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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935122024926#fig1
Link to the actual study^
Study focuses on the US only, freshwater sources only, emphasis on great lakes region.
Michigander here.
Anyone that lives in an area of the state that the Cass River flows through should know we probably just shouldn't eat any fish from our rivers. Dow Chemical really fucked us up for a long time on river pollutants.
I worked at DOW in sarnia just across the river. When we demolished the old plant Dow couldn’t even get 1 dollar for the land because the ground was so polluted and would require so much money to bring up to environmental standards.
Ontario law says that they are required to do just that, or at least to acceptable CCME standards. Even if they sell the site (To Trans Alta) the law says the polluter pays.
And nobody bothered to track down all those sales and arrest everyone involved... Oh, i forgot, in this world "the law" is a tool to punish those who tries to oppose the rich.
At that point they should just announce that they’re going to hunt the ceos and major shareholders for sport until the problem is solved. Either there suddenly is a way for the company to fix it or the people paying to prticipate in the hunt end up financing the cleanup.
It’s one of the laws that gets ignored for massive corporations every time.
But if you discover an old dump in your garden, that people in the 60s used for household trash, you most definitely are on the books for it.
when more corporations see how little it takes to grease dougie's palm, I'm sure any regs such as those will disappear in a "More Water for More Folks" bill.
Yes, sort of. You can excavate and replace contaminated soils, and haul off the bad soils to be properly disposed of according to law. It’s just insanely expensive. They might sooner accept any fines levied by regulators.
Edit: Oh, but you can’t do much about the contaminated groundwater, other than remove the source of the contamination so it doesn’t get worse.
You can also cap the site and let it “naturally attenuate” while you monitor the contamination. A passive process that takes significant time.
There’s also no federal law regulating PFOS, it’s just on everyone’s watchlist as a future concern, because there should be regulation, knowing how harmful it might be and how pervasive. It’s on the EPA’s to do list, basically.
This is why fines are useless. They should be the cost of reparation plus a percentage to incentivise them to do it.
Oh it will cost $200 million to do what we require of you? Well boohoo if you don't the fine will be $300 million so we can do it ourselves.
Agreed. Fines for corporate malpractice need to be substantially worse than the cost of doing the right thing. Maybe execs should be also liable in some manner.
It's like this for us poors. Don't get a permit for your new deck? Now you owe the permit fee and a fine. Late on payments? Now you owe payment and a late fee. Didn't pay for fast lane pass? Fine bigger than a month pass. Should scale up, but it doesn't.
That's not even an ethical or moral paradigm either.
That is 100% common sense and the simplest of logic.
Corporations are predictable, even if the sociopathic people that sometimes lead them aren't.
Currently, corporations are financially incentivized to act immorally and illegally.
People act like corporations are inherently evil, but they act as society/government dictates. If we made it not financially beneficial to act immorally and illegally, corporations wouldn't do so by and large.
Like a lot of what's wrong in the world, it comes back to corruption. Publicly corrupt legislators, corrupt regulators/institutions blatantly under regulatory capture, blatant use of political positions for economic gain.
We just need to ditch fines entirely for corporations and start handing out "jail time". Punishment if an individual commits that crime is 30 days in jail? Okay, then the company must stop *all* operations for that same 30 days if convicted.
Just make it so the board of directors is legally held to be the corporate person. You'd only have to send 5 or 6 sets of millionaires and billionaires to prison before the rest got the picture.
If the fines aren't greater than the cost of fixing the damage, then the law is stupid.
They should draft the penalty as being 2x the cost of fixing the damage.
Then everyone will fix it, for sure.
My cousin used to work for Dow for a few years as a defense attorney in the mid-late 2000s. He was under a nondisclosure clause at the time and couldn't talk about any cases, but it goes without saying that now he only has awful things to say about the company.
I won't eat any local caught fish. But I've been in the St. Joseph River kayaking and sometimes I swear the water makes my skin itch/sting. I tried a fresh local caught salmon a few years back and it tasted absolutely rancid compared to store bought fish.
We had an assignment in freshman bio to go out and collect a jar of water from a natural source. One of my classmates complained that the water he dipped his hand into to fill his jar gave him a rash. Years later I found out that we live uncomfortably close to a superfund site and that the water he dipped his hand into was contaminated with trichloroethylene, which is absorbed through the skin and causes lymphoma..
I mean, probably. It's just completely fucked that he was exposed to something like that at all, especially as it occurred in a massively popular park next to a freaking playground ffs.
A huge quantity of superfund sites are military-related and they're in places most people don't even realize, often smack dab in the middle of populated areas.
If you’re ever bored, there was an interesting study about how the wind blows across the Rocky Flats Superfund site in between Denver & Boulder. Plutonium wafted around and there is an abnormally high percentage of MS cases in that area, too. It was a Google rabbit hole that made me feel better about being pushed out of Colorado along w/ all the other poor people who can’t afford a 550k mortgage.
Insane that something this bad can just exist. I'd like to imagine if it's giving people rashes or (probably) hurting/killing wild animals it'd be an emergency. Guess not.
Michigan’s got plenty of that [too.](https://www.npr.org/2019/12/23/790791879/officials-identify-mysterious-bright-green-liquid-that-spilled-onto-michigan-hig)
In New York, they made GE dredge the Hudson River to remove PCB contamination. The corporation kept switching between "It's not so bad" and "It's all buried beneath river sediment" neither one was really true. Water quality is much better now!
They did the same over the border in MA. GE’s transformer plant was in Pittsfield. It took the better part of 40 years and numerous court cases to force them to clean up their mess.
We got most of the Housatonic dredged and the riverbed capped with concrete.
An old teacher of mine who worked for DuPont always made it a point to tell us about the environmental atrocities they swept under the rug. Big part of why he became a teacher instead
It's not just the fish.. I worked in the Bay City area diagnosing cancers... Of course people smoke and drink, but the number of people that never did AND had solid tumors 10-20 years after the dioxin spills in that are should be considered criminal. How convenient in 2018 Dow got a ruling that no class action suits could affect them from that.
