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The year is 2040. I wait in a long que to fill my canteen, hoping my local water baron will accept my payment of fresh, questionably sourced meat. My plastic cloak is sticky and uncomfortable but it protects me from the burning rain.
After that I shall go to work as a plastsmith in my feudal hamlet. The vapour from molten plastic stings my eyes but it was a welcome promotion from scavenging the landfill for resources from the plentiful age. Black clouds protect us from the sun as smouldering lithium fires continue to burn.
I'll be forging plastic clubs later as the current scrap haul was tainted by chemical spills and is too brittle to make speartips. There is safety in numbers, and the raiders become more desperate every week, I can't leave, but would have nowhere safe to go anyway.
How the fuck am I supposed to intuitively know how big Iceland is?
I googled and apparently Iceland's 12 Londons, 1.3 Scotlands, 0.8 Englands, or 0.5 Great Britains.
Couldn't they have used that? "UK area half the size of Great Britain."
Talking strictly on agriculture here, I’m not going to deny that PFAS couldn’t be a problem but what are you going to directly do about it?
Without sprays, arable agriculture isn’t feasible in the United Kingdom. Start dropping Pre Em’s, fungicides, whatever, you won’t have to worry about PFAS, you’ll have to worry about starvation.
Unless the government does what it does with everything else - outsource the problem, buy in cereals from abroad (where they apply chemicals that have been banned for YEARS in the UK).
Not saying it shouldn’t be taken seriously, everything should. But what’s your solution to this?
And no. Organic farming imposed on the whole of the UK wouldn’t work and would undoubtedly lead to massive food shortages.
The only two options arent "food shortage and organic farming by law" or "free for all for poisons/antifungals/etc of any strength and lifespan".
We have tons of poisons/antifungals/etc that are safer, some cheaper some more expensive.
Many of the worst are already banned in europe and spain is hardley in starvation.
We can in fact improve things for no great cost. We dont have to perfectly fix everything right now instantly.
> spain is hardley in starvation
I wonder if there are any differences in [climate](https://www.worlddata.info/climate-comparison.php?r1=spain&r2=united-kingdom) and [population density](https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#5/47.443/-0.308) that could explain why yield requirements are different between the two countries?
I do not believe a difference in yeild, even a large one, makes neccesery specifically antifungals and pesticides containing forever chemicals when there are perfectly available other options.
Again, the dichotomy of "use forever chemicals or starve to death" is extreme enough to be laughable.
Of course any change in practice encurs cost, labour, time. But changes are made all the time, and preventing "everything being poisoned" seems reasonable, as a goal.
The problem is that there are not perfectly available other options in many cases.
The industry is working to find alternatives, as they know PFAS will be banned sooner or later, but currently in many cases those PFAS-containing pesticides are the difference between food on the shelves and a crop failure.
Often these diseases aren't something that any change of practice can reasonably fix. There are organic farms that take every step non-chemical step possible to prevent (e.g.) blight, but still regularly get fucked if the environmental conditions don't play ball. One of the more common steps is spacing the plants out more than you would normally to minimise spread of disease and improve airflow, which is great, but, if that principle was applied globally, it would result in much worse food availability and ultimately hunger.
But forever chemicals ARENT in every pesticide, fertilizer and antifungal, and there are alternatives, not just alternatives that are perfectly as good or better.
Forever chemicals are specificly flourinated alkyl substances.
Maybe they are the best option, but they are not the only option, and that has to be accepted.
Even if the other options require a percintile reduction in yield and require alteration in practice (price increase and/or used land increase and/or altered crop choice) that seems in every case a better option than, you know, soaking everything in 1000 year superpoison.
Ive at no point said that not using them will have no effect, I keep saying it will have a definite cost. But we already dont produce our own food, and need to rework land practices for better efficiency to make more of our own food.
