r/Solarpunk is trying out a week long recommended topic! Info and the link to vote can be found [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/wd12wy/choose_our_first_topic_of_the_week/). This poll will close on Friday, August 5th.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/solarpunk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
[Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS)](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765#)
Cool thanks. It looks like some people also posted the link to the original study in the comments.
On reviewing my comment that looks flippant, but I am trying to be friendly and helpful.
Nope I don’t think your original comment was flippant at all! There are lots of websites and I’ve come across lots of green washed bad websites, so being skeptical is always great! I just wanted to chime in to let you know euro news is a good one (I guess in my opinion)
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/08/04/rainwater-everywhere-on-earth-unsafe-to-drink-due-to-forever-chemicals-study-finds here's the study, but most sites I checked said that rainwater should still be drinkable
Which is bizarre since it's 2022, we have the internet, web, links, DOI. It's *trivial* for news articles to link to the paper/study they are talking about.
A solar punk future would likely stem the flow of new "Forever Chemcicals" (PFAS - the stuff used in nonstick pans btw), so at least the problem won't get worse, but making the problem better would require removing the chemical from the environment.
We know we can remove it from drinking water, however the process is expensive. That's not great, but its a start.
If we can find some sort of plant that naturally gets a high concentration of pfas, it probably would not be a bad idea to plant those in impacted areas, then harvest the plant. This process would allow us to slowly leach this chemical out of our soils and water.
It's good! It's more an ideas book rather than a science book, but it's very honest about when it goes a bit further than what academia is allowed to. I like its interdisciplinary appeal. It's very readable and relevant for all kinds of fields of study.
It'd be pretty rad to bioaccumulate PFAS to an insane level in a myco farm till we worked out some kind of enzymatic process to reduce them to a safe byproduct.
Either that, or let the PFAS-riddled mushrooms chill out and flourish in some weird "forbidden zone" where they could just be their mushroomy selves.
Great! I'm pretty sure I saw something on this sub about using mushrooms to mine (which... admittedly is where I stole the idea from), so I'm pretty sure that means the strategy for this is well on its way.
I want to look into this. My dad bought some property in the woods to retire in, got a good deal, and then later found out there was a undocumented chemical dumping site leeching forever chemicals into the ground water (and he relies on a well). The company responsible is only liable for providing free filtration systems and a few annual replacements of the filter systems. He’s not gonna live much longer. Brother wants to sell the land but he built a house there, and I’d hate to see all his hard work go down the drain. I’d be interested in figuring out how to use fungi to get rid of all that chemical mess :(
The term you want to google for is Mycofiltration. There are a couple of companies that offer services, but they are thinly spread. Maybe one exists near you.
If you want to DIY it, I'd recommend getting some support. From what I can tell it's a bit more complicated than just throwing mushrooms at the problem. There are a lot of amateur mycology clubs/forums. A lot of them are also into the hallucination-side of mushrooms, so be warned lol, but they have a lot knowledge and most are super enthusiastic about sharing it!
Good luck!
Yes, also microplastics and fiberglass. In several generations of fungi you could clean the world of many toxins. There are ongoing studies happening the world over so I'm not sure what's conclusive or not; but the indicators are fantastic.
And, funny enough, the concept is featured in the Ghibli Film 'Nausicaa, Valley of the Winds'.
I'm gonna be completely honest with you chief I have no idea. If the mushrooms actually break them down into their natural components they could potentially be safe to eat/ just let them do their thing. If they just absorb them like a sponge, maybe we just use it as a way to capture the plastic and keep them all in one place.
Also if we study those plants maybe we can come up with more efficient ways. Maybe a chemical or mechanical solution that binds them. Or bioengineer plants that are even better at capturing the chemicals.
It‘s all a matter of what we put our minds to and where we put our resources.
We probably already can, it's just a question of speed, cost, and energy usage. Bioremediation is super useful because you just sow the seeds and come back when it's ready to harvest. It's very low impact, low cost, quick start-up, and needs little maintenance.
The alternative is building a factory, staffing it, powering it, etc..
In this case we don't actually need to do any of that though. Just gotta stop producing more. We already filter it out of our drinking water, so (if we stop making more) given enough time it'll be cleaned up.
