PFAS - Do you care?

AGeese said:

But is there a pragmatic approach to reducing exposure without ceasing to exist?

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Of course. It has even less expensive than the standard options.

AGeese said:

.. Taking into consideration your feeders, drinkers, all sorts of poultry supplies, feed, feed bags, your land, etc.

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My waterer and feed bowls are stainless steel that were designed for other purposes bought at resale stores.

My chicken supplies are mixed - some plastic or plastic components and some nonplastic. I've been replacing things as I find good alternatives.

I haven't found a good solution for feed bags. Yet.

My land, thankfully, has only a little of endless procession of plastic in various stages of brittleness and shattering that I've been cleaning off my parent's farm for many years now. Its a sad, frustrating process. This is what started me on the anti-plastic bandwagon far more than any health concerns.

Later, my mother's health problems resulted in extensive searching for products that didn't have formaldehyde, parabans, bronopol, quinoline, Cl+Me, or black tar. Over a year of constant, very intense itching and endless dr visits with a fragile woman in her 80's in year 2020 before we discovered she was allergic to all of these plus a few other things. Why a dermatologist didn't do allergy testing mystifies me. Then months of trying to decrease exposure to these destroyed my faith in (or blindness toward) the effects of "safe" chemicals and products.

And for what? Usually for poorer results that cost more in every way except, sometimes, the initial purchase price.

saysfaa said:

My waterer and feed bowls are stainless steel that were designed for other purposes bought at resale stores.

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I like this. How do you empty frozen waterers? I find myself having to jump on my rubber ones repeatedly to remove the ice! It gets stuck to my stainless steel waterers until spring sometimes, or until I bring them inside (that’s a bit annoying and messy.)

Evadig said:

Not to argue, but I don't think disposable products are a good thing. It might be more convenient but I feel it has been one of the causes of the massive amount of junk in the stores. Everything is made to be disposable now. There's no quality in anything. And it's bad for the environment but I won't go there.

And I would hardly say our life expectancy has skyrocketed. People might live longer overall but there's often no quality of life. Look at the obesity and the drugs and the cancer. I've lost several family members in the last five years, people who should still be alive right now. And humans might live longer, but at what cost? To spend their last days in a nursing home? I'd rather not.

I admit I do use plastics but I am working on cutting them them out of my life as much as possible. Please know I didn't want to start an argument and I'm sorry if I've been impolite. Thank you .

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You were very polite and represented your viewpoints quite well. But thank you for being so considerate.

But, we went to disposables for a reason, sanitation in most cases or cost savings. Now, I wish we had better recycling on the plastics but again, it would negate the cost savings or more. Quality is still available but at a cost needed to produce it; the majority of buyers won't support a quality product even if its per use cost is less than the cheaper item. Most will not even support made in U.S. goods if there is a cost difference or even if there isn't.

The obesity is a choice as are the drugs, cancer is there but after sixty something is likely to kill your ass and in my opinion, better than a heart attack with no way to plan or say good bye. That is with lots of cancer in my family so.... The nursing homes, another choice by people who fail to plan or raising shitty kids that have no filial respect. Mom's ninety five, mind is not all there, combative without meds but we planned it so she could live out her life at home. Dad died ten years ago, not so lucky of an end, too much of an asshole and violent to boot as he got older. Wound up with the black sheep sister taking him in, getting his ass committed, and stripped of his assets while the nursing home kept him doped up till he died. The rest of us were in shock at how well she planned it and executed the plan.

So, remember before tearing down an old fence to find out why the fence was put up in the first place. Those glass bottles when I was a kid was in a time of cheap labor and small payroll taxes and small insurance costs. That nickel deposit in the sixties and seventies would likely be $0.75 cents now. But consider nickel cokes back then are $2.00 out of the vending machine. In the late sixties Tulsa had a Coke machine out side their bottling plant still selling at a nickel per bottle. Then the logistics, one way with the plastic bottle, two way with the cost of logistics and washing plus the hassle for retailers accepting bottle returns. Those bottles funded most of our movies and swimming pool costs as a kid. LOL If you found a quart glass bottle that was a cheap movie ticket.