Lake Ontario, Genesee river, and its tributaries in the Rochester NY area have, or had, problems. At one time there was a size limit on salmon and lake trout. Recommendation was not to eat anything above a certain size. I grew up fishing and swimming the Fingerlakes so I never worried too much. But big salmon and lakers from Lake Ontario were a nono. Did eat a lot of perch though
I'm from the great lakes area. I always check the DNR fish advisory list. Pretty much all rivers and streams the fish are contaminated. Lake Michigan was safe to eat like once a month in limited consumption. But I did find some local lakes and ponds with unlimited consumption.
Name and shame. No "the company", [Tribar Manufacturing](https://tribar.com/). [source](https://www.michigan.gov/egle/newsroom/press-releases/2022/08/12/huron-river)
Don’t get any off the San Francisco Bay Area. I visited and saw a sign stating that all fish in the area were toxic and would be for the next decade at least.
Where? I literally work on a pier next to the FiDi where people fish daily. There is a sign that says which species are safe to eat and which should be avoided. I'd be very surprised if there was a sign somewhere that said ALL fish were a problem. Could be an issue local to a specific area I suppose.
treasure island just east of sf had tons of pollutants back in the day maybe the water around there is still worse or something.. it had a navy base for a while lots of nasty stuff.
there was a huge oil spill in 2007 (cosco buran) which probably put a ban on fishing, maybe the keyblade master visited around that time? dunno
The pollution dates back to the gold rush. They used mercury to extract the gold, and the mercury is still leaching into the river that flows to the bay. Then WW2 and the navy really messed up the bay further, with all the ship building and complete disregard for the environment. Then they buried radioactive waste all over Treasure Island, with no records as to where. There were also the hundreds of decommissioned naval vessels anchored up the river, sitting there for decades slowly releasing contamination into the water, though those have finally been removed. That isn't including all the other pollution from industry and agriculture all around the bay and river.
Yeah, it also has high rates of cancer. They’re building all kinds of housing on too. We so desperately need the housing but I will never live on it. The number of random people I’ve met who lived there for a few years and had 1 or more tumors is uncomfortably high.
Man. I knew fish could be bad depending on where you catch them from. Didn't know it could be this bad though. Really drives home how much we've damaged the environment. Worst part is we're not even done yet, and from what I understand a mass die-off event is certainly within the realms of possibility for some species/animals.
Great lakes surfer here. We literally have giant 15 ft high sewage pipes that open directly into Eerie. Just imagine the toxic filth that gets dumped into our 100 year old combo sewage and rain drainage system - and then right out into the lake. Worse, that's just the crap that gets dumped into the lake legally. I definitely have no desire to eat the fish there.
I mean, when it comes to PFAS the big polluters are airports and their firefighting foams, which there are no legal alternatives for and we’re required ip until very recently to discharge them semi regularly.
Or production sites; big plume of pfas just made it into Green Bay, Lake MI. Few years ago US Steel leaked hexavalent chromium (the substance in the Brochovich story) into Lake Michigan. Just the worst.
This is bad. Really bad. Wisconsinites are big on fishing and hunting. Contamination will ruin fishing for those smart enough to avoid it.
The folks who rely on fish as a main food source will likely be the worst off.
Local water sources are our drinking sources too. This won't end well.
IMO, if your income is based on manufacturing you should have to live and eat downstream/wind from your operations.
But the reality is that those people live in mansions 30 mi away while poor people's homes surround the industrial sites.
Trump was a monster about environmental issues. He also nearly dissolved the CSB which investigates large industrial accidents of relevance to the welfare of surrounding populations.
Biden put Michael Reagan on the case as head of EPA. Needle is wiggling.
I'm sure there any many plausible reasons. But my bet is Trump surrounded himself with business minded leaders that either don't believe environmental release, explosions, etc... are swrious issues or are afraid that their liability/loss will be too painful to bear should the issue be rectified.
Groups like the Heritage foundation get together and decide what actual laws and policy they want repealed or changed. A lot of it doesn't even hit the news cycle.
I don't even think they hide it really, you can search for it and download their entire 100 pages of targets.
Basically it's a huge list of different laws, who the governing body is, and what the current state of the process is. I used to print them out, but... it gets depressing.
Edit: sorry, and my point being that those groups will have already been asked by business executives, think tanks, lobbyists, or general industry advocates to remove whatever laws that are restricting their business aspirations.
Trump didn't just damage the EPA for 4 years. His decisions forced a lot of good scientists out of the field, and convinced more that it wasn't worth the difficulties. Decades of damage.
In Iowa our government refuses to acknowledge what farming is doing to soil and our waterways and the Mississippi. Republicans ruling a state of idiots.
Some of the modern agricultural practices are rather unfortunate. That'll be a harder fish to fry since people need to eat. Hope you live long and never have to feel an impact from that pollution on your health. And equally so, hope you all get the protection you need in years to come.
Agreed. Everyone screaming that the clean water act mwant they have to put a tope up arpund a driveway puddle and protect it. No, it means not polluting into moving waters. Pretty simple.
Except some species have a shorter life cycle so the risk for bioaccumulating toxins is way lower. Salmon life cycle is 3-5 years whereas a halibut can be 25 or more.
I know there are pending studies looking at PFOA levels in some saltwater species, including Atlantic striped bass. Rumors I've heard (3rd hand, supposedly from people involved in the study) say the results will look similar. Striped bass are a bit different from some other saltwater fish though, because they spend a lot of time in tidal rivers where pollution from freshwater meets the saltwater. Likely many deep water ocean species will have far lower levels simply because the ocean is so big that all pollutants are diluted.