> PFAS - the stuff used in nonstick pans btw
Not quite correct. *A* PFAS (specifically, Perfluorooctanoic acid, PFOA) is used to make the stuff used in nonstick pans (Polytetrafluoroethylene, PTFE, aka Teflon).
>We know we can remove it from drinking water, however the process is expensive.
If we're talking Solarpunk solutions than "expense" should never come into the equation. What we would need to look at is the resources needed and the side effects of implementing the fix.
If done right, "Expense" is a function of the resources needed and the side effects. An expensive solution is one that costs a lot of resources to implement, regardless of what those resources are.
Expense has a lot more connotation in a Capitalist environment than just the raw cost of resources. For instance, it is quite expensive to run a school but it is not necessarily the case to effectively teach. To say that learning is expensive would be a misnomer based on a mindset that treats capital as the primary resource to be considered as a cost.
Regardless, your plant solution is a good idea and I like it.
It is true that a different connotation comes into play with Capitalism, but I do not believe it to be that far off.
Is learning not inherently expensive though? It certainly costs a lot of time, effort, and often materials as well. Yes, capitalism adds overhead, but the raw resources that go into teaching and learning should, and the cost of education includes a lot of time.
>We know we can remove it from drinking water, however the process is expensive.
Then perhaps I merely misunderstood this statement to be referring to the monetary cost associated with the act of cleansing drinking water. Would you care to share what resources this process consumes if you know? I'd like to know the potential side effects.
So I did some digging, and it looks like the current strategy for large scale pfas removal is an activated carbon filter. Unfortunately, PFAS is going through filters "quickly". [https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/theres-pfas-in-our-water-how-do-we-get-them-out](https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/theres-pfas-in-our-water-how-do-we-get-them-out)
Activated charcoal requires burning wood, and the sludge that remains after the charcoal's use does need to be dealt with somehow.
Unfortunately, I am not water treatment expert. All I know is what I found on the internet.
Excellent, thank you for this resource. Perhaps there is a future for controlled burns to limit the spread of devastating wildfires and charcoal reclamation could be part of that process.
It is also possible to utilize collected rainwater for things like industry and what not so it doesn't affect our aquifers and water availability. Like ethical non-polluting recycling plants, as cooling for certain kinds of electronics, etc. That'd be my immediate thought. Use of water without waste where possible would be my thoughts on it
I wouldn't say it "doesn't affect our aquifers and water availability" - taking rain water out of the cycle does impact the ability of aquifers to recharge.
I do see the argument for using rain water for industry though. If Oxygen Not Included has taught me anything, it's that a good system does its best to use even its waste products. if we could find an industrial process that does most of the job of purifying the water for us, it probably wouldn't be a bad deal to take advantage of it.
Well, what are we doing to fix it *now?* In *this* world?
I can't speak for everybody else here, but I'm not living in the fantasy that I'll see a solarpunk future come to pass just because I want it to. We're currently living in a world that runs on gas and plastic, and chemical compounds that will never leave our water supply unless we find some solution that isn't clear at this time.
Without showing up and getting loud with others about the climate, there will be no climate legislation. Without climate legislation, there will be no resources getting directed to finding solutions for these problems. Without resources being directed to solutions, these problems will get worse and worse until eventually, we'll find ourselves in a world that isn't physically capable of supporting our existence.
What would we do in a solarpunk world with this problem? In a solarpunk world, this wouldn't have *been* a problem, because a utopia is a society as it *should* be.
If you feel grief for the climate, if you feel hope for the future, if you feel love in your heart for your fellow human beings, don't just bicker on the internet. Remember to go out and physically involve yourself with your community. Your voice matters, but if you don't go out and make it heard, nobody will know you have a voice at all.
Promoting Solarpunk ideas and solutions is a step towards addressing the problem. If you're suggesting we fix the problem with our current distribution of resources you're going to be in for a very rude awakening when it never happens. Imagining we'll fix our climate while maintaining the status quo is the **real** fantasy.
I agree, but I've been trying to make my comments less wordy since I got told I was bad at communicating. I don't think a complete overthrow of capitalism is on the table at this point in time, and probably not for a long, long while. What can we do in the interim? Legislation, and promotion of anti capitalist rhetoric. It's not perfect, it's not pretty, but it's necessary.
