What the heck are PFAS?
PFASt and loose is an illustrated primer to help normal people better understand PFAS – what they are, how worried we should be, and what we can do about it.
Stuff from my house – types of products that often contain PFAS
Who are you to tell me this stuff?
I’m an educator, an engineer, and a scientist. But given my druthers, I’d rather sit in a dark room and write stuff. Ideally, stuff that people actually read and understand. Here, I try to bring you the important info in an approachable and sometimes humorous format.
Why are PFAS a problem?
Blah, blah, blah. You probably don’t really care what PFAS stands for. The thing you need to know is that it doesn’t go away unless someone pays a lot of money to make it go away.
Are PFAS really forever?
It depends on what you mean by forever. They don’t stay in people forever, and there are ways to destroy them. But if you put them in the environment, they don’t disappear without human intervention.
How worried should I be?
All that background stuff is nice, but what do normal people actually need to know, and what can they do?
Why is everyone talking about PFAS/”forever chemicals”?
Sensational news! Horrifying headlines! Complicated laws and requirements! PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” are in the news a lot these days. Everyone is talking about them, because there are some new laws and proposed laws to “do something” about them, people don’t all agree on what they mean, whether they are necessary, or what will happen.
Should I be paying attention, and if so, what’s the TL:DR?
I’d spell out what PFAS stands for, but I suspect that you don’t really care. However, if you care about the future of humanity, there are three things you should know about them:
- They last a really long time in the environment. Like forever. (Unless someone specifically spends a lot of money to take them out.)
- They are a big group of chemicals that come in a lot of shapes and sizes, and we don’t know much about most of them, except that they last a really long time in the environment.
- They are really useful in our stuff: water-resistant, grease-resistant, durable, and slippery in all the right ways.
Some have been shown to be pretty toxic at pretty low levels. And some people have been unknowingly drinking them at levels that aren’t so low. We’re still trying to understand what they mean for our health, but it’s pretty certain that people have gotten cancer and possibly died because of them in some places. Plus, the fact that they don’t ever go away naturally combined with the fact that we are making way more than could ever be destroyed means that they will keep building up out there.
So are we all screwed?
I don’t know about you, but I hope that humans live on the earth past the next quarterly earnings statement, and possibly even into the next century. But if we’re making a lot of something that doesn’t ever go away naturally and we can’t possibly pay to engineer it away, I think that means that we are screwing the next generations over.
But our generation can make a different choice. Many of the things we use PFAS for have alternatives available right now that we can use instead. If our generation commits to phasing most of them out (and addressing other pressing environmental issues), maybe humans can live on earth into the next century and beyond.
“Yeah, whatever. I don’t have time to read and translate all that science shit.”
Whoever
a normal person
Read about it here
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PFASt and loose - an illustrated primer for normal people 