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>> No. 37869 Anonymous
19th March 2022
Saturday 3:22 pm
37869 Don't drink the water - Scientists
>Scientists are concerned that the allowable levels of toxic PFAS - known as "forever chemicals" - in UK drinking water are too high.

>A BBC study found PFAS levels exceeded European safety levels in almost half of the samples taken. However, none exceeded the current UK safety level. The chemicals are in many products such as non-stick pans, food packaging, carpets, furniture, firefighting foam. They have been linked to a range of diseases, including cancer.

>Guidelines from the UK Drinking Water Inspectorate state drinking water must contain PFAS chemicals at no more than 100 nanograms per litre (ng/l). Above that, action must be taken to reduce levels. Working with Greenwich University, the BBC took 45 tap water samples. Laboratory analysis found that none exceeded the 100ng/l level. But 25 samples did contain PFASs, and four had levels that exceeded 10ng/l, which, under the current guidelines, means local local healthcare professionals must be consulted, and levels monitored. And almost half of the samples exceeded the European Food Standards Agency tolerable limit of 2.2ng/l.

>Professor Roger Klein, a chemist and PFAS expert, said: "The significance of your results, even though they're small, is that it underlines that this stuff is everywhere and that it's in drinking water. "It's ridiculous that the UK Drinking Water Inspectorate has a level of 100ng/l before action is taken."

>Rita Lock-Caruso, Professor of toxicology at the University of Michigan, also said the results raised a potential health concern: "We're finding health effects at lower and lower concentrations - in the single digits." Research has found the most common PFAS chemicals, PFOA and PFOS, have probable links to high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, testicular cancer, kidney cancer, and pregnancy-induced hypertension.

>There is particular concern about the effect on children. Professor Philippe Grandjean, of Harvard University, said: "A woman may build this up in her body and when she gets pregnant, she shares that with her foetus. She eliminates part of her body burden into her milk. So, the next generation will get a huge dose, and the baby may end up having up to 10 times as much PFAS in the blood as her mother has."

>The US is considering reducing its regulatory level, from 70ng/l. "We are beginning to think that there's no such thing as a safe level and we want them to be as low as possible, because water is not the only source of exposure," said former head of the National Institute of Environmental Sciences, Linda Birnbaum. However, there is little public data about its presence or impacts in the UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60761972

We've all packed our rice but now we have nothing to boil it with. How fucked are we?
Expand all images.
>> No. 37870 Anonymous
19th March 2022
Saturday 3:34 pm
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You can distil your water if you want to deal with the hassle and the energy cost of that.
>> No. 37871 Anonymous
19th March 2022
Saturday 3:39 pm
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>>37870
Wouldn't a simple osmosis water filter be just as effective if not more so?
>> No. 37872 Anonymous
19th March 2022
Saturday 3:54 pm
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>>37871

Internet says:
>What are the disadvantages (cons) of RO filtration?

>Wastes as much as 6x the amount of clean water produced
>Requires professional maintenance to ensure effectiveness and safety
>Removes healthy minerals including calcium, magnesium, potassium and bicarbonates
>Relatively expensive starting from $300 + maintenance and replacements
>Risk of bacteria growing in the water after the filter since the chlorine has been removed

After a short google a solar water still seems like a good bet if you have a few square metres somewhere sunny to put it. Particularly as it can be made from scraps and double as a rain-water collector.
>> No. 37873 Anonymous
19th March 2022
Saturday 4:33 pm
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>>37869
Life expectancy needs to come down anyway. Who the fuck wants to live deep into their eighties?
>> No. 37878 Anonymous
19th March 2022
Saturday 10:18 pm
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>>37873

Depends, I'm hoping by the time I get there VR tech will be like in the movies and you can forget about your obsolete meat robot body, and spend all your time saving the world and fucking anime girls and femboy furries in the matrix.
>> No. 37879 Anonymous
19th March 2022
Saturday 10:23 pm
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>>37873
I'd rather be healthy up to my 60s then jump off a bridge, than live half my life with chronic conditions.

We often look back at people in the past for using lead pipes or lead based makeups, radium quack medicines, leaded petrol, mercury, arsenic all sorts of stuff that was slowly killing people and go "hahaha people in the past were so stupid", and we're still doing the exact same thing today. What's far worse is all the times we find out that the companies making these chemicals knew about the harm but decided to cover it up and actively try to discredit independent researches investigating the harm.

