It's raining PFAS in South Florida – study
75 points by Jimmc414 18 hours ago | 37 comments
  • Jimmc414 18 hours ago |
  • nayuki 17 hours ago |
    Related: https://youtu.be/-ht7nOaIkpI?t=699 . MyLifeOutdoors - "Your Gear is Poisoning You! (Not Clickbait)" (14m21s) [2024-10-23]

    He mentions finding PFBA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorobutanoic_acid ) in a pristine mountain stream, most likely because the chemical evaporates and gets carried by the air.

  • drawkward 16 hours ago |
    Don't worry, DeSantis will just enact legislation or make an Exec Order to forbid government employees talking about it. Problem solved!
    • c-linkage 16 hours ago |
      There is a far simpler solution. Just stop measuring it.
      • montagg 15 hours ago |
        That's very likely. One of the proposals in Project 2025 is to defund NOAA. https://www.axios.com/2024/07/20/project-2025-trump-what-to-...
        • jeff_carr 14 hours ago |
          Trump can just take the whole NOAA budget himself now and replace them with a legal pad and a black sharpie. I assume that's the plan. Say, we can just steal anything from any budget now right?
    • barbazoo 15 hours ago |
      Or do it like Alberta and celebrate the pollutant instead

      https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/10/18/news/alberta-ucp...

      • drawkward 12 hours ago |
        Wow.
  • CSMastermind 15 hours ago |
    > Miami has been identified as the US city with the 3rd highest levels of PFAS pollution in groundwater among 44 locations assessed

    Do we know why?

    I don't think a lot of manufacturing happens near Miami.

    • ggm 15 hours ago |
      In '78 I worked as a general dogsbody doing water quality analysis around the river forth estuary. Suspended solids, phosphate & nitrates from fertiliser factories and manufacturing alongside sewage outfalls were measured right upstream, to tidal limits and from the top north shore to the south. 100km or more. My constant tl;dr is that stuff moves, and whilst nothing like the tidal zone, groundwater is anything but static.

      My case? Estuarine. The Biscayne aquifer is limestone. Highly porous. Water will travel as water does. If anything even close has contamination its getting in, if there's transport from surface water into the aquifer. The stuff here says urban canals and groundwater flows definitely feed in. Any firestation testing foam? Its in. PFAS contamination from airport fire testing is a thing.

      https://www.evergladesfoundation.org/post/water-on-earth-exp...

    • pengaru 14 hours ago |
      This article goes into some of alleged sources:

      https://news.fiu.edu/2023/how-pfas-forever-chemicals-are-get...

    • greenavocado 13 hours ago |
      Firefighting foam used in airports is a major source that dwarfs the rest
    • alejohausner 11 hours ago |
      The article just below mentions two major sources:

      - failing septic systems, and spilled wastewater. Lots of household products like food packaging and carpets are coated with oil- and water-repellent PFAs. When you wash these products, the PFAs end in the waste water.

      - airports and military bases use a fire-fighting foam that is made from a PFA.

      Also, Kennedy space center uses fire-fighting foams (although it's far from Miami, but then again Florida is one big aquifer).

  • nonelog 15 hours ago |
    Distilled water is the purest drinking water you can get on this planet (and you just need a $150 distiller producing about 1 gallon of clean water per run).
    • sottol 14 hours ago |
      It's also devoid of minerals so you might want to supplement, if you mean to consume distilled water.
    • mschuster91 14 hours ago |
      It's also unsafe to drink in larger quantities, as is seawater. Both will let you live for a few days if there is no other source of water, but anything longer and you're looking at serious levels of minerals mismatch.
      • pfdietz 14 hours ago |
        It's safe to drink if you're eating a balanced diet, since food will provide all the minerals you need.

        In very large quantities it's unsafe, but that's true of any kind of water.

        • mschuster91 14 hours ago |
          > It's safe to drink if you're eating a balanced diet, since food will provide all the minerals you need.

          And that's a pretty ambitious assumption. A lot of people don't eat anything even close to a balanced diet, as evidenced by insane obesity rates or the return of malnutrition diseases like scurvy.

          [1] https://news.sky.com/story/scurvy-is-re-emerging-due-to-mode...

          • pfdietz 14 hours ago |
            But we're talking about minerals here, common ones, not things like vitamins or iodine.

            Which mineral do you propose will be found in ordinary tap water but not in food?

            Anyway, I challenge you to come up with published evidence for your initial assertion there. I find it highly dubious.

            EDIT: I looked up calcium. The average tap water in the US contains about 50 mg/L of calcium. The minimum daily requirement for calcium intake is 1000 mg (1300 mg for teens). If you are depending on tap water for this mineral you're going to be in sad shape.

            • BoiledCabbage 13 hours ago |
              > It's safe to drink if you're eating a balanced diet, since food will provide all the minerals you need

              I mean, not OP, but you're the one who made the initial assertion. Maybe you should be the one providing published evidence?

              • pfdietz 13 hours ago |
                The way it works is that rebuttals need only be at the level of evidence of the initial claim. Hitchen's Razor: "what is presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence."

                His claim is absurd on its face, due to the small quantity of minerals actually in water, compared to what is required. Food must be providing most of that input.

                I'm curious where this nonsense came from. It feels like another variety of nutrition superstition.