AGeese said:

Before global warming it was the Green House Effect

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No, it was that we were supposed to freeze to death with global cooling or the population bomb. Then they changed it to global warming where we all died in the late nineties. Then the current climate change. LOL

SkyAJK said:

Don't get me started on those unfriendly stuff.
I used to listen to various channels about repurpose stuff...and before long I saw tiny plastics in my garden, my chickens eat many of those micro plastic and there is no way to prevent it.

The plastic plant pots breakdown by turned into powdery texture, the plastic taps that to block rain breakdowns and by the time I see that it was not removable from the ground.

Those cheap metal trellis in the garden rusted and those tiny size rusts fall into the ground. I am certain my chickens eat them somehow and whatever I eat their eggs. I feel there is no future whenever I think about it. That is just household uses let alone big corporation.

One way or another, we contaminated our environment publicly or privately, and we consumed it one way or another. We will live to 100 or 100+, but we will experience ill health with that old age. Very negative thought, I don't think about it anymore.

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Look, despite the chicken little sky is falling propaganda I see no reason to worry about plastics being ingested. No way in hell plastic is going to be broken down in the gut and cross cell boundaries into the body or blood stream. Molecules can traverse through blood and lymph, micro plastics never will. At most the plastic particles or dust is just inert filler.

The rust from the trellis, how is that going to hurt any living being when we depend on iron in our diet to survive?

The majority of the fear mongers are just making a buck off people's ignorance. Yeah, corporations will pollute but if you were aware of how the rules and regulations are created you would realize that the majority of them are written by the corporations themselves or their industry/lobby groups and are designed to limit competition and not promote safety or the environment

People should worry about the cheese burger in their greasy fist or the fact that they are a couch potato instead of worrying about propaganda spread by people that hate other people or want to limit population growth..

Fallenone05 said:

As long as plastic is cheap to make, I don't see any real changes being made. Unless Tupperware takes on the merc position and takes out another ceo, I don't see any change happening at all.

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PFAS is not a normal kind of plastic.
Its the stuff used in fire extinguishers, coatings against rain (high tec rain gear) Tefal pans and a lot more.

The research lab paid by our government (RIVM / NVWA) found huge /unhealthy amount of PFAS in several eggs from outdoor ranging chickens.

After this announcement some people with backyard chickens send in eggs to get tested. The research institute thought they would found high amounts of PFAs around a factory where PFAs products are produced. But the results were very unexpected. The researchers didn’t find a correlation.

Further investigation made it clear that earthworms were full of PFAS and this was the route how it got to the chickens and eggs.

More PFAS info , easy to translate with google/ AI:
https://ggdleefomgeving.nl/schadelijke-stoffen/pfas/

And this page is about chicken eggs:
https://ggdleefomgeving.nl/schadeli...n-van-eigen-kippen-bevatten-soms-te-veel-pfas

I (google) translated a few facts / paragraphs for you:
PFAS are poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances. It is a group of thousands of chemical substances. Well-known examples are PFOS, PFOA and GenX. PFAS are man-made. They are used in many products and production processes. More and more is known about how harmful the substances are to people and the environment.

An annoying property of PFAS is that they do not or hardly break down. Poorly degradable substances accumulate in nature and in plants, animals and people.

What do we know about PFAS and health?

A number of PFAS are harmful to humans. The substances can cause changes in your body. If you ingest PFAS for a long time, there is a greater chance that changes in your body will lead to noticeable health effects. Whether you will actually notice anything depends on how much you ingest over time. Of the effects we mention below, we expect the effects on the immune system to be the first. A lot is known about PFOA and PFOS in particular. For example, we know that PFOA and PFOS:

can be bad for your immune system;
can be bad for your liver and thyroid;
can cause higher cholesterol;
can cause high blood pressure and problems during pregnancy;
can be harmful to reproduction and the development of unborn children (slightly lower birth weight);
can possibly cause cancer. Research into years of high exposure to PFOA shows a link with kidney cancer, testicular cancer and possibly thyroid cancer.
We still know very little about most PFAS. PFAS differ in their properties, some are more harmful than others.