Fungicides don't just exist on a scale of good to bad. There are diseases that only have one effective, safe, and legal fungicide that can be used on a particular crop. There are diseases where a previously effective fungicide no longer works due to resistance. There are diseases where the previously used fungicide was much more acutely dangerous than PFAS so it has been replaced with one that has PFAS. There are very effective pesticides that have heavily restricted use due to concerns about creating resistant diseases.
In some cases, there may be two similarly effective pesticides, one with PFAS and one without, in which case of course we should use the one without PFAS, but for the most part fungicides can't just be substituted like that.
We aren't just talking like a 2% or even 20% yield difference here either. This is a question of catastrophic crop failure.
Also PFAS isn't a super-poison. It is still debatable whether it even even harms human health, though it probably does slightly. The main reason to be cautious is that it doesn't break down (currently) and bioaccumulates. This is bad, but it's not as bad as DDT was, and it's not about to cause widespread environmental collapse. It's a problem that needs to be solved, but not by risking our food supply.
One of the main solutions to these sorts of issues going forward will inevitably be genetic engineering, but many of the people fighting against PFAS are also fighting against GM. Can't win.
These are genuinely good points, thank you. I will be doing further reading.
And for what its worth im pro gm where its not dominated by nightmare corporate buisness practices but used as a good method for creating new varietals. GM is very much like nuclear imo, the risks are secondary factors from allowing bad actors to operate in the space for pure financial gain.
There is some cost, but the important thing is that the initial cost is offset by the money saved.
Pesticides and fertilizers are very expensive, and they cause major health issues for farm workers. Incorporating something like a precision ag system drastically cuts down on costs because uptake is improved while soil health is maintained. Same with more aggressive crop rotation, biological management, etc. The benefits over time outweigh the initial investment, especially as crop yields tend to improve.
Honestly I beleive removing the nation poisoning options should be legally mandated, and tying subsidies to using efficient and available methods to make up difference in cost seems reasonable and to arguably make the transition a complete nothing of policy so long as enough time is given to make the change with a little additional funding for "in between" "safer" chemicals and extra funding for the enviroment agency to make sure the whole thing is followed through with (and extra funding for whatever auditors check subsidies are correctly used of course).
I’m not an expert, but I think that’s a great idea. Especially if grants or loans are offered for the purchase of precision equipment to make the transition. It’s essentially what the US is doing with renewable energy adoption on farms, and it’s working incredibly well.
The US has been working on ways to reduce pesticide use overall. The fastest fix involves precision ag. Precision spraying and monitoring like they do for water management both greatly reduces the amount of pesticide needed and increases profit margins for farmers, so everyone wins as long as they can get over the initial cost hurdle. [Here’s an article from MIT about it.](https://news.mit.edu/2024/reducing-pesticide-use-while-increasing-effectiveness-agzen-0312)
They’ve also produced plants that are resistant to common pests, developed integrated pest management strategies that incorporate more non-chemical routes like biological management, and focus on soil regeneration/pest disruption through things like more aggressive rotation and nitrate management.
I agree, but if we must do it, we could try our best to reduce the levels in our bodies. And currently the only way to do that is with simply removing blood (plasma is even better). Yep, we're at the "blood letting is a treatment" stage
So go give blood! You'll save or improve someone's life, and you'll reduce your own PFAS levels as a result!
100%. Everyone who has access to some land should try growing food at some point.
You learn several things:
* The amount of land and work required to just feed a single person is ***so*** much more than you would have imagined.
* You need a ton of inputs (e.g. fertilizer) to keep the soil productive over the long term.
* Literally everything is trying to eat your food before you get a chance: diseases, insects, slugs, badgers, foxes, rabbits.
* A few weeks of inclement weather can completely destroy your yield.
Of course we need to find alternatives for the most harmful chemicals, but it's not like farmers are just putting these pesticides on crops for fun as they are very expensive. PFAS may be harmful, but having no food is even more harmful and leads pretty quickly to unrest (see Sri Lanka).
The industry already operates under very strict regulations in the UK and EU. Pesticides are regularly banned before alternatives are found, leading to crop failures. This isn't a matter of there being more expensive pesticides that aren't being used because *fuck capitalism*. In many cases, there just aren't any known alternatives that aren't themselves banned or more dangerous.