I try not to be too paranoid, but I try and take reasonable steps to reduce my exposure to a lot of things. For example the vast majority of my clothes are natural fibres, but I still use treated waterproofs for sports. All my pots and pans are stainless steels or iron or enamel. I dont drink milk at work because they buy it in tetra-pacs. I have a stash of canned food in the house because it's useful but I try to minimise how often I use them. I use roll-on deodorant rather than breathing in fumes from a spray can every morning.
Just all sorts of little changes like that, they don't massively inconvenience me but I think it's worth it to lessen the potential chronic exposure to various chemicals.
>> No. 37880 Anonymous
19th March 2022
Saturday 10:52 pm
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I have the solar water filter stuck in my head now. The flat shed roof can probably support it, stick two water tanks under; one for clean and one for rain run-off that can be pumped back up for distilling in the dry season. Could be a project.
>> No. 37881 Anonymous
20th March 2022
Sunday 12:23 am
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>>450081

This is mostly bullshit.

A small group of scientists with close links to ambulance-chasing law firms have spent decades trying to prove that anything with a fluorine atom is deathly dangerous. This isn't a new movement, dating back to the 1960s when tinfoil-hatters first started freaking out about fluoridated tap water. They have found very little evidence, just tenuous and statistically weak associations.

The first thing to note is that PFASs are (with the exception of firefighting foams) a precursor chemical rather than an end-use product. Your non-stick pan is coated in PTFE, which is made by polymerising TFE with PFOS. Scotchgard used to contain PFOS, but is now made with the much shorter-lived PFBS.

Industry is finding alternatives to mitigate against the risk of massive settlements being awarded by US jurors who have seen Erin Brockovich. If PFASs are harmful, they pose an absolutely negligible risk, especially at the tiny concentrations that most people will be exposed to.

>>37879

>they don't massively inconvenience me but I think it's worth it to lessen the potential chronic exposure to various chemicals.

Everything is made of chemicals. We tend to think of "chemicals" only in relation to synthetic chemicals that don't seem "natural", but the cells in your body don't make that distinction.

Plywood contains formaldehyde and will continue outgassing formaldehyde for many months after manufacture. People assumed that the problem was the glue which is usually a urea formaldehyde resin, but that assumption turned out to be entirely wrong. The free formaldehyde in the resin is entirely consumed during polymerisation when the glue is properly mixed and cured; the free formaldehyde is outgassed by the wood, which naturally contains formaldehyde.

We only realised this when California kept tightening the formaldehyde limit for plywood, to levels that the industry found impossible to adhere to. Everyone assumed that the glue had to be the problem, so nobody had bothered to test the wood. Plywood manufacturers realised that their efforts to reduce the amount of glue was actively counter-productive, because the natural wood was over the Californian legal limit.

The fresh, natural smell of a pine forest is in fact a cocktail of toxic VOCs at levels that would exceed the legal limits for a plastics factory. Nobody gives a shit about that and I don't think anyone should give a shit; we just need to realise that pretty much everything is a little bit toxic (including oxygen) and stop worrying so much. Environmental and safety regulations are set based on the precautionary principle and are unreasonably strict far more often than they are unreasonably lax.

Industry does occasionally perpetrate massive environmental crimes (I'm looking at you, Volkswagen), but they inevitably get caught out. The big environmental problems of our time are fully understood and recognised, we just can't be arsed fixing them. Dieselgate cost Volkswagen billions, but we aren't really addressing the fact that diesel engines are inherently dirty and we need to get rid of them all.
>> No. 37882 Anonymous
20th March 2022
Sunday 11:00 am
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>>37881
>This isn't a new movement, dating back to the 1960s when tinfoil-hatters first started freaking out about fluoridated tap water. They have found very little evidence, just tenuous and statistically weak associations.
The thing about fluoride is that it naturally occurs in a lot of aquifers, so by comparing data between regions with different natural water chemistries we had a very strong dataset to compare its effects on humans at a wide range of concentrations. We know that there are harmful effects from it at the high concentrations found in water flowing through geologically recent volcanic rock and ash deposits, and we know there are other harmful effects from getting too little.