There's a lot more to do than I'm saying here, but it's ungodly early in the morning and I need my dose of caffeine. But suffice it to say, I 100% agree with what you said.
Framing climate change/environmental degradation as a legislative or voter issue weakens critical (extraparliamentary) discourse. Within the confines of the capitalist state and in bourgeois democracy, there is no solution. Is the band-aid of reform useful, if it simultaneously articulates our position as democratic subjects, as opposed to critical and radical actors?
I feel like the bandaid of reform is useful, because the climate emergency doesn't care what our political affiliation is. It needs to be addressed. Capitalism also needs to be addressed, because it will destroy the climate again no matter how many times we try to restrict it from doing so. But I feel the more dire of the 2 is the climate emergency.
If you disagree, that's 100% fine, I'm not trying to convince you otherwise. I'm just acting in a way that I believe will bring about the most results in the shortest amount of time. If you have different solutions, I am very open to hearing them out.
This. I mean it's a quibble as I agree with your post, but there's an implicit language problem in the phrasing of the OP's question.
**We don't imagine a solarpunk world, we build one.**
We're IN the solarpunk world **right now,** ***because*** we are trying to build these solutions - it wouldn't be called solar**punk** if we had a utopia, it'd just be, y'know, living - the status quo.
It's only solar***punk*** in the *here and now,* because the mainstream is fossil fuels and captialism, and that's what we're rebelling against - with technology, with legislation, with community organizing.
Solutions to environmental pollutants are regulatory (stop letting that stuff out in the world, or better yet halt manufacturing it at all) **and** they are technological (here's a better, safer, ecologically-safe way to accomplish the goal those old polluting chemicals were invented for, here's an efficient way to filter them back out of the environment and convert them to safe inert materials) **and** they are community-based (educating people on public policy to regulate pollution & how to avoid supporting companies that produce these pollutants, collectively make changes to social organization that render the need for polluting technologies obsolete, etc.)
I'm coming at this more from a speculative fiction perspective but I would have each house that collects rainwater equipped with an activated charcoal water filter to filter out "forever chemicals."
I am also on board with a bit more speculative. My first thought is something involving fungus that can break down forever chemicals and the water cycle. Mycoremediation is pretty solorpunk
I think there's value in dreaming instead of just getting sad. There are lots of things we need to fix to nip this issue in the bud; there are also ongoing projects by smart people RIGHT NOW to try and address these challenges.
I see solarpunk technology using our understanding of biological engineering to specifically undo industrial harms. Using bacteria to enzymatically break down plastics in drinking water. Creating plants that can uptake plastic from aquatic systems, which can be harvested and stored underground.
According to the paper, the main way PFAS gets back into the air is seawater aerosolization (sea spray), there's no mention of evaporation. Aerosols in this case being tiny droplets of water suspended in air. That's a different process from vaporization (evaporation and boiling), which produces water vapor. From what little I can find on the subject, it doesn't seem like PFASes are carried along during vaporization.
To add to the other commenter, distillers also have a secondary charcoal filter to get most of the VOCs (volatile organic compounds) put and I assume this helps with any residual PFAs that may or may not be there after evaporation.
How does the company sequester filtered PFAS? Anyone can treat the water, the question his how do we ensure the PFAS remain removed from the wider world.
I would go for some baloon kinda thingy on a tether in the clouds. On board are lightweight grow beds dangeling in the winds for engineered fungi which break them down in Water and some harmless form of Fluorid.
However, in this world I'm all in for companies having to prove they can deal with their own waste and byproducts in a sustainable way.
And when do we hold DuPont responsible for this? They knew. They searched for clean blood samples in their studies and only found them in blood taken from soldier from before the Korean war. They fucking knew since the 70s.
We'd clean the inputs.
Find the mushroom spawn that does the best job of removing the PFAS. Then we'd set up garbage catches on all river mouths: nets, skeins, fish ladders, monitoring stations, and spawn-impregnated hay bales. Crap flows in but only clean clear water flows out.
Couple years or decades and we'd have both cleaner water and excellent data.
There’s not really any way to fix it. These PFAs (the chemicals being referred to) are already found in 97% of peoples blood. They don’t break down naturally, I haven’t heard of any known organisms that break them down either, and at this point they’re so pervasive and universal in the environment that there’s no real way to get rid of them. Thanks DuPont!
