumulate in the environment in sufficient doses to be toxic. It is plausible that the other chemicals under discussion do, or at least it makes it much more difficult to have dosing discussions when its unclear at what level it accumulates in environment.
It caused one of the major mass extinction events on earth, some life still finds it toxic, and the point I was trying and failing to make is that the definition given was insufficient because dose is important.
Nobody disagrees that dose is important. Your point is failing to land because you are attacking a straw man and not the point the original person was making.
Dose where? In potato or surrounding soil or nearby fields or rivers which have runoffs from the farms? In farm animals that will eat it for 10 months and then be butchered? In fish living in those rivers or migrating to oceans to be eaten by other animals up in the food chain?
Farmers, just like any other industry, is very good at reading rules and finding very creative ways in between them how to maximize profits regardless of human costs. I don't blame them per se, but let's not be naive about farmers being some sort of saints doing whatever possible to feed the needy with as-healthy-as-possible healthy food.
Banning makes things much easier to actually govern and enforce, and doesn't leave endless amounts of backdoors for serious catastrophes 20-50 years down the road. We already had plenty of them to take lesson or two, most started with good intentions but lack of deep scientific understanding which we still don't have in such scale to clear any of these substances to be actually safe.
Also, some of us have kids and actually want to leave an OK world for them, if not better, not a scorched wasteland just to have marginally better retirement financial situation.
Organic/medicinal chemist here. Some toxin, endocrine disruptors and many other things have widely variable toxicity curves. Something we often see is U curves. With high toxicity in both small and high doses. The small doses can induce cascade effects (like hormones).
This effect has always puzzled me, so much that initially thought it was pseudoscience (like homeopathy). I mean, in a real U curve, the highest effect is at a zero dose and it makes no sense.
But it looks serious, peer reviewed papers and all that. The main reason seems to be that at a low dose, the chemical doesn't trigger "defense" reactions and can do its thing unimpeded (high effect), on a medium dose, our body starts to notice and dampen the effect (low effect). High doses are simply overwhelming and the effect becomes high again.
I still think there is a lot of pseudoscience around that effect that helps selling a lot of "natural", "detox", etc..., but I don't think all of it is bullshit anymore.
As other posters note some feed-forward defense mechanism requires a larger dose to elicit a response. Sometimes small doses have a cascade effect meaning A->2xB->6xC etc whereas a larger dose would activate a feed-backward mechanism between B and C.
A classic example is endocrine disruptors (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4036398/), a small dose induces a hormonal response, a medium dose the body fights due to detecting it as foreign and a high dose is just regular toxic. Please note this is somewhat simplified but used as an example.
Sure, but you can’t control the dose on an entire population. Let’s say only 1% of people get brain cancer because of their habits/lifestyle. That’s still unacceptable, despite 99% not getting a dose that’s lethal.
An example of this type of selective poisoning is cashiers handling receipts laced with BPA all day.
Is there any place left on Earth completely untouched by industrial chemicals? Even in remotest countries you have fertilizers, pesticides, mining activity related chemicals, road building chemicals etc.
99% of Americans have PFAS in their blood made by Dupont and other companies. This is because the US allows corporations to invent new chemicals and sell them to the public without any regulation.
People all over the world now have PFAS in their bodies as a result of the capitalist rot in the US. We didn't ask for this, and yet we're all subjected to it. PFAS are forever chemicals that will last centuries.
I recommend everyone, downvoters especially, see the movie Dark Waters, then return wiser and upvote. It will make you angry, and depressed, that such practises are allowed to happen, and are so hard to stop after being exposed. TLDW: DuPont made a secret toxic waste dump that poisoned farms, created birth defects etc. The movie's about a lawyer fighting DuPont in court for 20 years over that.
It's inapplicable. Sri Lanka did this, stupidly, overnight, thus pissing off many farmers and leaving the rest unprepared. Those sorts of policies need to be applied gradually to allow people to adapt.
Not looking forward to suddenly being unable to buy some basic cleaning or lubricant product because the EU nannies decided I'm no longer adult enough to handle it
It’s more like, you can put anything you want into your system as far as European Chemicals Agency is concerned, but you can’t sell products that clearly seem to cause hormonal effects or be cancerous
Noble move but I hope this doesn't cause unintended consequences. If costs go up because alternative methods are more expensive, people will end up importing from countries that don't have these bans. Are these economic side-effects ever considered in these decisions?