Al Gerhart said:

Look, despite the chicken little sky is falling propaganda I see no reason to worry about plastics being ingested. No way in hell plastic is going to be broken down in the gut and cross cell boundaries into the body or blood stream. Molecules can traverse through blood and lymph, micro plastics never will. At most the plastic particles or dust is just inert filler.

The rust from the trellis, how is that going to hurt any living being when we depend on iron in our diet to survive?

The majority of the fear mongers are just making a buck off people's ignorance. Yeah, corporations will pollute but if you were aware of how the rules and regulations are created you would realize that the majority of them are written by the corporations themselves or their industry/lobby groups and are designed to limit competition and not promote safety or the environment

People should worry about the cheese burger in their greasy fist or the fact that they are a couch potato instead of worrying about propaganda spread by people that hate other people or want to limit population growth..

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I hate it when people say things like you do. Climate change is so real that many more people get killed in nasty weather than say 10 or 20 years ago (more hurricanes, more floods, islands that drown, extreme periods of draught and extreme amount of rain in short period).

Chemicals, microplastics and PFAS are causing health problems, cancers etc. Only invisible until its too late. It’s not just the bees that die from it. My SIL and many more people in my country have a disease from exposure to chemicals like round-up. It’s called Parkinson’s disease. It didn’t exist before we started to use chemicals to grow crops for food and flowers. Especially people who work with flowers often get sick at a rather young age.

But one thing you say is very true. The average couch potato is living very unhealthy.

Please don’t try to tell us that there is nothing to worry about. + Factories should stop producing /using nasty poisons in their products.

AGeese said:

It seems to have for the states over the last 150 years, but... I can't really say I know many greats that didn't live as long. In fact it seems there have been many more health issues (at least that I'm ware of) with genertionally closer family. The other side to that is what killed them? Their coal mining job or their desk job?

But it would depend on what age, diet, and culture we want to compare to. There's some evidence of stone age people living to the ripe old age of 80, granted they would have been a lot tougher than any of us, and may have even stayed behind to die when the time came. But the modern 1st world lifesytle of sitting in the chair is all day and night, over eating nutritional poor food, and not getting fresh air and sun light seems to correlate with diesease.

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Average life expectancy for most of history seems to have been high 20s, low 30s. Did individuals live longer? Absolutely, that's the definitionally true of averages. Choosing to ignore infant deaths to some number of months or years will change that figure somewhat (several EU countries dfo this in their own reporting), but it only moves expectancy a couple of years.

By the 1950s, that life expectancy had risen to around 50. By the 2000s, low 70s.

Objectively, life *IS* better. Most of our population isn't living at the edge of starvation day to day. We don't, in the main, suffer widespread diseases or syndromes as result of nutritional deficiency like North Korea, parts of Africa, etc.

Are plastics responsible for that? In the main, no. But neither did they prevent it.

Have we, as a population, discovered new ways to be unhjealthy with our new found abundance? Absolutely.

There are trade offs with everything. Hopefully, our growing awareness of the problems with the so called "forever chemicals" will lead us to finding a superior solution - but returning to lead lined cans, glass bottles, or pre modern storage solutions ain't it. Aluminum has its own issues. As does paper + whatever its saturated with to keep moisture rich foods in and potential pathogens out (wax, silicone, etc).

In the grand scheme of things, the likehood of my suffering an adverse health event due to PFAs in my enveronment is less than the likelihood that I will suffer carpal tunnel as result of my BYC posts. I choose not to actively seek out PFAs. I make use of reusable storage where I can - we cook primarily with glass, earthenware, stainless, and cast iron. But I also like my smoker (which is measurably dangerous to long term health), and I do seal leftovers in tupperware (or equivalent). Avoiding waste has greater value to me than avoiding PFAs. [my risk assessment might change if I were 40 years younger and living in a densely urban environment "eating out" most meals].

Others will make different choices for themselves. and that's OK.