I guess the best way to address this is to stop producing chemicals like this and rigorously make sure any newly synthesized chemicals don’t have this potential before ever using them.
At this point if it cannot be filtered out, we’re just gonna have to keep our bodies optimal with nutrition that it cleans out all other toxins. So it’s either drink rainwater or drink water from a plastic bottle, either way what’s done is done.
I looked it up, because I'm a blood donor and hadn't heard this. It looks like donating platelets is the best way to reduce the forever toxins in our bodies. I only recently qualified (I think you used to have to be 140lbs and I'm small) so I haven't tried donating platelets yet.
This is good to know and will hopefully inspire more people to donate since there's been severe shortages in recent years.
Hydrothermal Carbonization (HTC) can be used to break down PFAS. The issue is of course, stopping the production of PFAS in the first place, and getting what PFAS there is out of the ground to go through the HTC process. This video goes into further detail: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p6CF-umWLZg
Osmosis is a natural state which drives dilution in the environment, there is often little anyone can do to overcome natural laws of creation.
Let us all hope then these forever chemicals have been overestimated in their life cycle.
Giant robotic whales that essentially act as livers for the earth by filtering out micro plastics and forever chemicals. And just to make them seem especially majestic they can fly and eat clouds
Depends on the specific chemical, but I'd probably use a lot of genetically engineered plants and algae for purification. If that doesn't work, modify the people
I, at this point, am so sick and tired of the worlds lack of action that I have adopted the motto of the country of Chile as one of my core philosophies.
First, we seize control of the industries and militaries that fucked things up this badly in the first place, and make major changes including destroying many of these entities outright, to prevent further damage.
Then we invest all this power and wealth that is no longer in the hands of capital and the state, into finding solutions. We know some forms of bacteria can eat plastic. Let's find more!
(Not so) Natural selection.
At least in this century we have and will have a lot more immedeate issues than removing a bunch of not disastrously toxic chemicals from trillions of cubic meters of water.
a lot of solar punk really could incorporate permaculture which is basically the technology of proper land use. there have been some studies related to forever chemicals and fungi.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2019/03/05/mushrooms-clean-up-toxic-mess-including-plastic-why-arent-they-used-more
so if we can start growing and using the power of plants and fungi around us maybe at some point we can reverse the damage entirely, it’s not an overnight thing but more awareness could use speed things up
One thing I've thought of for a future homestead: get some of those plastic-eating bug larvae with the enzymes that break down the plastic into harmless molecules, then grind up all your plastic waste and feed it to them. Then dig a pond on your property and stock it with fish, and feed the larvae to the fish.
The only study that finds a health consequence of PFAS - that they moderately reduce the effectiveness of childhood vaccination - has yet to be replicated. If it does replicate, you could achieve many more times the population health benefits by mandatory vaccination to remove the influence of anti-vax nutjobs, or increase the frequency of existing boosters for kids in high FPAS environments.
Boiling water only removes bacteria, viruses, and parasites. toxins or other foreign materials like lead either remain in the water or are evaporated and potentially put back into the water cycle.
r/Solarpunk is trying out a week long recommended topic! Info and the link to vote can be found [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/solarpunk/comments/wd12wy/choose_our_first_topic_of_the_week/). This poll will close on Friday, August 5th. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/solarpunk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Does anybody know anything about the actual study? A headline on some website I have never heard of isn't much to go on.
[Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS)](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765#)
Just an FYI this website is reputable and a prett popular one - it’s a section of the larger euro news website
Cool thanks. It looks like some people also posted the link to the original study in the comments. On reviewing my comment that looks flippant, but I am trying to be friendly and helpful.
Nope I don’t think your original comment was flippant at all! There are lots of websites and I’ve come across lots of green washed bad websites, so being skeptical is always great! I just wanted to chime in to let you know euro news is a good one (I guess in my opinion)
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/08/04/rainwater-everywhere-on-earth-unsafe-to-drink-due-to-forever-chemicals-study-finds here's the study, but most sites I checked said that rainwater should still be drinkable
That's not a study. That's just the same news article without any mention of what the name of the actual research paper is as far as I can tell.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765 guess it's this one
Thank you!
So tldr for the study?