134 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] thread[1] https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA
I started to till the soil and noticed there was a lot of plastics. I dug deeper and soon realized that our yard was once an area where the previous owners incinerated their rubbish as I started to dig up very old and rusted steel drums which was the incinerator. I spoke to neighbours and they told me everyone used to do this in the area. We excavated the top soil and disposed a lot of it, I still didn't trust it. but it looked nicer.
I decided to pave the area and make raised garden beds and fill them with new soil. It's basically impossible to build them out of wood without lining them with something which may have negative health effects to humans or plants.
In the end I found an old stone / concrete planter, there's probably something in there bad for me too, but I just couldn't believe that even glazed pots contain lead?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_tile
In the US, even pottery intended for use with food may contain lead, to this day apparently:
"..there are no U.S. regulations (to my knowledge/correct me if I am wrong!) that specifically regulate the overall content of lead in pottery—even for pottery pieces intended for use with food and beverages."
https://tamararubin.com/topics/does-vintage-and-new-function...
https://tamararubin.com/2021/09/yellow-vintage-fiesta-plate-...
..which is mad of approximately 50% lead, and certainly no accident of nature.
And even if it were to occur naturally, that wouldn't make it any less hazardous.
There are plenty of known-safe materials to line garden beds with. Even unlined treated timber has been shown to be safe with only tiny trace amount of treatment making it into the plant. You might be being too paranoid for your own good.
And if that's not enough, choose one of the many other treatment options, or line your bed with a proven-safe polythene liner, or use untreated timbers that are resistant to rot like cedar/macrocarpa. If you have any real research to show that any of these options are unsafe I would love to read it.
The article contains some lists of know hyperaccumulators.
For example, sunflowers are known excellent heavy metals sponges.
Not so! Many types of wood (cedar is a big one) can withstand direct weather/soil exposure for extended periods of time (multiple years at minimum). Yes you'll need to maintain them every so often, but surely you aren't going into gardening not expecting to maintain equipment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
RoHS = Restriction of Hazardous Substances, a directive that restricts the materials that can be used in electronic devices, forbidding manufacturers from using many known toxic materials. Initially adopted in the EU but then globally due to the necessity of exporting to the EU.
It would throw me off a bit at first but I got used to it quickly. Same as with driving on the other side when I moved over from Ireland :)
It's kinda hard to notice because it's so short and similar, I hadn't noticed myself until I read your comment.
ROHS is the acronym for a 2002 EU law called "Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...
- Lead-free solders don't wet/flow as well as leaded, which causes lower manufacturing yields.
- Lead-free solders are generally more brittle and subject to earlier fatigue failures than leaded solders, so the lead-free units often fail prematurely (compared to leaded ones).
[1] https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/reference/tech_papers/2005-dad...
I’ve personally experienced tin whiskers growing between adjacent TQFP pins (resulting in product failures).
We successfully mitigated this with (1) electronic redesign so the whisker was likely to fuse (self-destruct melting via resistive heating) if it made contact with the adjacent pin in question, and (2) urethane conformal coating.
NASA studies such as https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/reference/tech_papers/2010-Pan... show that urethane conformal coating is effective against tin whiskers. But that does add another chemical and processing step and its own hazards.
The EU is doing the right thing though. Lead is bad for us and cumulative. And RoHS was about a lot more than just solder.
If you're worried about lead used in electronics and electrical systems, the focus should be lead-acid batteries, which use >10x more lead than circuit assemblies ever did. Lead-acid batteries were, however exempted from RoHS, while circuit assemblies were not.
Also at the time there was no alternative for these. Now that even UPSes are starting to use lithium, I think these will be banned sooner rather than later too.
But it's a tradeoff, because without the lead or the antimony, tin whiskers will eventually form. There is no known way to stop them, on a long enough timescale they will 100% certainly grow whiskers and eventually that will cause a failure.
Conformal coatings can reduce the rate of growth, but they don't stop it, and the conformal coating can itself cause failure as the tin whisker still grows and will exert mechanical pressure as it does.
Dealing with lead safely is much harder, and in a hobby setup can be assumed to be infeasible to be done correctly for nearly all people
- Spouse, Child or anyone sharing your apartment
- Technicians or similar which might enter your apartment
- Anyone living in your apartment after you
- Anyone to which you might sell the desk, used tool and similar
- In case of gross negligence you might also contaminate public transportation or e.g. a desk at a restaurant
- Police/Firefighters (in case they have to enter your apartment)
- ...
also many young people which start soldering as a hobby are not really aware about the health risk of solder, in which case lead free solder is still a better choice.