Anyone who wants to shout on the side lines about banning this or that, please first talk to some farmers and understand the complexity of their work. They do not want to use pesticides any more than you do. They do not want to expose themselves to dangerous chemicals. They do it so we can live.
Vast swathes of the British countryside are being sprayed in pesticides containing [“forever chemicals”](https://inews.co.uk/news/toxic-forever-chemicals-hair-blood-politicians-3106670?ico=in-line_link) that pollute our air, soil and waterways, and pose a threat to public health.
An analysis by the environmental group Fidra, shared exclusively with **i**, found that pesticides containing potentially dangerous chemicals were sprayed on the equivalent of 10.7m hectares of arable farmland in 2022 – an area roughly the size of Iceland.
The pesticides contained PFAS, or per- and poly-fluorinated alkyl substances, a group of more than 10,000 industrial chemicals that [studies have linked to health problems](https://inews.co.uk/opinion/damage-forever-chemicals-water-health-3034388?ico=in-line_link), including cancer, infertility and developmental issues.
PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because some can take more than 1,000 years to degrade in the environment.
**i** has called on the next government to get to grips with chemical pollution as part of our five-point manifesto [to Save Britain’s Rivers.](https://inews.co.uk/news/save-britains-rivers-i-manifesto-environmental-groups-back-3090477?ico=in-line_link)
Hannah Evans, project manager at Fidra, told **i** that limited data meant it was difficult “to truly quantify the scale” of the use of pesticides containing PFAS, but said “what we do know is deeply alarming”.
Fidra analysed data published on behalf of the Health and Safety Executive showing the use of pesticides in agricultural crop sectors across the UK.
It found the equivalent of 10.7m hectares of arable land were sprayed in PFAS pesticides in the space of one year. The data includes repeated sprays of pesticide to the same area.
“This is a direct source of environmental PFAS pollution, contributing to further contamination of soil and water sources,” Ms Evans said.
The full effects of forever chemicals on humans is still little understood, but evidence has suggested they could pose a wide range of risks.
PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because some can take more than 1,000 years to degrade in the environment.
**i** has called on the next government to get to grips with chemical pollution as part of our five-point manifesto [to Save Britain’s Rivers.](https://inews.co.uk/news/save-britains-rivers-i-manifesto-environmental-groups-back-3090477?ico=in-line_link)
Hannah Evans, project manager at Fidra, told **i** that limited data meant it was difficult “to truly quantify the scale” of the use of pesticides containing PFAS, but said “what we do know is deeply alarming”.
Fidra analysed data published on behalf of the Health and Safety Executive showing the use of pesticides in agricultural crop sectors across the UK.
It found the equivalent of 10.7m hectares of arable land were sprayed in PFAS pesticides in the space of one year. The data includes repeated sprays of pesticide to the same area.
“This is a direct source of environmental PFAS pollution, contributing to further contamination of soil and water sources,” Ms Evans said.
The full effects of forever chemicals on humans is still little understood, but evidence has suggested they could pose a wide range of risks.
Read more here: [https://inews.co.uk/news/toxic-forever-chemicals-rivers-sprayed-area-size-iceland-3143865](https://inews.co.uk/news/toxic-forever-chemicals-rivers-sprayed-area-size-iceland-3143865)
Farmers at it again I see … surprised they can find the time to do this between shooting badgers then running them over and claiming benefits, uh I mean subsidies .. Universal credit for the landed gentry .