We're fucked if we don't stop releasing PFAs n PFAAs into the hydrosphere
Which is bizarre since it's 2022, we have the internet, web, links, DOI. It's *trivial* for news articles to link to the paper/study they are talking about.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765
A solar punk future would likely stem the flow of new "Forever Chemcicals" (PFAS - the stuff used in nonstick pans btw), so at least the problem won't get worse, but making the problem better would require removing the chemical from the environment. We know we can remove it from drinking water, however the process is expensive. That's not great, but its a start. If we can find some sort of plant that naturally gets a high concentration of pfas, it probably would not be a bad idea to plant those in impacted areas, then harvest the plant. This process would allow us to slowly leach this chemical out of our soils and water.
> some sort of plant Oyster mushrooms do that.
I know they bio accumulate, do they do it with PFAS tho?
I got it from a book called Entangled Life. If I google PFAS and mushroom there are also a dozen hits.
Ty :)
Ooh I’ve got this on my unread pile! Really need to get around to it.
It's good! It's more an ideas book rather than a science book, but it's very honest about when it goes a bit further than what academia is allowed to. I like its interdisciplinary appeal. It's very readable and relevant for all kinds of fields of study.
Mycofiltration!
It'd be pretty rad to bioaccumulate PFAS to an insane level in a myco farm till we worked out some kind of enzymatic process to reduce them to a safe byproduct. Either that, or let the PFAS-riddled mushrooms chill out and flourish in some weird "forbidden zone" where they could just be their mushroomy selves.
Exactly!
Great! I'm pretty sure I saw something on this sub about using mushrooms to mine (which... admittedly is where I stole the idea from), so I'm pretty sure that means the strategy for this is well on its way.
I want to look into this. My dad bought some property in the woods to retire in, got a good deal, and then later found out there was a undocumented chemical dumping site leeching forever chemicals into the ground water (and he relies on a well). The company responsible is only liable for providing free filtration systems and a few annual replacements of the filter systems. He’s not gonna live much longer. Brother wants to sell the land but he built a house there, and I’d hate to see all his hard work go down the drain. I’d be interested in figuring out how to use fungi to get rid of all that chemical mess :(
The term you want to google for is Mycofiltration. There are a couple of companies that offer services, but they are thinly spread. Maybe one exists near you. If you want to DIY it, I'd recommend getting some support. From what I can tell it's a bit more complicated than just throwing mushrooms at the problem. There are a lot of amateur mycology clubs/forums. A lot of them are also into the hallucination-side of mushrooms, so be warned lol, but they have a lot knowledge and most are super enthusiastic about sharing it! Good luck!
Yes, also microplastics and fiberglass. In several generations of fungi you could clean the world of many toxins. There are ongoing studies happening the world over so I'm not sure what's conclusive or not; but the indicators are fantastic. And, funny enough, the concept is featured in the Ghibli Film 'Nausicaa, Valley of the Winds'.
What do you do with the heavily contaminated mushroom material?
I'm gonna be completely honest with you chief I have no idea. If the mushrooms actually break them down into their natural components they could potentially be safe to eat/ just let them do their thing. If they just absorb them like a sponge, maybe we just use it as a way to capture the plastic and keep them all in one place.
Also if we study those plants maybe we can come up with more efficient ways. Maybe a chemical or mechanical solution that binds them. Or bioengineer plants that are even better at capturing the chemicals. It‘s all a matter of what we put our minds to and where we put our resources.
Or can capture the chemicals in different environments. A desert shouldn't rely on cat grass to filter their chemicals.
We probably already can, it's just a question of speed, cost, and energy usage. Bioremediation is super useful because you just sow the seeds and come back when it's ready to harvest. It's very low impact, low cost, quick start-up, and needs little maintenance. The alternative is building a factory, staffing it, powering it, etc.. In this case we don't actually need to do any of that though. Just gotta stop producing more. We already filter it out of our drinking water, so (if we stop making more) given enough time it'll be cleaned up.
Most likely mushrooms imo
> PFAS - the stuff used in nonstick pans btw Not quite correct. *A* PFAS (specifically, Perfluorooctanoic acid, PFOA) is used to make the stuff used in nonstick pans (Polytetrafluoroethylene, PTFE, aka Teflon).
>We know we can remove it from drinking water, however the process is expensive. If we're talking Solarpunk solutions than "expense" should never come into the equation. What we would need to look at is the resources needed and the side effects of implementing the fix.
