True, but our definition of toxic has changed. Humans have been living with wood smoke for millennia, it may not be great for you but it isn't very new in terms of evolutionary presence. Smoke from burning industrial chemicals is a newer thing, and certainly some of these industrial toxins can kill or injure you far more quickly than wood smoke. So a warehouse full of laptops burning (and probably painted with lead) is something I'd want to take extra precautions to avoid vs wildfire smoke.
I've been around laptops which seem to be a health hazard. It makes sense they could expose users to harmful chemicals, since they're essentially a bunch of plastic and metals that get hot and have air blown over them into the room. Various flame retardants have been used in the past which have been phased out over health concerns, but manufacturers did this at different rates and many older machines manufacturered with various noxious chemicals are still in use. Who knows about what they use now (the last time I looked into this was c. 2013). TV sets have a similar history, as do space heaters and electric blankets.
As part of various health problems, I have some sort of high sensitivity to fragrances and cleaning chemicals. I had a roommate with a Dell that would make the room smell like ozone and plastic. I looked into it and Dell used various chemicals on those models that they later pledged to discontinue. I couldn't be in the same room as his laptop for more than 5 minutes.
It's worth mentioning though that in general as our technology has gotten more exotic, so too the chemicals needed to manufacture it have gotten more toxic.
Without discounting the risks such chemicals cause, I often wonder how general environment toxicity changes over time. Victorian England for example sounds awful, with soot from burning coal everywhere, lead being used for babies’ dummies (its soft and all), and general lack of appreciation of hygiene. Dangerous chemicals like mercury and lead were used all over the place because they were cheap, and I guess no one knew any better.
When we are now concerned about those toxic chemicals, to what extent is that an absolute concern, and to what a relative one?
Yes, like plutonium, but we're not going to be dumping that all over the place either.
Cyanide is also "natural" but not great for our health depending on the context. The same for the "chemicals" that, when burned, cause some nasty stuff compared to if it wasn't burned.
Can’t tell if you are saying that growing up breathing rubber smoke is just fine, or that reporting that widely used chemicals are toxic is fear-mongering. Or both.
Your own choice of example was the smell from welding. With regard to releasing toxic or environmentally damaging chemicals, you are on much more solid ground.
Same could be said for asbestos as well as the undiscovered but numerous carcinogens and toxins we currently use in mass quantities. Every century has some type of widely used, but toxic, chemical discoveries. This century won't be any different.
Uh, proof? People being around chemicals all the time that end up being more harmful than first believed is common enough. Let's take lead and asbestos for easy examples. BPA for a more recent (but I think more controversial?) one.
It seems like we've discovered things that are obviously bad for us within a decade or two of use. Leaded gas, DDT, ionizing radiation, asbestos. I'm sure there are loads of things that are less than ideal, but it looks like they're all at least an order of magnitude safer than bad things that came to use in the 20th century. It's at a point where the data has problems with statistical significance and confounding variables.
The old stuff (PCBs and PBBs) definitely had health (and environmental) risks. PCBs are famous, and PBBs are in the EU RoHS, so I'd consider them comparable to lead solder in badness at a first glance (not horrible, but not great). Cancer is pretty hard to prove, but other health effects have had studies (at least for PentaPBDE, nothing for TDCPP (Chlorinated Tris)).
TDCPP might actually be on balance worth using; similarly, I think DDT probably is on balance worthwhile for some applications, and asbestos is still used for some purposes. It's all about tradeoffs, but it is easier to justify a tradeoff when the people paying the costs and receiving the benefits are the same. I get close to zero benefit from fire retardant foam in my couch, probably less than the financial cost of the chemicals.
(I am generally anti whacko unsubstantiated environmentalist/save-the-children activists, but I have some personal experience with PCB contaminated transformers; bleh.)
> Fire retardants which are known to cause cancer or birth defects, I'm not so sure.
On the other hand, they’re very good at stopping you from burning to death. Even the ones we have banned (or will ban) and replaced with others are very good at preventing a really really bad way to die.
Also, quite a lot of toxic things are also organic, regardless of if you’re using that word in the chemical sense or the “it’s natural” sense.
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