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Comment by Libbum

An additional thing to understand here is that PFAS is not a new boundary at all in the context of the planetary boundaries framework - they fall under the already defined category of Novel Entities.

Since that's a catch all category for many things (nuclear waste, other synthetic chemicals, there's even debate with the original authors of the framework if Artificial Intelligence should be considered), the boundary value itself is not currently defined.

One school of thought is that the boundary value for this category should be zero - as any synthetic substance is more than nature generates.

Regardless, papers like this one are helpful to piece together all of the novel entities research amd get a better picture of how this boundary interacts with the rest of the Earth System.

parent Libbum 4 years ago

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