            • pcthrowaway 13 hours ago |
              Fluoride is the only thing I can think of which is typically only encountered in municipal water in a typical diet.

              Most toothpaste has fluoride also, but not sure if the benefits are the same.

          • kevin_thibedeau 13 hours ago |
            Obesity isn't caused by bad diet. It's caused by overconsumption for a low effort lifestyle.
            • its_down_again 12 hours ago |
              Respectfully, what experience or expertise backs your statement? As someone who has personally faced obesity and struggled with weight management over the years, I have a somewhat different perspective. Growing up, I was an obese child and even made the varsity tennis team as an underclassman at an obese BMI. I tried dieting, cardio, and nothing really helped me lose weight. I eventually found some success with a keto diet before my senior tennis season. However, I found I had to start eating carbs to stay competitive, which led to weight fluctuations but also better performance.

              Even now, as an adult, I find weight management complex—I've been close to obesity while running up to 80 miles a week in marathon training, hitting a 3:02 marathon (6:58/mile pace). After finishing the marathon and cutting back to 40-50weekly mileage, my weight just naturally decreased. My appetite was much less when I wasn't running such high mileage. For me, it's a journey that seems to involve many factors beyond just low physical effort or overconsumption.

              • Vken 11 hours ago |
                Obesity is a multifaceted issue that many people misunderstand in a patronizing if not malicious way.

                For many they wish the reason was as simple as them just being lazy, because then they would only need to tackle that one simple flaw. But it goes beyond having a lazy/sedentary lifestyle. Does it contribute? Absolutely, but there are examples of lazy/sedentary people who adopts an unhealthy diet and lifestyle who are on the opposite extreme in BMI. To treat the obesity epidemic in the States as an individual failing on all who find themselves in that category is to downplay the systemic failings that have allowed this to happen.

                It's kind of weird how this is simply another avenue people take to put themselves on a "I'm better than you" pedestal.

              • kevin_thibedeau 6 hours ago |
                I was a skinny fit person until a year ago when a significant event caused me serious injury that has required a reduction in my intense exercise. I'm still nominally "skinny" but pants are getting tighter after gaining 15+ pounds. I haven't changed my diet, which is fine by my standards but I don't obsess over it. Should I assume the role of a victim without agency and blame the food or the reduction in energy consumption without reducing energy intake?

                That's what the orthorexic religion is really all about: Nobody should be held accountable for their decisions because of the other who did something bad to them. This belief system doesn't want people to seek real solutions to their issues because that reduces the size of the flock who can be marketed to.

      • jajko 14 hours ago |
        Consuming seawater is generally a bad idea, people died of thirst before drinking the material in which they swam for some time (if documentaries are correct, haven't faced this myself)
        • greenavocado 13 hours ago |
          Seawater has a high salt concentration—about 3.5%, or 35 grams of salt per liter. The human kidneys are limited in how much salt they can filter out; they need a lower salt concentration than what seawater has to effectively expel salt. When someone drinks seawater, the kidneys are forced to use more water from the body to dilute and excrete the excess salt. This actually leads to a net loss of water, worsening dehydration instead of hydrating the body.
    • hobs 14 hours ago |
      While that's true, effectively the same process is occurring to create rain, and if rain is contaminated so will your distillation stream.

      You'd need to do something that destroys it entirely if you want to remove the lighter molecules.

    • greenavocado 14 hours ago |
      VEVOR distiller is a lot cheaper than that
    • rozap 13 hours ago |
      PFBA is transported in rain and snow. That suggests that it sticks around in the vapor and condenses back into the liquid. There's no escaping it except to break it down, but that's the crux of the issue - the PFAS class of molecules are extremely energy intensive to break apart, which is why they don't break down naturally.

      Important to note that while the EPA says names acceptable level of 4PPT (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/14/epa-drin...) for drinking water, they name that level out of pragmatism. They found health effects at every level, and the acceptable level is actually closer to 0.

      Also distillation is very energy intensive. A solar still makes sense if you need to do this a lot and live in a sunny place.

    • pvaldes 13 hours ago |
      Can't be drank without suffering serious diarrhea. People should expect to discover more nasty surprises now that scientists had being fired, and 'uneducated' is the goal
      • r00fus 10 hours ago |
        Entire countries survived on distilled water for decades (Hong Kong, etc). Electrolytes can be readily gotten by solid foods.
        • pvaldes 9 hours ago |
          Trump was on power for less than a day, and here we are, talking about those electrolytes that plants crave, and forgetting about how osmosis really works. That was fast.

          Funny times ahead.

  • _DeadFred_ 13 hours ago |
    I'm supper torn. I came up with a product that would probably sell well. It's not really needed (solves a simple issue people can take care of with a different product but just don't because it's inconvenient), and just dumps PFAS into houses (like that is kind of the product). As a hippie I haven't moved forward with it but at the same time I'd really like more money to help my adult children out. The idea came after learning of other products that just straight dump PFAS into the environment and thinking WTF this is horrible, I mean if we are willing to do that why not just XYZ (my product). It literally came from 'this is horrible'. And yet hippie me is torn because $$$. Us humans are not good at this stuff.
    • esperent 8 hours ago |
      Caring about the environment and about not poisoning your customers isn't "hippie", it's being a good human.