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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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UK Politics
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I don't think many people realise what a disaster this is and what it shows us about how pervasive toxic substances are in our lives.
Nearly everything that is in this sludge is either something that has passed through the human body, or come into contact with it. After being reincorporated into the food chain through use as fertiliser it goes through this process once again, joining the intake of 'virgin' chemicals added during manufacturing, packaging and transport. It's cumulative; much like dumping the old contents of your hoover back onto the floor each time you need to hoover it again. It's debatable whether this constant recycling is better or worse than getting bioaccumulated in the body, like microplastics do in the brain for example, but either way it's bad.
PFAS are just one group of harmful chemicals that we are currently aware of and are used in food packaging, toilet paper, cosmetics and clothing among other things. They are non-combustible, so forget about dealing with the problem by incinerating stuff. Dumping them into the sea isn't going to get rid of them either as they are mobile in the water cycle, which is why you now find them in rain and groundwater.
Farmers need to put the fertility and water back into the land which was exported when their crop left the field. But so many pollutants and untested chemicals have been introduced into the system that it's now impossible to do responsibly, even if you want to. Seriously, it's a losing battle at the moment.
It's not the first time that we've discovered that we've been unknowingly poisoning ourselves and it won't be the last.
We need much more restriction on what chemicals and materials can be produced in the first place. It's no good waiting for generations until someone finds a causality in the data, there is public outrage, a campaign, a national law passed and then an international agreement. And there's no way to clean this stuff up once it's out there.
If we're going to use synthetic substances, they need to be proven safe before they are used on a global mass scale. Thats how it's done in medicine. Yes, it will slow us down. But how much is it slowing us down diagnosing and treating the nearly 1 in 2 people in the UK who end up with cancer?
No, what we need is to abolish capitalism, because as long as these practices make money (and they do, lots), those who benefit don't give a single fuck about the environment nor any of us or the plastics in our brains (or theirs for that matter, like with all the other rules and laws they've set up for society, they genuinely think they're above being impacted because they can afford to be, in this case by being able to buy better food and get better healthcare), and they will NEVER act to improve things unless it makes them more money.
Congradulations, you have replaced the problem statement with one 100 times larger, and offered no actual solutions to achiving the larger problem statement (the abolition of capitalism) or the smaller (Flouro-Carbons)