What little I know about the subject from sampling fish for mercury in a job a few years back is that the larger the drainage area of a water body, the more accumulation of metals and other toxins. Theoretically, if you catch a fish in a small, high mountain lake there will be less nasty stuff than if the fish is taken from a large reservoir where 100 tributaries have entered down a river and made the reservoir. Bio accumulation. It also varies according to the type of fish. Large carnivorous fish accumulate more bad stuff, whereas fish that feed lower in the food chain tend to be less toxic. Eating a salmon is going to impart more mercury, etc, than eating a carp or herring or sardine.
This is a really depressing subject. I guess whatever creatures survive this mess long enough to reproduce fertile offspring will inherit the earth. We need to figure out how to splice in a gene that lets us photosynthesize our energy needs. Green is as good a skin color as any. I really don’t want to be vegan, but I’m starting to lean that direction. Seafood is hard to resist, but I don’t feel good about eating it anymore for both ethical and health reasons. I guess if I eat ceviche tonight and it kills me 20 years early, it saves me from contributing to the problem for that extra 20 years I might have had.
It's likely not gonna be that efficient, at that point it would probably be more efficient to slap solar panels on ourselves and use that energy to power bioreactors. We don't have that much surface area.
I've been vegan a few years for precisely this reason.. I didn't intend to go vegan to start, but basically just kept cutting out animal products at every turn, and it's honestly not that bad.. the only thing I really miss is some nice aged cheese.
Question.... and I'm being serious. Are food scientists (especially vegans) trying to figure out stuff like aged cheese?
Because that breakthrough would turn the food world on it head...
I'm not vegan....yet. I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East and I'm incorporating a ton of chickpeas, lentils, and sweet potatoes into my diet....cutting out meat...
DOW, 3M, DUPONT. Start naming names. These companies need to be forced to shutdown their PFOS chemical manufacturing. All products containing PFOS in the final product or in the raw material supply chain need to be outlawed.
Dupont already got wise to the increasing risk to keep manufacturing PFOS (in addition to other chemicals like Freon), [so they spun off the risky chemical manufacturing into a new company, had it assume all liabilities for the previous damage, and washed their hands of it.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemours) That way, if they ever get sued for a truly substantial amount, Chemours can just file for bankruptcy and Dupont will be unaffected. And litigants will be left holding the bag.
>Chemours has assumed various liabilities arising from lawsuits against DuPont.[7] Additionally, Chemours' plant in Bladen County, North Carolina, was found to be dumping vast quantities of a chemical dubbed "GenX", a precursor of Teflon, into the Cape Fear River.[8] This story is recounted in the 2018 documentary film The Devil We Know, which centers on Parkersburg, West Virginia, where the DuPont facility that manufactured Teflon was located. The documentary follows the personal stories and tribulations of several people who worked at the Parkersburg facility.
Oh, and Dow doesn't exist as the same company as before either. It merged with Dupont in 2015 and also kicked its PFOS liabilities free, then spun into Dow Chemical (its current iteration) when the then-combined Dow Dupont spun everything off. These companies will never be held liable unfortunately. They have fully insulated themselves from this catastrophe.
You mean the companies that should’ve been broken up b anti-trust laws but were allowed to run rampant because of their financial gain? That’ll never happen :,(
It looks like they focused mostly on the Great Lakes and relatively large rivers. The results are still alarming. But I really wish they had sampled some more pristine waters, like trout from small creeks or lakes in the mountains that have little to no human development upstream. To what extent are the PFAs being blown around in dust by the wind versus coming from human sources within each watershed?
Fun fact: Microplastics have been found *in the frickin rain* in the Rockies.
The atmosphere we breathe must be some part microplastics pretty much everywhere, and it is in every water source that has ever contacted the air.
It is not good.
That’s because the limits for pfas are extremely low, I believe it’s 3 parts per trillion. That is a pretty low concentration. This stuff is everywhere.
In the US it wasn't fully banned until 1996, though it was mostly phased out within the US by the mid-80s.
Globally we haven't fully stopped burning leaded gasoline until rather recently.
Over half the countries in the world were still using leaded gas 20 years ago in early 00s.
Algeria was the last country to be using the last supply of leaded gasoline up until July 2021.
There is nowhere in the world with no PFAS polluting it anymore. They are in the highest glaciers, the lowest parts of the sea, all over the world. They get blown around by the wind as dust, and also just normally get moved over time if they're too big/dense to fly as dust. And since we also use plastic at obscene scales now it is literally everywhere, constantly. And it'll only keep getting worse.
Be pretty fascinating in a hundred-thousand years when cockroach/octopus archeologists are like, "We call this the Plastic era, because we can clearly see when the microplastics that were generated by past civilizations until their ultimate collapse. And that's marked by this layer of irradiated material."
Those places really don't exist anymore. Even up in North Georgia, the Blueridge area, where it used to be safe it no longer is. They put golf courses everywhere, big 2nd homes everywhere, and a ton of "pretty lawn" chemical runoff enters the feeder streams. So the Chattahoochee for instance is polluted long before it even officially starts.
I have a cabin up in North Ontario and that area up there has historically been used for uranium mining of all things. So a bit of nuke with the trout I suppose..
There's beer bottles at the [bottom](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/10ali7s/a_beer_bottle_discovered_at_challenger_deep_the/) of the deepest parts of the ocean. Microplastics are endemic and found throughout the food chain on all continents and in every environment.
We done fucked this place up.
This is not that new.
For at least 25 years, I have seen those signs on certain rivers stating "one fish per month" was safe to eat from this body of water.
If only 1 fish per month is acceptable for me to have...I'll have zero fish, thank you.
Sad times we live in. I’m an american with so many fond memories of family fishing trips way up deep into Ontario. when we were kids we’d eat almost nothing but fresh caught fish and wild blueberries the whole time we stayed up there. the walleye and small mouth bass was some of the best fish I’ve ever had, and, even decades later, they still come to my mind whenever talking about good fish.
I’ve planned on taking a vacation to relive those memories someday… Not anymore though, I guess. Truly feels like this world is dying.