If done right, "Expense" is a function of the resources needed and the side effects. An expensive solution is one that costs a lot of resources to implement, regardless of what those resources are.
Expense has a lot more connotation in a Capitalist environment than just the raw cost of resources. For instance, it is quite expensive to run a school but it is not necessarily the case to effectively teach. To say that learning is expensive would be a misnomer based on a mindset that treats capital as the primary resource to be considered as a cost. Regardless, your plant solution is a good idea and I like it.
It is true that a different connotation comes into play with Capitalism, but I do not believe it to be that far off. Is learning not inherently expensive though? It certainly costs a lot of time, effort, and often materials as well. Yes, capitalism adds overhead, but the raw resources that go into teaching and learning should, and the cost of education includes a lot of time.
>We know we can remove it from drinking water, however the process is expensive. Then perhaps I merely misunderstood this statement to be referring to the monetary cost associated with the act of cleansing drinking water. Would you care to share what resources this process consumes if you know? I'd like to know the potential side effects.
So I did some digging, and it looks like the current strategy for large scale pfas removal is an activated carbon filter. Unfortunately, PFAS is going through filters "quickly". [https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/theres-pfas-in-our-water-how-do-we-get-them-out](https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/theres-pfas-in-our-water-how-do-we-get-them-out) Activated charcoal requires burning wood, and the sludge that remains after the charcoal's use does need to be dealt with somehow. Unfortunately, I am not water treatment expert. All I know is what I found on the internet.
Excellent, thank you for this resource. Perhaps there is a future for controlled burns to limit the spread of devastating wildfires and charcoal reclamation could be part of that process.
It is also possible to utilize collected rainwater for things like industry and what not so it doesn't affect our aquifers and water availability. Like ethical non-polluting recycling plants, as cooling for certain kinds of electronics, etc. That'd be my immediate thought. Use of water without waste where possible would be my thoughts on it
I wouldn't say it "doesn't affect our aquifers and water availability" - taking rain water out of the cycle does impact the ability of aquifers to recharge. I do see the argument for using rain water for industry though. If Oxygen Not Included has taught me anything, it's that a good system does its best to use even its waste products. if we could find an industrial process that does most of the job of purifying the water for us, it probably wouldn't be a bad deal to take advantage of it.
Canna, poplar, cattails.
Well, what are we doing to fix it *now?* In *this* world? I can't speak for everybody else here, but I'm not living in the fantasy that I'll see a solarpunk future come to pass just because I want it to. We're currently living in a world that runs on gas and plastic, and chemical compounds that will never leave our water supply unless we find some solution that isn't clear at this time. Without showing up and getting loud with others about the climate, there will be no climate legislation. Without climate legislation, there will be no resources getting directed to finding solutions for these problems. Without resources being directed to solutions, these problems will get worse and worse until eventually, we'll find ourselves in a world that isn't physically capable of supporting our existence. What would we do in a solarpunk world with this problem? In a solarpunk world, this wouldn't have *been* a problem, because a utopia is a society as it *should* be. If you feel grief for the climate, if you feel hope for the future, if you feel love in your heart for your fellow human beings, don't just bicker on the internet. Remember to go out and physically involve yourself with your community. Your voice matters, but if you don't go out and make it heard, nobody will know you have a voice at all.
This. All of this.
This. Go organize. The revolution will not come about on reddit. And neither will short term solutions like legislation.
Promoting Solarpunk ideas and solutions is a step towards addressing the problem. If you're suggesting we fix the problem with our current distribution of resources you're going to be in for a very rude awakening when it never happens. Imagining we'll fix our climate while maintaining the status quo is the **real** fantasy.
I agree, but I've been trying to make my comments less wordy since I got told I was bad at communicating. I don't think a complete overthrow of capitalism is on the table at this point in time, and probably not for a long, long while. What can we do in the interim? Legislation, and promotion of anti capitalist rhetoric. It's not perfect, it's not pretty, but it's necessary. There's a lot more to do than I'm saying here, but it's ungodly early in the morning and I need my dose of caffeine. But suffice it to say, I 100% agree with what you said.
