The only way to escape PFAS is to go to a different planet. 3M and Dow have poisoned the entire world. It's shocking how much effort and money I have had to invest to try to mitigate this problem as much as possible in my own home, not because the alternatives are expensive, but because of how pervasive PFAS use is and how it contaminates everything. Every single decision-maker involved should have been jailed.
There's the PFAS blood cleaning startup but is unvalidated and also we'll all just get more replacement exposure from routine activities of living soooo imo almost feels futile regardless: https://www.wired.com/story/this-startup-promises-to-clean-y...
> What have you done in your own home? I’d be curious to know.
I've gotten rid of anything in my kitchen that I can that contains PFAS or is produced with PFAS or PFOAs. I use cast iron or stainless steel cookware, glass and silicone only for things that cannot be made of stainless steel. I've more or less eliminated plastics as much as possible from the kitchen. Unfortunately, I can't necessarily do that with food packaging, but even there when I have an option I will change brands or stores to buy things without plastic packaging, or paper packaging coated in PFAS/Teflon. Similarly to avoid PFAS and other chemicals in the production of plastics, as well as microplastics, I almost exclusively buy clothing made entirely from natural fibers.
Beyond that, I have a whole home water filtration system, and after that whole home filtration system I additionally run an undersink 5-stage RO system, both of which are NSF/ANSI certified (53 for the filter system and 58 for the RO system) to remove PFAS and PFOAs. I also go out of my way to find and buy products that don't contain added PFAS, because unfortunately PFAS are in many basic everyday household products like dishwasher detergent, rinse aid, laundry detergent, fabric softener,
and the like. If you dig into this you will be disturbed at how many things have PFAS intentionally added to them, and then you will be even more disturbed to find out how many things contain PFAS incidentally, mostly due to contaminated water supplies.
Even with all of this effort, and more I'm not detailing in this comment, I am exposed to PFAS in the food supply and water supply daily, and in a myriad of other ways. It's impossible to avoid, even with a major budget and being extremely conscious of this issue. There is no way to get away from it. The entire world is contaminated. I don't even know how much my mitigations have any helpful effect towards my health, because it's so difficult to mitigate.
How do you deal with running electricity through the house? This is not meant to be a fully serious question, but I'm replacing old wires in my home currently and it doesn't escape my attention that PFAS added to the insulation makes the new wiring easier to use and possibly safer from a fire perspective. I'm not certain about this but pulling cloth wrapper wires out of the ceiling makes me think where such chemicals have been used. I know I buy precrimped jumper wires with a teflon coating for work. I'm certain some people strip them with a heated tool. And I certainly melted some insulation while soldering them as a teenager.
I've never owned a house old enough to be rewired, my previous house was built in 1992, the current house was built in 2017. That said, as far as I am aware, SIMpull does not contain PFAS, which is the slippery coating on Romex wiring. I don't know what the off-brand companies do, though.
For data cabling, which I did install myself in both houses, I looked up material safety data sheets (MSDS) for any products I purchased before buying them. The wiring I used also does not contain any PFAS in its insulation.
Interesting, I haven't looked at the datasheets but I assumed there were some PFAS used in the coatings. That is good to know. The problem I see is that the material properties of PFAS are so useful and desireable, so they are used in so many different contexts.