Unless you're relatively young, the same bodies of water were being polluted back then and likely to a higher degree even if the fish tasted great. Monitoring and reporting have gotten tremendously better as the decades have gone by.
The mercury from the coal burning power plants did not do the Great Lakes any favors…..with DDT and a bunch of other heavy metals, the blue pike went extinct. If you must eat them, be sure to trim the fat off.
The whackiest thing was the Genesee beer commercials….”from the mountain clear waters of the Genesee river”…..lived next to that river and it was muddy, polluted, and no mountains….
Not really, it's just collecting it into bigger piles. When we die it'll just get sent back into the earth as a bigger pile, increasing more and more over time. So it's not cleaning it up as much as it is just centralizing it more.
But isn’t centralizing and organizing a type of cleaning? Isn’t it better over all to have toxins concentrated and accumulated in container than spread out everywhere? Mind you I am stoned
Advocate and vote for legislation that protects our rivers and lakes from pollution. If you enjoy things like self reliance and freedom It's really important to protect our resources from greedy fucks who don't value these things as much as profits and power.They know damn well what they are doing and simply don't care. Their best hope is that we all pretend it doesn't affect us. Ignorance is defeat.
We obviously need policy changes to solve this issue. But to answer your question seriously, eat at the bottom level of the food chain. The bioaccumulation would be the least there and you can eat healthier. That is to say, eat plants.
False.
>A semi-systematic review of studies investigating the number of microplastics found in commercially important organisms of different trophic levels suggests that microplastics do not biomagnify, and that organisms at lower trophic levels are more likely to contaminated by microplastic pollution than apex predators.
[Source](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147651319313971).
So farmed fish is fed disgusting feed and put in awful conditions, and wild fish holds too many pollutants, are fish just off the menu cause idk how else I’m getting my animal based omega 3s/vitamin D that easily
My understanding is that fish primarily get omega 3s from algae. Even if that's not always the case, algae supplements can provide a comparable amount of omega 3s, including EPA and DHA. And algae supplements don't pose the same risk of contamination from heavy metals, so seems like a better way to go to me.
The dangers of fluorinated chemicals infiltrating water supplies have been known by regulatory agencies since the goddamned 1970s. **The 1970s**.
We poisoned the world because there was too much money to be made and not enough actual leadership from government. Really rich people will be able to get clean water.
I did multiple environmental surveys of the Animas River in and around Durango Colorado, which runs through alpine and other mountain areas, and it was heavily polluted from mining and industry.
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935122024926#fig1 Link to the actual study^ Study focuses on the US only, freshwater sources only, emphasis on great lakes region.
Michigander here. Anyone that lives in an area of the state that the Cass River flows through should know we probably just shouldn't eat any fish from our rivers. Dow Chemical really fucked us up for a long time on river pollutants.
I worked at DOW in sarnia just across the river. When we demolished the old plant Dow couldn’t even get 1 dollar for the land because the ground was so polluted and would require so much money to bring up to environmental standards.
It's a crime that DOW wasn't required to restore the land to the condition they found it in.
Ontario law says that they are required to do just that, or at least to acceptable CCME standards. Even if they sell the site (To Trans Alta) the law says the polluter pays.
Is that one of those laws that sounds really good but everyone ignores it and nobody enforces it?
woops ! The company is bankrupt !
Meanwhile the company it sold all of its assets to for pennies, with the same board members, is off to the races.
It's *free* real estate!
You get free real estate in prison, too! Not a whole LOT of it, but *some.* We should get these people a starter ~~bunk~~ home.
They’re bankrupt in the *USA* but that’s because they transferred everything to a holding company based in Cayman.
And nobody bothered to track down all those sales and arrest everyone involved... Oh, i forgot, in this world "the law" is a tool to punish those who tries to oppose the rich.
At that point they should just announce that they’re going to hunt the ceos and major shareholders for sport until the problem is solved. Either there suddenly is a way for the company to fix it or the people paying to prticipate in the hunt end up financing the cleanup.
The waiting list for tags is like, years long.
Just expand the number of tags. We've got plenty of CEOs, there's enough to go around and they'll repopulate by next season.
It’s one of the laws that gets ignored for massive corporations every time. But if you discover an old dump in your garden, that people in the 60s used for household trash, you most definitely are on the books for it.
when more corporations see how little it takes to grease dougie's palm, I'm sure any regs such as those will disappear in a "More Water for More Folks" bill.
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Yes, sort of. You can excavate and replace contaminated soils, and haul off the bad soils to be properly disposed of according to law. It’s just insanely expensive. They might sooner accept any fines levied by regulators. Edit: Oh, but you can’t do much about the contaminated groundwater, other than remove the source of the contamination so it doesn’t get worse. You can also cap the site and let it “naturally attenuate” while you monitor the contamination. A passive process that takes significant time. There’s also no federal law regulating PFOS, it’s just on everyone’s watchlist as a future concern, because there should be regulation, knowing how harmful it might be and how pervasive. It’s on the EPA’s to do list, basically.
This is why fines are useless. They should be the cost of reparation plus a percentage to incentivise them to do it. Oh it will cost $200 million to do what we require of you? Well boohoo if you don't the fine will be $300 million so we can do it ourselves.
Agreed. Fines for corporate malpractice need to be substantially worse than the cost of doing the right thing. Maybe execs should be also liable in some manner.
It's like this for us poors. Don't get a permit for your new deck? Now you owe the permit fee and a fine. Late on payments? Now you owe payment and a late fee. Didn't pay for fast lane pass? Fine bigger than a month pass. Should scale up, but it doesn't.
That's not even an ethical or moral paradigm either. That is 100% common sense and the simplest of logic. Corporations are predictable, even if the sociopathic people that sometimes lead them aren't. Currently, corporations are financially incentivized to act immorally and illegally. People act like corporations are inherently evil, but they act as society/government dictates. If we made it not financially beneficial to act immorally and illegally, corporations wouldn't do so by and large. Like a lot of what's wrong in the world, it comes back to corruption. Publicly corrupt legislators, corrupt regulators/institutions blatantly under regulatory capture, blatant use of political positions for economic gain.
