Comment by cjflog

Comment by cjflog 19 hours ago

24 replies

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Currently a one-man side project: https://laboratory.love

Last year, PlasticList found plastic chemicals in 86% of tested foods—including 100% of baby foods they tested. Around the same time, the EU lowered its “safe” BPA limit by 20,000×, while the FDA still allows levels roughly 100× higher than Europe’s new standard.

That seemed solvable.

Laboratory.love lets you crowdfund independent lab testing of the specific products you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports × Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid’s snacks, or whatever you’re curious about.

Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, and get full lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn’t reach its goal within 365 days, you’re automatically refunded. All results are published publicly.

We use the same ISO 17025-accredited methodology as PlasticList.org, testing three separate production lots per product and detecting down to parts-per-billion. The entire protocol is open.

Since last month’s “What are you working on?” post:

- 4 more products have been fully funded (now 10 total!)

- That’s 30 individual samples (we do triplicate testing on different batches) and 60 total chemical panels (two separate tests for each sample, BPA/BPS/BPF and phthalates)

- 6 results published, 4 in progress

The goal is simple: make supply chains transparent enough that cleaner ones win. When consumers have real data, markets shift.

Browse funded tests, propose your own, or just follow along: https://laboratory.love

oniony 7 hours ago

On https://laboratory.love/faq you say: "We never accept funding from companies whose products we might test. All our funding comes from individual contributors." On https://laboratory.love/blog you say: "If you're a product manufacturer interested in having your product tested, we welcome your participation in funding."

Bit confused as to your position on funding.

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  • tannedNerd 24 minutes ago

    Have zero stake in this, but I read it as they won’t accept blank checks from those companies, but if those companies want to pay for testing they can work something out. It’s poorly worded but I don’t think they are trying to be sneaky.

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nonethewiser 2 hours ago

This is very cool.

Here is something I'm struggling with as a user. I look at a product (this tofu for example [0]) and see the amounts. And then I have absolutely no clue what it means. Is it bad? How bad? I see nanograms one place and μg in an info menu - is μg a nanogram? And what is LOQ? Virtually 0? Simply less than the recommended amount?

I think 99% of people will have the same reaction. They will have no idea what the information means.

I clicked on some info icons to try and get more context. The context is good (explains what the different categories are) but it still didnt help me understand the amounts. I went to "About" and it didnt help with this. I went to the FAQ and and the closest I can find is:

>What makes a result 'concerning'? We don't make safety judgments. Instead, we compare results to established regulatory limits from FDA, EPA, and EFSA, noting when products exceed these thresholds. We also flag when regulatory limits themselves may be outdated based on new research.

I understand that you don't want to make the judgement and it's about transparency and getting the information. But the information is worthless if people dont know what it meant.

[0] - https://laboratory.love/product/118

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neilv 16 hours ago

1. An example result is "https://laboratory.love/product/117", which is a list of chemicals and measurements. Is there a visualization of how these levels relate to regulations and expert recommendations? What about a visualization of how different products in the same category compare, so that consumers know which brand is supposedly "best"? Maybe a summary rating, as stars or color-coded threat level?

2. If you find regulation-violating (or otherwise serious) levels of undesirable chemicals, do you... (a) report it to FDA; (b) initiate a class-action lawsuit; (c) short the brand's stock and then news blitz; or (d) make a Web page with the test results for people to do with it what they will?

3. Is 3 tests enough? On the several product test results I clicked, there's often wide variation among the 3 samples. Or would the visualization/rating tell me that all 3 numbers are unacceptably bad, whether it's 635.8 or 6728.6?

4. If I know that plastic contamination is a widespread problem, can I secretly fund testing of my competitors' products, to generate bad press for them?

5. Could this project be shut down by a lawsuit? Could the labs be?

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  • cjflog 13 hours ago

    Thank you for your questions!

    1. I'm still working to make results more digestible and actionable. This will include the %TDI toggle (total daily intake, for child vs adult and USA vs EU) as seen on PlasticList, but I'm also tinkering with an even more consumer-friendly 'chemical report card'. The final results page would have both the card and the detailed table of results.

    2. I have not found any regulation-violating levels yet, so in some sense, I'll cross that bridge when I get there. Part of the issue here is that many believe the FDA levels are far too relaxed which is part of why demand for a service like laboratory.love exists.

    3. This is part of the challenge that PlasticList faced, and additionally a lot of my thinking around the chemical report card are related to this. Some folks think a single test would be sufficient to catch major red flags. I think triplicate testing is a reasonable balance of statistically robust while not being completely cost-prohibitive.

    4. Yes, I suppose one could do that, as long as the funded products can be acquired by laboratory.love anonymously through their normal consumer supply chains. Laboratory.love merely acquires three separate batches of a given product from different sources, tests them at an ISO/IEC 17025-accredited lab, and publishes the data.