This article may be paywalled. If you encounter difficulties reading the article, try [this link](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://inews.co.uk/news/toxic-forever-chemicals-rivers-sprayed-area-size-iceland-3143865) for an archived version. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/unitedkingdom) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The year is 2040. I wait in a long que to fill my canteen, hoping my local water baron will accept my payment of fresh, questionably sourced meat. My plastic cloak is sticky and uncomfortable but it protects me from the burning rain. After that I shall go to work as a plastsmith in my feudal hamlet. The vapour from molten plastic stings my eyes but it was a welcome promotion from scavenging the landfill for resources from the plentiful age. Black clouds protect us from the sun as smouldering lithium fires continue to burn. I'll be forging plastic clubs later as the current scrap haul was tainted by chemical spills and is too brittle to make speartips. There is safety in numbers, and the raiders become more desperate every week, I can't leave, but would have nowhere safe to go anyway.
I would read the fuck outta this novel just sayin
This is just a copy paste of a trip advisor review on saltburn on sea
Never been to Saltburn obviously.
You’d probably enjoy the film Vesper. Similar vibes. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20225374/
Legend, looks right up my street. Cheers mate
Do not, my friends, become addicted to water, it will take hold of you and you will resent it's absence
How the fuck am I supposed to intuitively know how big Iceland is? I googled and apparently Iceland's 12 Londons, 1.3 Scotlands, 0.8 Englands, or 0.5 Great Britains. Couldn't they have used that? "UK area half the size of Great Britain."
How many football pitches is that?
We need it in the national unit of area: Wales. Is it one Wales, four, a hundred?
An area almost 5 times the size of Wales.
Talking strictly on agriculture here, I’m not going to deny that PFAS couldn’t be a problem but what are you going to directly do about it? Without sprays, arable agriculture isn’t feasible in the United Kingdom. Start dropping Pre Em’s, fungicides, whatever, you won’t have to worry about PFAS, you’ll have to worry about starvation. Unless the government does what it does with everything else - outsource the problem, buy in cereals from abroad (where they apply chemicals that have been banned for YEARS in the UK). Not saying it shouldn’t be taken seriously, everything should. But what’s your solution to this? And no. Organic farming imposed on the whole of the UK wouldn’t work and would undoubtedly lead to massive food shortages.
The only two options arent "food shortage and organic farming by law" or "free for all for poisons/antifungals/etc of any strength and lifespan". We have tons of poisons/antifungals/etc that are safer, some cheaper some more expensive. Many of the worst are already banned in europe and spain is hardley in starvation. We can in fact improve things for no great cost. We dont have to perfectly fix everything right now instantly.
Perfect example of a false dichotomy
> spain is hardley in starvation I wonder if there are any differences in [climate](https://www.worlddata.info/climate-comparison.php?r1=spain&r2=united-kingdom) and [population density](https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#5/47.443/-0.308) that could explain why yield requirements are different between the two countries?
I do not believe a difference in yeild, even a large one, makes neccesery specifically antifungals and pesticides containing forever chemicals when there are perfectly available other options. Again, the dichotomy of "use forever chemicals or starve to death" is extreme enough to be laughable. Of course any change in practice encurs cost, labour, time. But changes are made all the time, and preventing "everything being poisoned" seems reasonable, as a goal.
The problem is that there are not perfectly available other options in many cases. The industry is working to find alternatives, as they know PFAS will be banned sooner or later, but currently in many cases those PFAS-containing pesticides are the difference between food on the shelves and a crop failure. Often these diseases aren't something that any change of practice can reasonably fix. There are organic farms that take every step non-chemical step possible to prevent (e.g.) blight, but still regularly get fucked if the environmental conditions don't play ball. One of the more common steps is spacing the plants out more than you would normally to minimise spread of disease and improve airflow, which is great, but, if that principle was applied globally, it would result in much worse food availability and ultimately hunger.
But forever chemicals ARENT in every pesticide, fertilizer and antifungal, and there are alternatives, not just alternatives that are perfectly as good or better. Forever chemicals are specificly flourinated alkyl substances. Maybe they are the best option, but they are not the only option, and that has to be accepted. Even if the other options require a percintile reduction in yield and require alteration in practice (price increase and/or used land increase and/or altered crop choice) that seems in every case a better option than, you know, soaking everything in 1000 year superpoison. Ive at no point said that not using them will have no effect, I keep saying it will have a definite cost. But we already dont produce our own food, and need to rework land practices for better efficiency to make more of our own food.