So no it's not just your problem.
And it doesn't matter if you specifically handle it correctly, most hobby soldering people do not and this is a general decision which is mainly about lead in hobby use cases (there are a bunch exceptions for companies).
Well and it's also about sold devices, because that also matter, children get there hand on them and there are various (sometimes surprising) ways how lead from soldering can get into the life of people using the product, instead of producing it.
(By ban I mean consumer exposure, not ban for use without exposure.)
In case anyone is wondering it's because of acrylamide.
So a bag of potato chips should come with a Safety Data Sheet? Maybe a big red tag attached to persimmons in the produce department warning you they can cause bezoars? I prefer a world where that's considered insane. The human race has made it this far without this degree of coddling. And no, I'm not suggesting we go back to the days of steak and cigarette sandwiches but people should be entrusted to make reasonable decisions without the need for scare tactics.
Or a QR code w/ link to SDS for those who care.
> Maybe a big red tag attached to persimmons in the produce department warning you they can cause bezoars?
Great idea! I have not known about unripened persimmons causing bezoars, thank you!
> The human race has made it this far without this degree of coddling. And no, I'm not suggesting we go back to the days of steak and cigarette sandwiches but people should be entrusted to make reasonable decisions without the need for scare tactics.
Why put warnings on cigarettes / alcohol at all then? Why isn't that "too much coddling"? Human race will survive even if we go back to using leaded gasoline and asbestos (after all, it survived a period when that was common), so if that's the only goal you have, I think we're already there and the warnings are not reducing our chances.
> (...) people should be entrusted to make reasonable decisions without the need for scare tactics.
And how do you make sure that they do? What's reasonable for you is not the same as what's reasonable for me. What you think may be common knowledge may not be as common for others (TIL about persimmons).
Out of curiosity I’ve locked up the list. It includes: “alcoholic beverages”, “bitumen”, “leather dust”, “testosterone”, “unleaded gasoline”, “wood dust”, and I can also recognise several medicines on the list.
I wonder if it’s even possible to avoid all these things?
Good job California!
And that is why California is an object of mockery by the rest of the world.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide#Occurrence_in_food_...
"On April 24, 2002, the Swedish National Food Administration announced that acrylamide can be found in baked and fried starchy foods, such as potato chips, breads, and cookies. Concern was raised mainly because of the probable carcinogenic effects of acrylamide."
"In 2016, the UK Food Standards Agency launched a campaign called "Go for Gold", warning of the possible cancer risk associated with cooking potatoes and other starchy foods at high temperatures."
"From this, they [WHO & FAO of UN] concluded acrylamide levels in food were safe in terms of neuropathy, but raised concerns over human carcinogenicity based on known carcinogenicity in laboratory animals."
The summary report for FAO/WHO consultations on acrylamide is available at http://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/67372:
"Risk communication The Consultation would encourage transparent and open risk assessment and risk management processes and recognises the importance of involving interested parties (consumer, industry, retail etc.) in this process at some stages. Risk communication policy could facilitate the crucial communication process between risk assessor and risk manager and among all parties involved."
https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredie...
"""It is highly toxic, likely to be carcinogenic,[6] but its main derivative polyacrylamide is nontoxic. The possibility that this innocuous bulk chemical contains traces of its hazardous precursor has long attracted attention.""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide
I note another comment saying this has indeed been found in various foods, typically when heated for long periods over 120 C. I don’t think bread gets that hot (when it does it’s called toast).
It does when they bake it. Bread is baked at an average of 200C. How do you think the crust forms?!
In the EU new products need to follow the precautionary principle [0] and proof that their product is safe for consumers, before being allowed to be sold on the market.
While in the US the product is assumed to be benign until evidence to the contrary surfaces, which is then usually solved trough civil law suits suing the company using something that is discovered to be nasty.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
> To make it harder for chemical firms to avoid having individual chemicals banned, the European Chemicals Agency prefers dealing with chemicals in groups.
> Otherwise, firms can use a tactic called "regrettable substitution -- altering the composition of chemicals to create sister chemicals that could be just as dangerous, The Guardian reported.
> The toxins will be part of a regularly reviewed rolling list, according to the European Commission.
Get access to government retreats meant for diplomats, nice pay and create prestige.
But along with that comes a complete ban of gainful employment from industry after you get the top job with jail as punishment.
