The most “amusing” example of PFA use I’ve heard of is in waterproofing the compostable paper single-use food containers, and most ridiculous of all, paper straws.
Sibling comment mentions using the stems of grain crops as natural drinking straws. This was done, in the past, and is the origin of the word "straws" for the modern plastic variety.
Historically, straws were also made from waxed paper.
The issue isn't that plastic straws were banned, it is that plastic straws were banned and no additional guidance was provided e.g., mandating paper straws with natural wax coatings. This combined with corporate greed led to companies putting out the most profitable product within constraints of the law-- health and environmental safety be damned.
The first paragraph of the following article describes both types of historical drinking straws:
Waxed straws used paraffin which is made from petroleum anyway, and they still get soaked through and collapse like the shitty PFAS coated straws. I know because they’re still made and I’ve used one, and the attic you posted mentions that draw back.
Straws made from plant stalks simply aren’t suited to mass distribution. They aren’t uniform, can’t easily be sanitized before packaging, they’re fragile, and still leak and get soaked.
The problem isn’t “corporate greed” it’s that there aren’t good alternatives to plastic for disposable straws.
The problem isn't really petroleum. We have more than enough petroleum for straws. And the carbon in paraffin is not in the atmosphere, which is good.
The problem with plastic straws, if you believe their opponents (whose claims I have not evaluated), is that they are persistent pollutants that harm animals. If paraffin-waxed paper straws are not, that's an improvement, petroleum or no.
You ever try eating your fast food on the train/subway/bus. The same situation exists there too.
The problem isn't the cars. The problem is that we don't all live in some fantasy where people have time to sit down and eat their food and drink not on the go. If it wasn't the straws people would be complaining about the plastic coffee cup lids.
The first hot dog man provided nice white gloves for his customers to hold the wieners and toppings with. They were supposed to be returned after use, but evidently they were too fancy and many customers would hang onto them. His wife suggested serving the wieners in a bun instead.
Except you see people drinking through straws while sitting down, too. So weird. I’ve always thought of straws as things only small children and maybe the disabled need. Like if you don’t even have the motor control to merely bring a glass up to your lips. I mean, even while walking and moving I somehow seem to be coordinated enough to sip liquid from a glass. I don’t know, maybe I’m an acrobat or something.
This might be a USA thing but a lot of times in restaurants they’ll bring me my drink with a straw in it and I can’t help but think “WTF do I look like a six year old?”
I used to also but then I started thinking how obscene it is that the piece of plastic will be around for thousands of years just so I can have slightly more convenience for an hour or two.
I guess. It’s a minimal amount of material that’s made from a waste product anyway. Pottery and glass last just as long, or longer.
Something made of cellulose that breaks down more easily would be better, so long as it comes from agricultural byproducts.
*edit I’m saying this might be better because some light plastics like straws end in in storm drains and on road sides, so something that breaks down over time into organic compounds might be preferable.
I am drinking something without a straw right now and maybe I just have a sophisticated technique but I seem to be putting the liquid into my mouth back over my tongue to the same overall place it goes when using a straw?
You said it yourself, there aren't good mass distributable alternatives to plastic straws. I never thought banning them was a meaningful step towards sustainability, but maybe straws should be labor intensive and left for the service industry to figure out as opposed to being mass distribution-friendly.
That'd be preferable to more PFAS, at the least.
Yes. At most they should have levied a tax on them in relation to their (alleged) impact. Outright bans are seldom as economically efficient as an appropriate tax.
> This combined with corporate greed led to companies putting out the most profitable product within constraints of the law-- health and environmental safety be damned
I didn’t expect capitalism to be Fermi’s Filter, but kind of makes sense.
Those still fall apart in liquid after a few minutes and the wax is made of petroleum. I’m not sure plastic straws were ever really a problem worth solving, given the trade offs.
They're definitely usually made of paraffin, and every one I've encountered falls apart quickly. There are two coffee shops near me that use them and they both fall apart within 15 minutes.
I highly recommend Dr Tung's smart floss. The floss is made of polyester fibers, and it is coated with either beeswax or plant wax and activated charcoal. The packaging is all recyclable or compostable. Most importantly, PTFE and PFAS free.
I went with silk floss. I figured if I'm going to try to avoid endocrine disruptors I might as well avoid plastic too. It works just as well for me. It's coated in candelilla wax.
It's well known (and documented) that PTFE fumes from cooking can be deadly to birds. I don't think "the most nontoxic" is anywhere near accurate, approximately or not.
Not that that same risk applies to dental floss (I don't think many people heat their dental floss to a few hundred degrees), but your statement was more general than that.