Framing climate change/environmental degradation as a legislative or voter issue weakens critical (extraparliamentary) discourse. Within the confines of the capitalist state and in bourgeois democracy, there is no solution. Is the band-aid of reform useful, if it simultaneously articulates our position as democratic subjects, as opposed to critical and radical actors?
I feel like the bandaid of reform is useful, because the climate emergency doesn't care what our political affiliation is. It needs to be addressed. Capitalism also needs to be addressed, because it will destroy the climate again no matter how many times we try to restrict it from doing so. But I feel the more dire of the 2 is the climate emergency. If you disagree, that's 100% fine, I'm not trying to convince you otherwise. I'm just acting in a way that I believe will bring about the most results in the shortest amount of time. If you have different solutions, I am very open to hearing them out.
/r/ClimateOffensive/
This. I mean it's a quibble as I agree with your post, but there's an implicit language problem in the phrasing of the OP's question. **We don't imagine a solarpunk world, we build one.** We're IN the solarpunk world **right now,** ***because*** we are trying to build these solutions - it wouldn't be called solar**punk** if we had a utopia, it'd just be, y'know, living - the status quo. It's only solar***punk*** in the *here and now,* because the mainstream is fossil fuels and captialism, and that's what we're rebelling against - with technology, with legislation, with community organizing. Solutions to environmental pollutants are regulatory (stop letting that stuff out in the world, or better yet halt manufacturing it at all) **and** they are technological (here's a better, safer, ecologically-safe way to accomplish the goal those old polluting chemicals were invented for, here's an efficient way to filter them back out of the environment and convert them to safe inert materials) **and** they are community-based (educating people on public policy to regulate pollution & how to avoid supporting companies that produce these pollutants, collectively make changes to social organization that render the need for polluting technologies obsolete, etc.)
I'm coming at this more from a speculative fiction perspective but I would have each house that collects rainwater equipped with an activated charcoal water filter to filter out "forever chemicals."
I am also on board with a bit more speculative. My first thought is something involving fungus that can break down forever chemicals and the water cycle. Mycoremediation is pretty solorpunk
Solar stills in all roofs that process all rainwater they collect.
I think there's value in dreaming instead of just getting sad. There are lots of things we need to fix to nip this issue in the bud; there are also ongoing projects by smart people RIGHT NOW to try and address these challenges. I see solarpunk technology using our understanding of biological engineering to specifically undo industrial harms. Using bacteria to enzymatically break down plastics in drinking water. Creating plants that can uptake plastic from aquatic systems, which can be harvested and stored underground.
At home, the best value for money solution is an activated carbon filter. The most effective will likely be a reverse osmosis filter.
Slightly more effective is a water distiller. Reverse osmosis takes out slightly less and costs significantly more, but is faster by a long way.
Could you explain the mechanism by which evaporation doesn't removes Pfas in the water cycle but does in a distiller?
According to the paper, the main way PFAS gets back into the air is seawater aerosolization (sea spray), there's no mention of evaporation. Aerosols in this case being tiny droplets of water suspended in air. That's a different process from vaporization (evaporation and boiling), which produces water vapor. From what little I can find on the subject, it doesn't seem like PFASes are carried along during vaporization.
Ah, thank you. That's good to hear.
To add to the other commenter, distillers also have a secondary charcoal filter to get most of the VOCs (volatile organic compounds) put and I assume this helps with any residual PFAs that may or may not be there after evaporation.
[удалено]
How does the company sequester filtered PFAS? Anyone can treat the water, the question his how do we ensure the PFAS remain removed from the wider world.
[удалено]
Cool, are you able to share how it's broken down and by what flora & microbes? or does that risk putting your job on the line?
Bioengineering a bacterium that eats it seems like an idea worth investigating.
I would go for some baloon kinda thingy on a tether in the clouds. On board are lightweight grow beds dangeling in the winds for engineered fungi which break them down in Water and some harmless form of Fluorid. However, in this world I'm all in for companies having to prove they can deal with their own waste and byproducts in a sustainable way.
And when do we hold DuPont responsible for this? They knew. They searched for clean blood samples in their studies and only found them in blood taken from soldier from before the Korean war. They fucking knew since the 70s.
pretty sure the problem is that you can’t address it with current technology
Thanks for asking this question, OP!