If you aren’t fired for colluding with industry then get a lifelong pension.
Expensive sure, but less expensive than letting industry control the regulators.
The alternative you’re suggesting ( if it even works at eliminating the collusion in the first place), is to staff such with lower qualified people, which has its own pitfalls.
No you can’t take politics out of a political institution, so it’s actually questionable how good this will end up being, and will it place the EU further behind other parts of the globe, especially if an alternative chemical can not be found for some necessary process.
Top of industry -> top of regulation is fine as long as one divests all relevant assets simultaneously.
> Chemical category groups like PVC plastics, flame retardants and bisphenols are included in the EU's plan.
So... building houses are going to get a lot more expensive? (I'm assuming this means you now have to use copper piping for new houses instead of PVC since it would be banned).
[0] https://www.state.nj.us/humanservices/opmrdd/health/pvc.html
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/10/phthala...
[2] https://themicrogardener.com/is-pvc-plastic-safe-to-use-in-a...
The leech rates are absolutely crazy. Copper is the only way, ideally pro-press
Fire retardants which are known to cause cancer or birth defects, I'm not so sure. Then there's the fact that Oxyten is literally everwhere, do you want those retardants to be everywhere too, in your lungs?
On the other hand, they’re very good at stopping you from burning to death. Even the ones we have banned (or will ban) and replaced with others are very good at preventing a really really bad way to die.
Also, quite a lot of toxic things are also organic, regardless of if you’re using that word in the chemical sense or the “it’s natural” sense.
Flame retardants only really give you a slight edge vs a burning cigarette on a couch.
We coated our couches, clothes, carpets etc in cancerous chemicals to save a few smokers that passed out drunk
We literally coated everything in carcinogenic chemicals for the dumbest of reasons.
They also save the families of those smokers, and people like my sister who knocked over a candle and had enough time to put it out despite not having a fire extinguisher, and people like me who forgot food on the stove one time, or people like my dad who missed when pouring burning brandy onto a Christmas puddings.
If you still find this unconvincing, ask yourself why life expectancy has gone up rather than down since the invention and mandated use of fire retardants.
CO would be a better comparison, and we have actual detectors for it in houses.
That shouldn’t matter. My point is the standard being called for is ridiculous because it would also ban oxygen for being (1) toxic and (2) accumulating in the environment.
I'm sure the actual standard surely takes accumulation levels into account otherwise it wouldn't make any sense at all, as you say. Unlike in the US, EU laws aren't usually written by idiots.
(Oxygen toxicity is really the one thing in recreational scuba diving training where they tell you "do this and you will positively die").
Ubiquity increases the changes of high dose. There are now plastics in human blood for example:
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/microplastics-dete...
Farmers, just like any other industry, is very good at reading rules and finding very creative ways in between them how to maximize profits regardless of human costs. I don't blame them per se, but let's not be naive about farmers being some sort of saints doing whatever possible to feed the needy with as-healthy-as-possible healthy food.
Banning makes things much easier to actually govern and enforce, and doesn't leave endless amounts of backdoors for serious catastrophes 20-50 years down the road. We already had plenty of them to take lesson or two, most started with good intentions but lack of deep scientific understanding which we still don't have in such scale to clear any of these substances to be actually safe.
Also, some of us have kids and actually want to leave an OK world for them, if not better, not a scorched wasteland just to have marginally better retirement financial situation.
But it looks serious, peer reviewed papers and all that. The main reason seems to be that at a low dose, the chemical doesn't trigger "defense" reactions and can do its thing unimpeded (high effect), on a medium dose, our body starts to notice and dampen the effect (low effect). High doses are simply overwhelming and the effect becomes high again.
I still think there is a lot of pseudoscience around that effect that helps selling a lot of "natural", "detox", etc..., but I don't think all of it is bullshit anymore.
A classic example is endocrine disruptors (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4036398/), a small dose induces a hormonal response, a medium dose the body fights due to detecting it as foreign and a high dose is just regular toxic. Please note this is somewhat simplified but used as an example.
An example of this type of selective poisoning is cashiers handling receipts laced with BPA all day.
People all over the world now have PFAS in their bodies as a result of the capitalist rot in the US. We didn't ask for this, and yet we're all subjected to it. PFAS are forever chemicals that will last centuries.
https://massivesci.com/articles/dark-waters-pfas-focus-featu...
When govt bans, its the people who pay the price.