The various PFOS PFAS etc. have been hugely difficult to study because researchers have found that humans around the world are almost universally exposed at some level, there is no control group to compare against. Animal models are problematic because lab rats don't live long enough to study the long term effects of chronic exposure, but in cellular studies it has been proven that these chemicals cause cellular and DNA damage.
The daily exposure to these chemicals is miniscule but the problem is that that they bioaccumulate over years and decades. Even though products you use as a consumer may not directly contain such chemicals, chemicals of concern can still be released via routes such as thermal or UV degradation. Release of PFOS and PFAS into the wider environment by manufacturers happens constantly, drinking water and animal products are found to be almost universally contaminated to some extent.

In certain groups of chemicals, individual chemicals used by industry are regularly put forward to government regulators with sufficient evidence of causing harm to warrant a ban on their use, but every time a chemical is banned industry switches to a slightly different molecular structure which is almost functionally identical but is not controlled by the regulation. This is a dance that has been going on for decades as in certain groups of chemicals, particularly ones such as bis-phenols there are thousands of similar chemicals to choose from, and there's no effective or practical means of banning entire groups.

>The fresh, natural smell of a pine forest is in fact a cocktail of toxic VOCs at levels that would exceed the legal limits for a plastics factory. Nobody gives a shit about that and I don't think anyone should give a shit; we just need to realise that pretty much everything is a little bit toxic (including oxygen) and stop worrying so much. Environmental and safety regulations are set based on the precautionary principle and are unreasonably strict far more often than they are unreasonably lax.
This is true but it's nevertheless still a good idea to keep your windows open as much as possible to ventilate your house for a few weeks whenever you buy new furniture or do any decorating. However minor the risk from sleeping in a room with high levels of VOCs may be, it's still sensible and reasonable to limit your exposure.
>> No. 37883 Anonymous
20th March 2022
Sunday 11:19 am
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>>37882
>and there's no effective or practical means of banning entire groups.
Bollocks. If they can blanket ban all psychoactive drugs they can do the same to those. It's like how for drug companies it's more profitable to never actually cure chronic illness; there's more political credit in being able to ban X or Y chemical occasionally but allow the polluters to continue poisoning people. I bet they'd find fewer people actively opposed to banning those things than opposed to banning psychoactive drugs too, only difference is the few who are, have very deep pockets.
>> No. 37884 Anonymous
20th March 2022
Sunday 11:27 am
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I got round all this by buying a decent water filter. Has changed my life, I drink more water during the day and tea tastes fantastic.

The American version called a Big Berkey seems better quality than the Doulton British Berkefeld, but is twice the price. Comes with water filters that filter out almost everything, you can optionally buy flouride filters too depending on where you live; they're not recommended for my water area, but some areas of the UK they are. Expensive but worth it; filters last about five years with normal use.
>> No. 37885 Anonymous
20th March 2022
Sunday 12:40 pm
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>>37882

>In certain groups of chemicals, individual chemicals used by industry are regularly put forward to government regulators with sufficient evidence of causing harm to warrant a ban on their use, but every time a chemical is banned industry switches to a slightly different molecular structure which is almost functionally identical but is not controlled by the regulation.

I'm not sure that's entirely fair. After the PCB ban, transformer oil either went back to mineral oil or used synthetic esters. Industrial use of volatile solvents has been massively reduced due to the introduction of ultrasonic cleaning, deionised water and a variety of other alternatives. R-12 did get replaced with R-134a which has no ozone depletion potential and far lower global warming potential, but even that is being replaced with hydrofluoroolefins with almost no global warming potential.

The big petrochemical firms can be aggressive lobbyists, but the regulators aren't totally daft.
>> No. 37893 Anonymous
21st March 2022
Monday 2:26 am
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>>37884

My grandparents used to have a filter tap, and I remember it massively improving the taste of our hard tap water. I never really thought about getting one of my own as an adult until you just prompted me.

I don't know how much these sorts of things are, but knowing my grandad it was probably a ludicrous expense that he justified by installing himself. I think I'd want to go full ultracunt and get one that dispenses the water ice cold, though.

The apocalypse side of my brain likes the idea of having that big tank that I presume you could fill with rainwater, though.
>> No. 37910 Anonymous
21st March 2022
Monday 8:30 pm
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>>37893
I've always fancied one of these https://www.quooker.co.uk - but this is decidedly lower-tech.

>rainwater


>> No. 37914 Anonymous
21st March 2022
Monday 11:38 pm
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>>37910
Where does all the manky shit go once it's been removed? Do you have to pour a bucket of AIDS down the sink every couple of weeks? Because if I had to look at that, it might well put me off the water that comes from the same machine.

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