    5. I suppose any project can be shut down by a lawsuit, but laboratory.love is not currently breaking any laws as far as I'm aware.

    Reply View 2 replies
    • ugh123 13 hours ago

      The UK levels are more strict and generally more up to date, which I personally follow rather than FDA. Could be nice to show those violations as a comparison to FDA.

      Great site!

      Reply View 1 reply
  • Timothy055 6 hours ago

    What a wonderful idea! I sincerely hopes this moves the market. And I backed a study.

    Reply View 0 replies
hxorr 9 hours ago

This is actually a topic I'm interested in

What bugs me is that plastics manufacturers advertise "BPA-free", which is technically correct, but then add a very similar chemical from the same family that has the same effect on the plastic - which is good - but also has the same effect on your endocrine system

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linsomniac 15 hours ago

Where can I subscribe to pay $20/mo to whatever happens to be the current leader unfunded product?

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  • cjflog 13 hours ago

    Thanks for your interest!

    Here is a Stripe link: https://donate.stripe.com/9B614o4NWdhN83l9r06c001

    I'll add subscriptions as a more formal option on laboratory.love soon!

    Disclaimer: I don't think I can have a 365-day refund with a recurring donations like this. The financial infrastructure would add too much complexity.

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ebbi 19 hours ago

It's sad that it's come to this on needing to test these things, but amazing initiative! Would love something like this where I am.

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  • gcanyon 14 hours ago

    Serious question: around 1900 meat was often preserved using formaldehyde, and milk was adulterated with water and chalk, and sometimes with pureed calf brains to simulate cream.

    I hope we can agree that we are better off than that now.

    What I'm curious about is whether you think it's been a steady stream of improvements, and we just need to improve further? Or if you think there was some point between 1900 and now where food health and safety was maximized, greater than either 1900 or now, and we've regressed since then?

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    • abdullahkhalids 14 hours ago

      Trying to collapse high dimensional, complex phenomena onto a single axis usually gives one a fake sense of certainty. One should avoid it as much as possible.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • gcanyon 5 hours ago

        And yet we report gun deaths per year, smoking rates, sea warming, etc. etc. The error isn't in producing or considering an aggregate result, but in ignoring where it came from. Since this is an internet forum and not a policy think tank I think that error is largely moot.

        Or put another way: it was a simple question that the ggp can answer or not as they choose. I was just curious for their perspective.

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    • cjflog 13 hours ago

      I don't know, but I do know there is room for improvement from where we are now, and I think we should strive to do better.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • gcanyon 5 hours ago

        For sure! Turnabout for the goose etc.:

        My instinct is that things have largely gotten better over time. At a super-macro level, in 1900 we had directly adulterated food that e.g. the soldiers receiving Chicago meat called "embalmed". In the mid-20th century we had waterways that caught fire and leaded gas.

        By the late 20th we had clean(er) air (this is all from a U.S. perspective) and largely safe food. I think if we were to claim a regression, the high point would have to be around 2000, but I can't point to anything specific going on now that wasn't also going on then -- e.g. I think microplastics were a thing then as well, we just weren't paying attention.

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  • cjflog 18 hours ago

    Where are you? This project is not necessarily limited to products that are available in the United States. Anything that can be shipped to the United States is still testable.

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    • ebbi 17 hours ago

      In New Zealand, but just thinking about some of the items that wouldn't be able to be shipped to the US.

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ashdnazg 19 hours ago

First of all, really cool initiative!

It's interesting that a bunch of the funded products have been funded by a single person.

Do you know if it's the producers themselves? Worried rich people?

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  • cjflog 18 hours ago

    Given the current reach of the project (read: still small!), I suspect for awhile yet the majority of successfully funded testing will be by concerned individuals with expendable income. It is cheaper and much faster to go through laboratory.love than it would be to partner with a lab as an individual (plus the added bonus that all data is published openly).

    I've yet to have any product funded by a manufacturer. I'm open to this, but I would only publish data for products that were acquired through normal consumer supply chains anonymously.

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tribeca18 14 hours ago

this looks so cool! I wish it told me if the levels found for tested products were good/bad - I have no prior reference so the numbers meant nothing to me

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pbronez 16 hours ago

I think this concept has legs to be much bigger than just foods. There are lots of influencer types who focus on testing.

For example, there are two individuals who own the same $100k machine for testing the performance of loudspeakers.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php

https://www.erinsaudiocorner.com/

Both of them do measurements and YouTube videos. Neither one has a particularly good index of their completed reviews, let alone tools to compare the data.

I wish I could subscribe to support a domain like “loud speaker spin tests” and then have my donation paid out to these reviewers based on them publishing new high quality reviews with good data that is published to a common store.

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