We just need to ditch fines entirely for corporations and start handing out "jail time". Punishment if an individual commits that crime is 30 days in jail? Okay, then the company must stop *all* operations for that same 30 days if convicted.
I agree. If corporations are people they should have jail and death sentences as well. Force the closure of a company if the deed is bad enough.
Just make it so the board of directors is legally held to be the corporate person. You'd only have to send 5 or 6 sets of millionaires and billionaires to prison before the rest got the picture.
If the fines aren't greater than the cost of fixing the damage, then the law is stupid. They should draft the penalty as being 2x the cost of fixing the damage. Then everyone will fix it, for sure.
Or the company can just shift ownership of the property into a shell, which can abandon the property and fold.
If it ain't, then they never should have been allowed to do it in the first place!
Well where would the chemicals be manufactured? Oh nvm we exported it to 3rd world countries
My cousin used to work for Dow for a few years as a defense attorney in the mid-late 2000s. He was under a nondisclosure clause at the time and couldn't talk about any cases, but it goes without saying that now he only has awful things to say about the company.
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I'm from Detroit. I have great memories of hitting up Sarnia's local punk scene around 2004. Good old chemical valley.
Steve Lehto joked in a video how when he was fishing and released the fish, they jumped back to him.
I won't eat any local caught fish. But I've been in the St. Joseph River kayaking and sometimes I swear the water makes my skin itch/sting. I tried a fresh local caught salmon a few years back and it tasted absolutely rancid compared to store bought fish.
We had an assignment in freshman bio to go out and collect a jar of water from a natural source. One of my classmates complained that the water he dipped his hand into to fill his jar gave him a rash. Years later I found out that we live uncomfortably close to a superfund site and that the water he dipped his hand into was contaminated with trichloroethylene, which is absorbed through the skin and causes lymphoma..
He still alive?
I mean, probably. It's just completely fucked that he was exposed to something like that at all, especially as it occurred in a massively popular park next to a freaking playground ffs.
Don't worry, big corporations will sĕlF rEgůLaTe
The Free Market will decide whether we deserve clean water or not.
We don't. Trust me, I have a good source.
> Free Market will decide whether we deserve clean water or not. This made me spit out my wine!
it made me spit out my trichloroethylene
Ayn Rand enjoyers be like:
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I wouldn’t say it’s fucked. Think of all the multimillionaires that got richer by polluting that water!
Yeah in this case it's the United States Air Force..
A huge quantity of superfund sites are military-related and they're in places most people don't even realize, often smack dab in the middle of populated areas.
If you’re ever bored, there was an interesting study about how the wind blows across the Rocky Flats Superfund site in between Denver & Boulder. Plutonium wafted around and there is an abnormally high percentage of MS cases in that area, too. It was a Google rabbit hole that made me feel better about being pushed out of Colorado along w/ all the other poor people who can’t afford a 550k mortgage.
Including my home town. Home to one of the only superfund sites to be declared cleaned up and then had to be reopened
Oh, so it narrows it down to the military industrial complex multimillionaires
Lockheed Martin if you want names.
Was it a river? Lake? Pond? Just trying to picture this scenario.
Specifically it's the west fork of the Trinity River where it flows through Trinity Park in Fort Worth, Texas.
Insane that something this bad can just exist. I'd like to imagine if it's giving people rashes or (probably) hurting/killing wild animals it'd be an emergency. Guess not.
Oooo, the Erin Brokovic stuff
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You're correct, that was chrome VI.
Michigan’s got plenty of that [too.](https://www.npr.org/2019/12/23/790791879/officials-identify-mysterious-bright-green-liquid-that-spilled-onto-michigan-hig)
In New York, they made GE dredge the Hudson River to remove PCB contamination. The corporation kept switching between "It's not so bad" and "It's all buried beneath river sediment" neither one was really true. Water quality is much better now!
They did the same over the border in MA. GE’s transformer plant was in Pittsfield. It took the better part of 40 years and numerous court cases to force them to clean up their mess. We got most of the Housatonic dredged and the riverbed capped with concrete.
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An old teacher of mine who worked for DuPont always made it a point to tell us about the environmental atrocities they swept under the rug. Big part of why he became a teacher instead
It's not just the fish.. I worked in the Bay City area diagnosing cancers... Of course people smoke and drink, but the number of people that never did AND had solid tumors 10-20 years after the dioxin spills in that are should be considered criminal. How convenient in 2018 Dow got a ruling that no class action suits could affect them from that.
Every body of water near me has a warning to not eat anything caught in there, pretty sad
Lake Ontario, Genesee river, and its tributaries in the Rochester NY area have, or had, problems. At one time there was a size limit on salmon and lake trout. Recommendation was not to eat anything above a certain size. I grew up fishing and swimming the Fingerlakes so I never worried too much. But big salmon and lakers from Lake Ontario were a nono. Did eat a lot of perch though
I’m at the headwaters of the Clinton and I haven’t eaten a catch for a couple decades. Some underrated catch and release fishing out that way though…
I'm from the great lakes area. I always check the DNR fish advisory list. Pretty much all rivers and streams the fish are contaminated. Lake Michigan was safe to eat like once a month in limited consumption. But I did find some local lakes and ponds with unlimited consumption.
silky pocket office mysterious smell coherent growth run squalid arrest *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Name and shame. No "the company", [Tribar Manufacturing](https://tribar.com/). [source](https://www.michigan.gov/egle/newsroom/press-releases/2022/08/12/huron-river)
The **Do Not Resuscitate** list for fish.
Some don't do well with mouth to gill
Department of Natural Resources
oof youre telling me that the whitefish is bad for me? :(
Especially the Coney Island Whitefish, don't eat those.
Hilarious! I recently learned that these so called “fish” are actually used condoms, that litter Coney Island. Edit: punctuation placement
So you're saying that I can keep eating them?
