News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Humans existed before these compounds were created. One of the ones mentioned in the article PFAS were first created in the 1940s.
So my question would be, what did we use in their place before that?
And what will happen if we stop using them.
Use your brain for once and realise that there weren't modern electronics in the 1940s, and without these compounds, we couldn't have useful computer systems now.
Yes ideally they should just stop. However, there are things that have changed since the 1940s.
A lot of technology is based on plastics being available and will require a complete redesign to work without it.
Also ordinary stuff f.i. rain jackets, cookware and cleaning products. All of these could be replaced with whatever people used beforehand, but one reason why plastics has been used so widely is because it's a cheap biproduct that could replace more expensive and more energy intensive productions. F.i. imagine if we had to replace all hard plastic casing with ceramics, glass or steel. That would require a lot of furnaces to run on coal. Multiply this with the increased population since the 1940s and it might very well just cause a different environmental disaster.
Cast iron pans work great, you can even use them on your induction stove and they heat way better than any expensive non-stick. Waxed canvas is also excellent at waterproofing. We do have solutions already for many things. Your plastic argument as well. The types of plastics the complaint is about is for specific products, not all of them. I work in manufacturing and the availability of safe materials are plentiful as science keeps looking for new ways. People just have to stop buying new things to throw perfectly good and usable ones in the garbage. It would go a long way.
Yes absolutely. Reuse is the second best step of the" reduce, reuse, recycle, reclaim" cycle of materials.
All I'm saying is that if everyone needs durable quality products, then we're facing a different material problem than what plastics are doing. Plastic is used because it's a cheap biproduct. Cast iron is not, and we can't replace all plastics with iron, glass or stone without also damaging the environment in other ways.
Personally I think plastic wrapping is better place to start. Why not use paper, cardboard or another biodegradable material for wrapping.