As lawmakers around the world weigh bans of 'forever chemicals,” many manufacturers are pushing back, saying there often is no substitute.
As lawmakers around the world weigh bans of 'forever chemicals,” many manufacturers are pushing back, saying there often is no substitute.
Necessity is the mother of all inventions. When you take away their forever chemicals they will come up with new replacements quickly.
Often, the replacement will just be a derivative that isn't necessarily better. The narrative that will then go out through the media is: "We're no longer using this evil thing. Full stop." The replacement ends up just being something similar with similar problems. People stop paying attention because they assume the problem is solved, when it really isn't.
Example: there was that whole BPA plastic stink years back, now most bottles and food containers are "BPA Free"…but if you look into the chemical they used to replace BPA, it has the same synthetic estrogen problem BPA did. (Arbitrarily searched source: https://www.plasticstoday.com/study-says-bpa-free-plastics-still-show-estrogenic-activity )
In the case of replacement for water bottle or food container plastics, the best answer is to just not using them anymore, although glass and metal have their own difficulties, namely fragility and weight.
Enough countries use glass instead of plastic containers that I'm sure it isn't nearly as difficult as they'd make us think
I remember the horrible transition period of the terrible "energy saving" lightbulbs back when EU banned incandescent bulbs. Expensive, took minutes to warm up, had terrible colour rendition, filled with mercury and saved barely any energy. It felt like such a moronic decision.
Now with over 50 LED bulbs all using like a tenth of the energy they used to with lifespans so long I can't even remember when I last had to replace one, it feels totally worth it. Sometimes someone has to make you suffer before it gets better.
Though with chemicals in contact with food, hopefully they take it just a bit slower to make sure they are safe first.
Led was obviously on the horizon when those bans were passed, it was bad legislation to ban at that point when fluorescent was the only real option.