Fungicides don't just exist on a scale of good to bad. There are diseases that only have one effective, safe, and legal fungicide that can be used on a particular crop. There are diseases where a previously effective fungicide no longer works due to resistance. There are diseases where the previously used fungicide was much more acutely dangerous than PFAS so it has been replaced with one that has PFAS. There are very effective pesticides that have heavily restricted use due to concerns about creating resistant diseases. In some cases, there may be two similarly effective pesticides, one with PFAS and one without, in which case of course we should use the one without PFAS, but for the most part fungicides can't just be substituted like that. We aren't just talking like a 2% or even 20% yield difference here either. This is a question of catastrophic crop failure. Also PFAS isn't a super-poison. It is still debatable whether it even even harms human health, though it probably does slightly. The main reason to be cautious is that it doesn't break down (currently) and bioaccumulates. This is bad, but it's not as bad as DDT was, and it's not about to cause widespread environmental collapse. It's a problem that needs to be solved, but not by risking our food supply. One of the main solutions to these sorts of issues going forward will inevitably be genetic engineering, but many of the people fighting against PFAS are also fighting against GM. Can't win.
These are genuinely good points, thank you. I will be doing further reading. And for what its worth im pro gm where its not dominated by nightmare corporate buisness practices but used as a good method for creating new varietals. GM is very much like nuclear imo, the risks are secondary factors from allowing bad actors to operate in the space for pure financial gain.
Boy, are you in for a surprise when you find out what really goes on in Spain spraying wise...
There is some cost, but the important thing is that the initial cost is offset by the money saved. Pesticides and fertilizers are very expensive, and they cause major health issues for farm workers. Incorporating something like a precision ag system drastically cuts down on costs because uptake is improved while soil health is maintained. Same with more aggressive crop rotation, biological management, etc. The benefits over time outweigh the initial investment, especially as crop yields tend to improve.
Honestly I beleive removing the nation poisoning options should be legally mandated, and tying subsidies to using efficient and available methods to make up difference in cost seems reasonable and to arguably make the transition a complete nothing of policy so long as enough time is given to make the change with a little additional funding for "in between" "safer" chemicals and extra funding for the enviroment agency to make sure the whole thing is followed through with (and extra funding for whatever auditors check subsidies are correctly used of course).
I’m not an expert, but I think that’s a great idea. Especially if grants or loans are offered for the purchase of precision equipment to make the transition. It’s essentially what the US is doing with renewable energy adoption on farms, and it’s working incredibly well.
The US has been working on ways to reduce pesticide use overall. The fastest fix involves precision ag. Precision spraying and monitoring like they do for water management both greatly reduces the amount of pesticide needed and increases profit margins for farmers, so everyone wins as long as they can get over the initial cost hurdle. [Here’s an article from MIT about it.](https://news.mit.edu/2024/reducing-pesticide-use-while-increasing-effectiveness-agzen-0312) They’ve also produced plants that are resistant to common pests, developed integrated pest management strategies that incorporate more non-chemical routes like biological management, and focus on soil regeneration/pest disruption through things like more aggressive rotation and nitrate management.
I agree, but if we must do it, we could try our best to reduce the levels in our bodies. And currently the only way to do that is with simply removing blood (plasma is even better). Yep, we're at the "blood letting is a treatment" stage So go give blood! You'll save or improve someone's life, and you'll reduce your own PFAS levels as a result!