Pretty much anything produces toxic fumes if you get it hot enough. Air produces nitrogen dioxide, for example, water produces ozone, and table salt produces chlorine (and sodium vapor, of course, but that condenses before you have a chance to breathe it). Those fumes, which require temperatures far above cooking temperatures to form, aren't PTFE; they're a cocktail of nasty fluorocarbons which are bad for you too, just not immediately fatal the way they are for birds.
So "the most nontoxic" is pretty darn accurate. PTFE is substantially less toxic than air, water, table salt, cellulose, polypropylene, or pretty much anything else you're likely to put in your mouth.
You would have to heat the PTFE to almost glowing to make it emit fumes.
If you tried that with oil you would have an enormous cloud of smoke - and the smoke from the oil is MORE toxic than the smoke from the PTFE.
So yah, the most nontoxic is completely correct.
And BTW, it is far safer for your birds to use PTFE cookware vs oil because you would have to get the PTFE much hotter vs the oil for there to be any issue.
It's true that any foodsafe oil has a smokepoint lower than the temperature needed to degrade PTFE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_chemistry_of_cooking#S... lists temperatures from 175 degrees for butter to 257 degrees for soybean oil), but in some cases only by a little bit.
I don't think it's necessarily true that cooking with PTFE is safer, even if the smoke is more toxic to birds, because the PTFE fumes are invisible, so you can kill your birds before you realize that there's a problem. It's not likely but it's possible.
I also don't think it's really true that you have to heat PTFE "to almost glowing". WP says PTFE starts to decompose around 350 degrees (science) and is already a health problem for birds above 250 degrees, killing parakeets at 280 degrees (after four hours of exposure, which was longer than it took burning butter fumes to kill the parakeets). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene#Safety. Things don't start to glow until about 525 degrees, or a little hotter if they're very white.
The difference between 280 degrees and 525 degrees is even bigger than it sounds in terms of heat input. It's 145 degrees, yes, but at those temperatures radiation (in the infrared) is the dominant form of heat transfer, and radiation is proportional to the fourth power of temperature; at 280 degrees blackbody radiation is 5300 watts per square meter, while to get something up to 525 degrees you have to pump in 23000 watts per square meter, more than a factor of four.
The summary is that it takes four times as much heat per minute to make your teflon skillet glow as it takes to heat it up enough to kill your parakeet in four hours, which is about the same temperature that soybean oil starts smoking at, so if you have birds you might want to think about switching to cast iron, or at least always using abundant oil on your teflon so you're guaranteed to notice if you go outside the safe temperature region.
None of this is relevant to bike chain lube or dental floss.
I don't think the problem is only with smoke particles; I think gaseous fluorocarbons produced are sufficiently toxic to birds. (In humans they cause polymer fume fever, but the humans recover after a day or two.)
It's kinda funny to say this because one of the early problems with PTFE was the nerves in the hands of people handling PTFE-insulated aircraft wiring dying - due to residues from manufacturing in the PTFE. Sure, the polymer itself is non-toxic and non-reactive as can be. Everything that went into it is absolutely not. The way to minimize that is expensive process and quality control => don't use cheap polymers!
This was also the case with agent orange. Sloppy, rushed production led to it being absolutely full of unintentional contaminants from the manufacturing process.
Microplastics of PTFE, particularly fibers, provoke the same sort of response as similar asbestos, for the same reasons. A smooth PTFE surface, e.g. in a surgical implant, evokes a completely different response.
So, no: PTFE can be safe, but is not necessarily. Convexity matters.
The principle, as I recall, is that when a nanoparticle or nanofiber lodges somewhere, poking a membrane or anyway intruding, immune system cells attack it with increasingly caustic chemicals, trying to break it down. If it is too stable, they fail, but don't give up. It is this inflammatory response that underlies asbestos's toxicity.
A smooth, locally flat surface does not, by itself, provoke that immune response, and chemically PTFE doesn't draw attention. But PTFE happily adopts any shape. So, maybe nobody makes PTFE microfibers or nanoparticles on purpose, but that doesn't mean there aren't any.
The short story is that tests showing PTFE surgical implants don't evoke an inflammatory response do not tell you much about effects of PTFE in different circumstances. Likewise: people can wear metal jewelry for years, but that doesn't mean you can poke a knife through somebody with no effect.
There was a recent report that those mesh tetrahedral tea bags each release literally billions of plastic nanoparticles into your tea. That cannot have been deliberate. I wonder if those have been banned or recalled yet...
Talk about cutting off one’s own nose.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33770693/