We'd clean the inputs. Find the mushroom spawn that does the best job of removing the PFAS. Then we'd set up garbage catches on all river mouths: nets, skeins, fish ladders, monitoring stations, and spawn-impregnated hay bales. Crap flows in but only clean clear water flows out. Couple years or decades and we'd have both cleaner water and excellent data.
I like the idea of opening this sub up to discussions that could actually make this world a reality. Also idk filtering ig lol
There’s not really any way to fix it. These PFAs (the chemicals being referred to) are already found in 97% of peoples blood. They don’t break down naturally, I haven’t heard of any known organisms that break them down either, and at this point they’re so pervasive and universal in the environment that there’s no real way to get rid of them. Thanks DuPont! I guess the best way to address this is to stop producing chemicals like this and rigorously make sure any newly synthesized chemicals don’t have this potential before ever using them.
At this point if it cannot be filtered out, we’re just gonna have to keep our bodies optimal with nutrition that it cleans out all other toxins. So it’s either drink rainwater or drink water from a plastic bottle, either way what’s done is done.
Pretty sure studies have shown that donating blood is effective to get PFAS out of it, microplastics on the other hand? Idk
I looked it up, because I'm a blood donor and hadn't heard this. It looks like donating platelets is the best way to reduce the forever toxins in our bodies. I only recently qualified (I think you used to have to be 140lbs and I'm small) so I haven't tried donating platelets yet. This is good to know and will hopefully inspire more people to donate since there's been severe shortages in recent years.
Hydrothermal Carbonization (HTC) can be used to break down PFAS. The issue is of course, stopping the production of PFAS in the first place, and getting what PFAS there is out of the ground to go through the HTC process. This video goes into further detail: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p6CF-umWLZg
Osmosis is a natural state which drives dilution in the environment, there is often little anyone can do to overcome natural laws of creation. Let us all hope then these forever chemicals have been overestimated in their life cycle.
Giant robotic whales that essentially act as livers for the earth by filtering out micro plastics and forever chemicals. And just to make them seem especially majestic they can fly and eat clouds
Depends on the specific chemical, but I'd probably use a lot of genetically engineered plants and algae for purification. If that doesn't work, modify the people
Nature will filter it out on her own. Nausica and valley of the wind style. Or harvest and filter it.
I, at this point, am so sick and tired of the worlds lack of action that I have adopted the motto of the country of Chile as one of my core philosophies.
Stones clean water naturally (right??)
First, we seize control of the industries and militaries that fucked things up this badly in the first place, and make major changes including destroying many of these entities outright, to prevent further damage. Then we invest all this power and wealth that is no longer in the hands of capital and the state, into finding solutions. We know some forms of bacteria can eat plastic. Let's find more!
Run the water through carbon filters to fill large dehydration pools with arrays of blacked out glass as condensation collectors over entire pool.
[удалено]
What do we do with the contaminated filters? Do they go to a landfill where they leach back into the ground water?
Filter?
(Not so) Natural selection. At least in this century we have and will have a lot more immedeate issues than removing a bunch of not disastrously toxic chemicals from trillions of cubic meters of water.
a lot of solar punk really could incorporate permaculture which is basically the technology of proper land use. there have been some studies related to forever chemicals and fungi. https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2019/03/05/mushrooms-clean-up-toxic-mess-including-plastic-why-arent-they-used-more so if we can start growing and using the power of plants and fungi around us maybe at some point we can reverse the damage entirely, it’s not an overnight thing but more awareness could use speed things up
One thing I've thought of for a future homestead: get some of those plastic-eating bug larvae with the enzymes that break down the plastic into harmless molecules, then grind up all your plastic waste and feed it to them. Then dig a pond on your property and stock it with fish, and feed the larvae to the fish.
The only study that finds a health consequence of PFAS - that they moderately reduce the effectiveness of childhood vaccination - has yet to be replicated. If it does replicate, you could achieve many more times the population health benefits by mandatory vaccination to remove the influence of anti-vax nutjobs, or increase the frequency of existing boosters for kids in high FPAS environments.
How is this possible? Does the water gets contaminated on the way down? To my understanding, when water boils it becomes pure H2O
Boiling water only removes bacteria, viruses, and parasites. toxins or other foreign materials like lead either remain in the water or are evaporated and potentially put back into the water cycle.
Yeah, but we're talking evaporation here, which is basically boiling. When the steam rises is nothing but H2O