zlacker

Couldn't you apply that to anything? Why draw the line at 'chemicals' and how do you define that anyway? Or are we only allowed to use elements? Or anything we can find naturally occurring, but not including other things we created by moving naturally occurring things 'from one part of the environment to another'?

Because all of human progress is just building on top of what we've been able to find, then using those things in combination, and those things, and so on until you get to super evil chemical manufacture. Seems like an arbitratry line?

(For what it's worth I cook a lot and buy very little that isn't a 'raw ingredient', I'm not saying this from a 'let me have my ready meals' sort of perspective.)

>>OJFord+(OP)
You're reading too much into my nitpick, I'm not suggesting that this distinction is relevant to environmental policy. Obviously waste runoff from mines/etc is a serious issue which warrants environmental regulation.

More relevant to the sokoloff's point is the fact that extraction of lead was not done for the sake of plumbing, it began thousands of years before lead pipes were invented. There wasn't a point where people were weighing the harm of extracting lead against the utility of plumbing; the lead was essentially a waste product of the silver industry.