5d ago

Canada wants cities to start filtering toxic forever chemicals from public drinking water, but that’s no easy feat

newsinteractives.cbc.ca

Tackling PFAS in drinking water | CBC News

17 comments

Have we stopped the global production of PFAS? It is non-biogradable and thus cumulative in the environment and due to earth's natural hydrological cycle, it doesn't respect borders.
Filtering our drinking water while not banning it entirely and leading the charge to a global ban is just whistling past the graveyard.
- Banning the production of all PFAS will take time. There are no alternatives to Teflon in many contexts, and many medical devices would simply not work if not for Teflon. A hard and immediate end to PFAS production would be devastating for medical care. It's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
  
  True, but medical devices are probably very very minor sources of pollution compared to textiles and firefighting foam. 80/20 rule is a clear step forward. Let's not artificially invent uneccessary arguments to stall progress.
  
  The irony is, teflon is used extensively in water treatment and plumbing as well.
Sorry we're too busy preventing you from having your own home, we can't squeeze in not poisoning you.
- They're also too busy handing over our private data to the US
  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/canadas-bill-c-2-opens-floodgates-us-surveillance
  
  While that's awful that's not really a municipal issue like housing and water treatment.
  
  wow, thank you for spreading the word
No one said it would be easy. Start doing it anyway.
Yes it's difficult. That's why it's a federal mandate. Otherwise I'd do it myself in my kitchen. Wtf Trash writing is this?
Wonder how many decades they are gonna waffle on that.
- Those chemicals are not easy to remove, especially compared to traditional water treatments. New solutions need to be developed or a new, uncontaminated source found for some areas. Reverse osmosis could probably reduce the toxic chemicals, but reverse osmosis is expesnive to install and operate and very energy intensive. Getting the toxic chemicals out is easier said than done.
  
  There are ways that we can currently do it, not putting an imperfect system in where there currently is none is waffling. How long till we see imperfect implemented to mitigate?
  I'm not touching on cost or complexities as I don't think that would be useful in this particular conversation.

17 comments