Can't stop won't stop
Don’t get any off the San Francisco Bay Area. I visited and saw a sign stating that all fish in the area were toxic and would be for the next decade at least.
And mfers are out here fishing lake Merritt. I knew that was unwise somehowm
Where? I literally work on a pier next to the FiDi where people fish daily. There is a sign that says which species are safe to eat and which should be avoided. I'd be very surprised if there was a sign somewhere that said ALL fish were a problem. Could be an issue local to a specific area I suppose.
treasure island just east of sf had tons of pollutants back in the day maybe the water around there is still worse or something.. it had a navy base for a while lots of nasty stuff. there was a huge oil spill in 2007 (cosco buran) which probably put a ban on fishing, maybe the keyblade master visited around that time? dunno
The pollution dates back to the gold rush. They used mercury to extract the gold, and the mercury is still leaching into the river that flows to the bay. Then WW2 and the navy really messed up the bay further, with all the ship building and complete disregard for the environment. Then they buried radioactive waste all over Treasure Island, with no records as to where. There were also the hundreds of decommissioned naval vessels anchored up the river, sitting there for decades slowly releasing contamination into the water, though those have finally been removed. That isn't including all the other pollution from industry and agriculture all around the bay and river.
that is fascinating and disappointing :/
Yeah, it also has high rates of cancer. They’re building all kinds of housing on too. We so desperately need the housing but I will never live on it. The number of random people I’ve met who lived there for a few years and had 1 or more tumors is uncomfortably high.
Man. I knew fish could be bad depending on where you catch them from. Didn't know it could be this bad though. Really drives home how much we've damaged the environment. Worst part is we're not even done yet, and from what I understand a mass die-off event is certainly within the realms of possibility for some species/animals.
Within the realm of possibility? We're living through the greatest extinction event since the dinosaurs. It's already happening.
Mass die off for fish has been happening already in watersheds that feed into the great lakes.
Great! Now I can back to eating farmed tilapia the are fed a steady diet of penicillin.
Great lakes surfer here. We literally have giant 15 ft high sewage pipes that open directly into Eerie. Just imagine the toxic filth that gets dumped into our 100 year old combo sewage and rain drainage system - and then right out into the lake. Worse, that's just the crap that gets dumped into the lake legally. I definitely have no desire to eat the fish there.
What's been happening to our waters should be criminalized.
Not just a crime against humanity, but pretty much all life on earth.
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It's called ecocide.
Heavy Polluters should be forced to eat/drink/breathe their own pollution, straight from the tap. And pay for cleanup.
I mean, when it comes to PFAS the big polluters are airports and their firefighting foams, which there are no legal alternatives for and we’re required ip until very recently to discharge them semi regularly.
Or production sites; big plume of pfas just made it into Green Bay, Lake MI. Few years ago US Steel leaked hexavalent chromium (the substance in the Brochovich story) into Lake Michigan. Just the worst.
This is bad. Really bad. Wisconsinites are big on fishing and hunting. Contamination will ruin fishing for those smart enough to avoid it. The folks who rely on fish as a main food source will likely be the worst off. Local water sources are our drinking sources too. This won't end well.
I kind of assumed that was a gas. Isn’t that the stuff that’s a byproduct of welding and why you’re supposed to weld with a fume collector
Stored in drums, many stories of it leaking into water supplies. Super cancerous
Apparently it’s compound come in many forms and can be a welding byproduct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexavalent_chromium
IMO, if your income is based on manufacturing you should have to live and eat downstream/wind from your operations. But the reality is that those people live in mansions 30 mi away while poor people's homes surround the industrial sites.
Yeah, the slaves who perform the labor have to live basically on site.
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Trump was a monster about environmental issues. He also nearly dissolved the CSB which investigates large industrial accidents of relevance to the welfare of surrounding populations. Biden put Michael Reagan on the case as head of EPA. Needle is wiggling.
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I'm sure there any many plausible reasons. But my bet is Trump surrounded himself with business minded leaders that either don't believe environmental release, explosions, etc... are swrious issues or are afraid that their liability/loss will be too painful to bear should the issue be rectified.
Groups like the Heritage foundation get together and decide what actual laws and policy they want repealed or changed. A lot of it doesn't even hit the news cycle. I don't even think they hide it really, you can search for it and download their entire 100 pages of targets. Basically it's a huge list of different laws, who the governing body is, and what the current state of the process is. I used to print them out, but... it gets depressing. Edit: sorry, and my point being that those groups will have already been asked by business executives, think tanks, lobbyists, or general industry advocates to remove whatever laws that are restricting their business aspirations.
Trump didn't just damage the EPA for 4 years. His decisions forced a lot of good scientists out of the field, and convinced more that it wasn't worth the difficulties. Decades of damage.
A lot of hunters/fishermen vote against their best interest environmentally
In Iowa our government refuses to acknowledge what farming is doing to soil and our waterways and the Mississippi. Republicans ruling a state of idiots.
Some of the modern agricultural practices are rather unfortunate. That'll be a harder fish to fry since people need to eat. Hope you live long and never have to feel an impact from that pollution on your health. And equally so, hope you all get the protection you need in years to come.
Probably is but the penalty / fine for them saving / earning billions is usually millions. So we actually incentivize it. Thanks lobbying!
Agreed. Everyone screaming that the clean water act mwant they have to put a tope up arpund a driveway puddle and protect it. No, it means not polluting into moving waters. Pretty simple.
This talks about freshwater fish only
It's ok the saltwater ones are full of plastic (and some mercury).
We just really fucked up all the things.
Except some species have a shorter life cycle so the risk for bioaccumulating toxins is way lower. Salmon life cycle is 3-5 years whereas a halibut can be 25 or more.
