Could the world go PFAS-free? Proposal to ban ‘forever chemicals’ fuels debate
I was visiting my family a few weeks ago in my childhood town, and the topic of our small local river came up. It's about three minutes away, and both the streams that feed it and the larger river it feeds into were fairly big parts of my childhood, including fishing, crayfishing, exploring, and generally playing on the banks. It turns out that there's a fishing advisory in effect this year, advising folks not to eat any fish caught in that river.<p>The reason is PFAS pollution, where the levels in the water table now indicate the potential for bioaccumulation above the recommended level for human toxicity. The people living in that area are now denied access to clean water and not having to worry about eating toxic fish, and I'm sure the otters and herons in the area haven't gotten the notice. Millions of state tax dollars have now been allocated to try to just estimate the contamination level in drinking water wells throughout the state as well.<p>Frankly, the producers and users of these chemicals have proven to be, at the minimum, so grossly negligent and potentially actually malicious, that they can not be considered to be acting in good faith, and "reasonable compromises" should be looked at with extreme suspicion. I feel the responsible organizations fined for both remediation and damages, the individuals responsible made criminally liable for the harm they've caused, and once that example has been made, we can talk about compromises once the "free market" has factored in the actual cost of using these chemicals when they can't just dump risk onto the public.<p>[1] <a href="https://ctmirror.org/2021/08/29/how-widespread-are-pfas-chemicals-ct-officials-are-about-to-inspect-more-than-2400-locations/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://ctmirror.org/2021/08/29/how-widespread-are-pfas-chem...</a>