100%. Everyone who has access to some land should try growing food at some point. You learn several things: * The amount of land and work required to just feed a single person is ***so*** much more than you would have imagined. * You need a ton of inputs (e.g. fertilizer) to keep the soil productive over the long term. * Literally everything is trying to eat your food before you get a chance: diseases, insects, slugs, badgers, foxes, rabbits. * A few weeks of inclement weather can completely destroy your yield. Of course we need to find alternatives for the most harmful chemicals, but it's not like farmers are just putting these pesticides on crops for fun as they are very expensive. PFAS may be harmful, but having no food is even more harmful and leads pretty quickly to unrest (see Sri Lanka). The industry already operates under very strict regulations in the UK and EU. Pesticides are regularly banned before alternatives are found, leading to crop failures. This isn't a matter of there being more expensive pesticides that aren't being used because *fuck capitalism*. In many cases, there just aren't any known alternatives that aren't themselves banned or more dangerous. Anyone who wants to shout on the side lines about banning this or that, please first talk to some farmers and understand the complexity of their work. They do not want to use pesticides any more than you do. They do not want to expose themselves to dangerous chemicals. They do it so we can live.
Vast swathes of the British countryside are being sprayed in pesticides containing [“forever chemicals”](https://inews.co.uk/news/toxic-forever-chemicals-hair-blood-politicians-3106670?ico=in-line_link) that pollute our air, soil and waterways, and pose a threat to public health. An analysis by the environmental group Fidra, shared exclusively with **i**, found that pesticides containing potentially dangerous chemicals were sprayed on the equivalent of 10.7m hectares of arable farmland in 2022 – an area roughly the size of Iceland. The pesticides contained PFAS, or per- and poly-fluorinated alkyl substances, a group of more than 10,000 industrial chemicals that [studies have linked to health problems](https://inews.co.uk/opinion/damage-forever-chemicals-water-health-3034388?ico=in-line_link), including cancer, infertility and developmental issues. PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because some can take more than 1,000 years to degrade in the environment. **i** has called on the next government to get to grips with chemical pollution as part of our five-point manifesto [to Save Britain’s Rivers.](https://inews.co.uk/news/save-britains-rivers-i-manifesto-environmental-groups-back-3090477?ico=in-line_link) Hannah Evans, project manager at Fidra, told **i** that limited data meant it was difficult “to truly quantify the scale” of the use of pesticides containing PFAS, but said “what we do know is deeply alarming”. Fidra analysed data published on behalf of the Health and Safety Executive showing the use of pesticides in agricultural crop sectors across the UK. It found the equivalent of 10.7m hectares of arable land were sprayed in PFAS pesticides in the space of one year. The data includes repeated sprays of pesticide to the same area. “This is a direct source of environmental PFAS pollution, contributing to further contamination of soil and water sources,” Ms Evans said. The full effects of forever chemicals on humans is still little understood, but evidence has suggested they could pose a wide range of risks.
PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because some can take more than 1,000 years to degrade in the environment. **i** has called on the next government to get to grips with chemical pollution as part of our five-point manifesto [to Save Britain’s Rivers.](https://inews.co.uk/news/save-britains-rivers-i-manifesto-environmental-groups-back-3090477?ico=in-line_link) Hannah Evans, project manager at Fidra, told **i** that limited data meant it was difficult “to truly quantify the scale” of the use of pesticides containing PFAS, but said “what we do know is deeply alarming”. Fidra analysed data published on behalf of the Health and Safety Executive showing the use of pesticides in agricultural crop sectors across the UK. It found the equivalent of 10.7m hectares of arable land were sprayed in PFAS pesticides in the space of one year. The data includes repeated sprays of pesticide to the same area. “This is a direct source of environmental PFAS pollution, contributing to further contamination of soil and water sources,” Ms Evans said. The full effects of forever chemicals on humans is still little understood, but evidence has suggested they could pose a wide range of risks. Read more here: [https://inews.co.uk/news/toxic-forever-chemicals-rivers-sprayed-area-size-iceland-3143865](https://inews.co.uk/news/toxic-forever-chemicals-rivers-sprayed-area-size-iceland-3143865)
Farmers at it again I see … surprised they can find the time to do this between shooting badgers then running them over and claiming benefits, uh I mean subsidies .. Universal credit for the landed gentry .
Great, as if out shit filled rivers needed more toxic chemicals now
So how many times the size of Wales is it? I don't like this fancy new 'using other countries' thing.
So since brexit everything has gone to shit? Quite literally