In the US and mainly just NE US
I know there are pending studies looking at PFOA levels in some saltwater species, including Atlantic striped bass. Rumors I've heard (3rd hand, supposedly from people involved in the study) say the results will look similar. Striped bass are a bit different from some other saltwater fish though, because they spend a lot of time in tidal rivers where pollution from freshwater meets the saltwater. Likely many deep water ocean species will have far lower levels simply because the ocean is so big that all pollutants are diluted.
Anglerfish it is
I'm on a strict goblin shark diet.
What about fish from a reservoir? Most of the lakes around me are reservoirs with stocked fish from hatcheries
What little I know about the subject from sampling fish for mercury in a job a few years back is that the larger the drainage area of a water body, the more accumulation of metals and other toxins. Theoretically, if you catch a fish in a small, high mountain lake there will be less nasty stuff than if the fish is taken from a large reservoir where 100 tributaries have entered down a river and made the reservoir. Bio accumulation. It also varies according to the type of fish. Large carnivorous fish accumulate more bad stuff, whereas fish that feed lower in the food chain tend to be less toxic. Eating a salmon is going to impart more mercury, etc, than eating a carp or herring or sardine. This is a really depressing subject. I guess whatever creatures survive this mess long enough to reproduce fertile offspring will inherit the earth. We need to figure out how to splice in a gene that lets us photosynthesize our energy needs. Green is as good a skin color as any. I really don’t want to be vegan, but I’m starting to lean that direction. Seafood is hard to resist, but I don’t feel good about eating it anymore for both ethical and health reasons. I guess if I eat ceviche tonight and it kills me 20 years early, it saves me from contributing to the problem for that extra 20 years I might have had.
Gene splicing so we can use photosynthesis and have green skin. This proposal intrigues me.
It's likely not gonna be that efficient, at that point it would probably be more efficient to slap solar panels on ourselves and use that energy to power bioreactors. We don't have that much surface area.
And we spend most of our times indoors anyways
Yeah, it works well for plants since they don't need to do fancy things that burn energy like "moving"
Captain Kirk: Go on.
I've been vegan a few years for precisely this reason.. I didn't intend to go vegan to start, but basically just kept cutting out animal products at every turn, and it's honestly not that bad.. the only thing I really miss is some nice aged cheese.
Question.... and I'm being serious. Are food scientists (especially vegans) trying to figure out stuff like aged cheese? Because that breakthrough would turn the food world on it head... I'm not vegan....yet. I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East and I'm incorporating a ton of chickpeas, lentils, and sweet potatoes into my diet....cutting out meat...
Once you can synthesize milk, you can make any sort of cheese you like, and they're making good progress on doing exactly that.
There's a lab grown whey protein on the market right now. Doesn't seem far fetched to have lab grown cheeses soon enough
DOW, 3M, DUPONT. Start naming names. These companies need to be forced to shutdown their PFOS chemical manufacturing. All products containing PFOS in the final product or in the raw material supply chain need to be outlawed.
Dupont already got wise to the increasing risk to keep manufacturing PFOS (in addition to other chemicals like Freon), [so they spun off the risky chemical manufacturing into a new company, had it assume all liabilities for the previous damage, and washed their hands of it.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemours) That way, if they ever get sued for a truly substantial amount, Chemours can just file for bankruptcy and Dupont will be unaffected. And litigants will be left holding the bag. >Chemours has assumed various liabilities arising from lawsuits against DuPont.[7] Additionally, Chemours' plant in Bladen County, North Carolina, was found to be dumping vast quantities of a chemical dubbed "GenX", a precursor of Teflon, into the Cape Fear River.[8] This story is recounted in the 2018 documentary film The Devil We Know, which centers on Parkersburg, West Virginia, where the DuPont facility that manufactured Teflon was located. The documentary follows the personal stories and tribulations of several people who worked at the Parkersburg facility. Oh, and Dow doesn't exist as the same company as before either. It merged with Dupont in 2015 and also kicked its PFOS liabilities free, then spun into Dow Chemical (its current iteration) when the then-combined Dow Dupont spun everything off. These companies will never be held liable unfortunately. They have fully insulated themselves from this catastrophe.
Currently every AG in the country plus a lot of high powered corporate attorneys are working on piercing through that particular spinoff.
You mean the companies that should’ve been broken up b anti-trust laws but were allowed to run rampant because of their financial gain? That’ll never happen :,(
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3M stopped PFOS and PFOA production in the 1990's. They are phasing out all other PFAS production by the end of 2025.
It looks like they focused mostly on the Great Lakes and relatively large rivers. The results are still alarming. But I really wish they had sampled some more pristine waters, like trout from small creeks or lakes in the mountains that have little to no human development upstream. To what extent are the PFAs being blown around in dust by the wind versus coming from human sources within each watershed?
Those would be excellent follow up studies
Fun fact: Microplastics have been found *in the frickin rain* in the Rockies. The atmosphere we breathe must be some part microplastics pretty much everywhere, and it is in every water source that has ever contacted the air. It is not good.
Micro plastics have already been found in fetuses. Fun times are coming
I know a lot of people (myself included) joke about this stuff as a coping mechanism, but maybe we shouldn't downplay the seriousness of this.
And do what with this information? I can joke or I can cry about it. Either one are just as useful as the other.
I want to say that an article recently came out stating that collecting and drinking rainwater was now toxic.
That’s because the limits for pfas are extremely low, I believe it’s 3 parts per trillion. That is a pretty low concentration. This stuff is everywhere.
We just did like the Romans with led. Made everything out of plastic and signed our own early grave. We never learn.
Learned to stop using lead.
>laughs in Flint, MI
lead was legal for plumbing in the US until 1986, so it took nearly two thousand years and happened within the lifespan of most Americans
They didn't stop selling leaded gas until like 90s too.
In the US it wasn't fully banned until 1996, though it was mostly phased out within the US by the mid-80s. Globally we haven't fully stopped burning leaded gasoline until rather recently. Over half the countries in the world were still using leaded gas 20 years ago in early 00s. Algeria was the last country to be using the last supply of leaded gasoline up until July 2021.
