Is 'Toxic Fashion' making us sick? A look at the chemicals lurking in our clothe (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Is 'Toxic Fashion' making us sick? A look at the chemicals lurking in our clothe (2023)

npr.org

49 pointsLordNibbler22 comments

From [0]:

> Out of 38 products ordered from fast-fashion giants, CBC Marketplace found one in five items had elevated levels of chemicals, including lead, phthalates and PFAS.

Lead, we know is bad. Pthalates were recently shown to be bad for brains of any age [1], on top of being bad for developing ones. PFAS, well, they bioaccumulate, and we probably should be worried about overexposure, with studies linking them to various health problems. So, yes, it's reasonable to assume that some clothing is subtly harming health.

[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-fast-fashion-ch...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42069320

I think it’s reasonable to assume that some clothing is harming health, and the degree to which it does is entirely unknown.

The NPR article does talk about some directly observable effects like people having trouble breathing and rashes, or 'brain fog', though I suppose that's not all conclusively casually linked. Still, it's something worth thinking about, and something I feel is worth taking into account when you have the option of buying a garment consisting of only natural fibers versus something boasting it's wrinkle-free, or if you're deciding weather or not to buy the water repellent spray that the shoe store clerk is pushing, and so on.

Sorry I mean that "subtle" is probably too conservative a descriptor of the health effects. Subtle doesn't mean "low-medium confidence of significant effects," which I think is probably closer to the current assessment of the harm of these things.

Ah okay, you're right, I misunderstood you.

Honestly, if you have to choose between PFAS and phthalates... I'd probably take the PFAS. Pthalates are horrifying substances when you see what they can really do to human development.

Surely you could have dropped "Is" for a readable (vs truncated) title: 'Toxic Fashion' making us sick? A look at the chemicals lurking in our clothes

Alternatively "lurking" isn't adding value: Is 'Toxic Fashion' making us sick? A look at the chemicals in our clothes

The title is fine, get outside more.

Cloth shopping bags are harming us and the environment around us. They are sold unwashed with heavy dyes, so we either wash them and pollute the local sewer or septic system, or we throw them out and everything in them leeches into the landfill.

> have access to medical care. Often the types of doctors that will address this - they don't take insurance. They only take cash

Is he implying that the doctors who take insurance will not tell the truth

> MOSLEY: So those anti-wrinkle finishes and the finishes to prevent mildew and mold and things like that, we're talking about formaldehyde and Teflon were used as chemical finishing as well, right?

> WICKER: Yes. So Teflon is the brand name for water and stain repellent finishes, and that's PFAS, which you might know has been in the news lately because it's been found in the water of half of all Americans. And part of the reason why it's in the water of so many Americans is because there are still manufacturers in the United States of textiles for clothing, performance clothing, uniforms and furniture that use this stain-repellent chemistry, and then they put it in the water. And there's nothing illegal about that.

Man, Gell-Mann amnesia is awful. That is... not what Teflon is, or how the PFAS problems have arisen, and anyone who would say or approve those two paragraphs comes across as having no bloody clue what they're talking about. Now I don't trust the rest of the article, even if its argument seems generally sound!

(That said: never buy from the six-letter "brands" on Amazon and friends if there is any other source for that item. There is no reason to deal with those guys, and so many reasons not to do it. They usually aren't even the factories, they're just middlemen! Factories at least try to build decent reputations.)

It's an inverse Mann-gell, no ?

Mann-gell amnesia is trusting a source despite the fact that on subject you know a lot about, it's wrong more often than not.

I'd say than inverse Mann-gell amnesia (Gell-Mann remembrance ?) is not trusting a source because it was factually wrong on a detail despite being overall correct.

And sometimes it's caused by simplification. I used to watch a vulgarisation channel, that happened to be wrong about some issue because of oversimplification and overgeneralization, I understand that it's needed, but I cannot help but think 'what if she's wrong there too' and stopped watching vulgarization for good :/

[edit] sorry for the unrelated tangent, I guess I just wanted to rant about that for months and finally found an occasion

Wow, did they show you a bright red shiny plastic thing that didn’t have terrible chemicals in it? Like the one that they ordered from some other country ? no eh? or thick clear flexible plastic like that purse is ? Did they find some that doesn’t have phalates in it? Because that’s how you make thick clear plastic flexible. This was true in the 80s when they made them in America but now they make them in China.

And then the raincoat has. Pfas LMAO that’s how they make all raincoats waterproof. Did they compare it to the raincoat from MEC? In the 90s, we had that shit in a bottle and we would spray it inside on our shoes to waterproof them. Pure insanity.

People think that things are safe just for no reason just because they are OK they’re safe. Guess what you can’t make a raincoat waterproof and light and cheap without putting dangerous shit on it. Go get your oil, skin jacket and then wax it there you go safe.

They fluorinate the machines that package your food because the food taste better after four months in the fluorinated container and fuck you they’re never gonna change

>They fluorinate the machines that package your food because the food taste better after four months in the fluorinated container and fuck you they’re never gonna change

source?

They don't "fluorinate the machines" but they sure as hell do use fluropolymer liners for cans and containers and such. It's usually PFA Teflon (alkoxy) but it is fluorinated nonetheless.

Yes pfas is a lubricant used in all factories including food factories and they florinate the large plastic food barrells they put all our food in

> that’s how they make all raincoats waterproof.

Nearly every major outdoor clothing manufacturer is making rain-gear without PFAS. Patagonia, The North Face, Arcteryx, Helly Hansen, Columbia, and Fjallraven (just to name a few) all offer a variety of PFAS-free raingear.

This has been an ongoing effort for 10 or 15 years at this point; with a lot of progress occurring in the last few years, as the PFAS-free DWR chemistries have reached parity for most use cases.

DWR == durable water repellent.

GORE-TEX ePE Is like 2 years old there’s like five raincoats with this technology and they’re fucking $500 and nobody has them except for some out of touch, coastal elites. and you have to spray more often with hippy dwr which is made of just shorter pfas, im sure thats much better lmao

There are at least a dozen of these coatings, and you can get em on $99 jackets. You can also get em on purpose built hunting jackets that no “coastal elite” is wearing.

You can be as rude you want. Your original claim remains incorrect, as are your follow-on claims.

Did you just move the goalpost to talking about waterproof coatings that come from China because that’s not what the articles about

99% of all rain jackets for the last 50 years are waterproofed with pfas, that’s not a failing of China and changing the waterproofing for a shorter chained PFAS is probably a good direction( unless you have to use 100 times more over the lifetime of the jacket ) but the article doesn’t even tell you what type of PFAS they detected they probably don’t have the equipment to do that. Curious that you would assume that it was the ‘bad’ kind

No, I didn't move the goalposts. I was refuting your incorrect assertion that the only non-PFAS coating is that one Goretex product for $500 jackets worn by coastal elites.

Literally every part of your claim there was incorrect.

Anyway, you have proven that you are ignorant, that you are ludicrously rude, that you are aggressive for no reason, and that you are either unwilling or unable to have a civil conversation. We're done.

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