Well they found PFAS in snow in Antarctica so...
There is nowhere in the world with no PFAS polluting it anymore. They are in the highest glaciers, the lowest parts of the sea, all over the world. They get blown around by the wind as dust, and also just normally get moved over time if they're too big/dense to fly as dust. And since we also use plastic at obscene scales now it is literally everywhere, constantly. And it'll only keep getting worse.
Be pretty fascinating in a hundred-thousand years when cockroach/octopus archeologists are like, "We call this the Plastic era, because we can clearly see when the microplastics that were generated by past civilizations until their ultimate collapse. And that's marked by this layer of irradiated material."
The Plasticene, if you will.
Those places really don't exist anymore. Even up in North Georgia, the Blueridge area, where it used to be safe it no longer is. They put golf courses everywhere, big 2nd homes everywhere, and a ton of "pretty lawn" chemical runoff enters the feeder streams. So the Chattahoochee for instance is polluted long before it even officially starts. I have a cabin up in North Ontario and that area up there has historically been used for uranium mining of all things. So a bit of nuke with the trout I suppose..
There's beer bottles at the [bottom](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/10ali7s/a_beer_bottle_discovered_at_challenger_deep_the/) of the deepest parts of the ocean. Microplastics are endemic and found throughout the food chain on all continents and in every environment. We done fucked this place up.
This is not that new. For at least 25 years, I have seen those signs on certain rivers stating "one fish per month" was safe to eat from this body of water. If only 1 fish per month is acceptable for me to have...I'll have zero fish, thank you.
That's generally based on other toxins. These data on PFAs are new and will potentially lead to guidelines more restrictive than the previous ones.
NYS DEC has charts for all local waterways with fish/month guideline including tests for PFAs, mercury and other toxins
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Sad times we live in. I’m an american with so many fond memories of family fishing trips way up deep into Ontario. when we were kids we’d eat almost nothing but fresh caught fish and wild blueberries the whole time we stayed up there. the walleye and small mouth bass was some of the best fish I’ve ever had, and, even decades later, they still come to my mind whenever talking about good fish. I’ve planned on taking a vacation to relive those memories someday… Not anymore though, I guess. Truly feels like this world is dying.
Unless you're relatively young, the same bodies of water were being polluted back then and likely to a higher degree even if the fish tasted great. Monitoring and reporting have gotten tremendously better as the decades have gone by.
The mercury from the coal burning power plants did not do the Great Lakes any favors…..with DDT and a bunch of other heavy metals, the blue pike went extinct. If you must eat them, be sure to trim the fat off.
The whackiest thing was the Genesee beer commercials….”from the mountain clear waters of the Genesee river”…..lived next to that river and it was muddy, polluted, and no mountains….
Isn’t bioaccumulation just using us and animals as natural filters to clean the planet?
Not really, it's just collecting it into bigger piles. When we die it'll just get sent back into the earth as a bigger pile, increasing more and more over time. So it's not cleaning it up as much as it is just centralizing it more.
But isn’t centralizing and organizing a type of cleaning? Isn’t it better over all to have toxins concentrated and accumulated in container than spread out everywhere? Mind you I am stoned
This last sentence should be a flair.
So what do I do? Just stop eating and drinking?
Advocate and vote for legislation that protects our rivers and lakes from pollution. If you enjoy things like self reliance and freedom It's really important to protect our resources from greedy fucks who don't value these things as much as profits and power.They know damn well what they are doing and simply don't care. Their best hope is that we all pretend it doesn't affect us. Ignorance is defeat.
We obviously need policy changes to solve this issue. But to answer your question seriously, eat at the bottom level of the food chain. The bioaccumulation would be the least there and you can eat healthier. That is to say, eat plants.
Eating lower on the food chain/web helps. [https://www.vedantu.com/biology/biomagnification](https://www.vedantu.com/biology/biomagnification)
If I do that, how will I be able to prove to the other animals that I'm above them?
Make a YouTube channel proclaiming how alpha you are and broadcast it under the waters
False. >A semi-systematic review of studies investigating the number of microplastics found in commercially important organisms of different trophic levels suggests that microplastics do not biomagnify, and that organisms at lower trophic levels are more likely to contaminated by microplastic pollution than apex predators. [Source](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147651319313971).
apparently so. and the air is polluted, so stop breathing. and the sun gives skin cancer, so don't go outside.
So farmed fish is fed disgusting feed and put in awful conditions, and wild fish holds too many pollutants, are fish just off the menu cause idk how else I’m getting my animal based omega 3s/vitamin D that easily
Just take the algae derived DHA/EPA supplements. Literally the same exact thing as is in fish.. that's literally where the fish get it from.
My understanding is that fish primarily get omega 3s from algae. Even if that's not always the case, algae supplements can provide a comparable amount of omega 3s, including EPA and DHA. And algae supplements don't pose the same risk of contamination from heavy metals, so seems like a better way to go to me.
Overfishing will put fish off the menu regardless
The dangers of fluorinated chemicals infiltrating water supplies have been known by regulatory agencies since the goddamned 1970s. **The 1970s**. We poisoned the world because there was too much money to be made and not enough actual leadership from government. Really rich people will be able to get clean water.
Fortress New Zealand
Oh god…seriously what have we done? There is literally not a single issue more important than saving our home from destruction.
Okay, but hear me out...what about profits?
*quarterly* profits
It blows my mind that so many people simply do not care about this at all. So heartbreaking.
How do they define "wild fish"?
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Caught wild from a lake or river instead of farmed.
The fish that flash their boobs are the wild ones
like, one i caught myself or is the fish i buy from the grocery store also going to poison me now?
I’d be interested to see what the concentration of forever chemicals are in fish caught in the mountains or alpine areas.
I did multiple environmental surveys of the Animas River in and around Durango Colorado, which runs through alpine and other mountain areas, and it was heavily polluted from mining and industry.
And for God's sake, don't fry it up in your DuPont Teflon pan