Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

Currently a one-man side project:

https://laboratory.love

Last year PlasticList discovered that 86% of food products they tested contain plastic chemicals—including 100% of baby food tested. The EU just lowered their "safe" BPA limit by 20,000x. Meanwhile, the FDA allows levels 100x higher than what Europe considers safe.

This seemed like a solvable problem.

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

Here's how it works: Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, get detailed lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn't reach its funding goal within 365 days, automatic refund. All results are published openly. Laboratory.love uses the same methodology as PlasticList.org, which found plastic chemicals in everything from prenatal vitamins to ice cream. But instead of researchers choosing what to test, you do.

The bigger picture: Companies respond to market pressure. Transparency creates that pressure. When consumers have data, supply chains get cleaner.

Technical details: Laboratory.love works with ISO 17025-accredited labs, test three samples from different production lots, detect chemicals down to parts per billion. The testing protocol is public.

You can browse products, add your own, or just follow specific items you're curious about: https://laboratory.love

>All results are published openly.

Where can I find the link? Do I need to submit my email to see the "openly published results"?

Really cool, definitely donating to a few products!

https://laboratory.love/plasticlist may work for you. If not, the input 'email@example.com' is what led me there.

How do you hold the money for up to 1 year? Does it go into escrow until the project is funded?

cool idea, fyi on an s21, each word (bisphenols etc) has the last letter going to a second line.

This is really cool - it'd be great to test for other chemicals like heavy metals.

Specifically, rice seems to contain a good deal of arsenic (https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-muc...) and I've been interested for a while in trying to find some that has the least, as I eat a lot of rice.

Super compelling project. When I saw PlasticList, my first thought was how to get the results to create pressure on the food companies. The interactivity and investment of your project might do that. Best of luck.

> Powdered Milk from 1952 Korean War Rations: High in Phthalates

Wow, thanks for the heads up, website. I'll throw out my stock of these right away.

If you are concerned about heavy metals, look at herbs: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb...

BTW I love Consumer Reports.

I don't understand? It would be useful to see how items from the past test for these materials. There are also plenty of current items.

Do you have an arbitrary date we should use to ignore items for testing?

Seems odd that two different flavors of the same product would have different phthalate content? Would that mean that shelf life could have an impact?

Vanilla (high): https://laboratory.love/plasticlist/59 Strawberry (medium): https://laboratory.love/plasticlist/60

Are there any tests like this for rices imported from abroad?

Seems like a fair point, given OPs opening says “crowdfund independent testing of specific products you actually buy” - having the top products be more commonly bought items may be interesting.

Nice observation ;-) If I'm reading the underlying data[0] correctly, it looks like the threshold for DEHT is significantly lower in the Vanilla tests (<4,500ng) vs the Strawberry tests (<22,500ng)

0: https://i.imgur.com/L1LVar1.png

Edit: I guess that should impact the Substitutes category, though, and not the Phthalates category.

Rice is easy to solve by just buying California grown. They have the lowest regional levels in the world and I expect the variance amongst those growers to not have significant impact.

How do you find California grown in other states? Often it just says US

I was really just making a joke

Some brands tell you. I think Nishiki is one of the big ones. There are family farms that sell online too.

IIRC, This was previously (recently) discussed wrt rice sold (or given) to Haiti. Because that rice came from the Confederate States, it has more arsenic.

IIRC2, don't buy rice from land formerly used to grow cotton. Because calcium arsenate was used to kill the boll weevil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boll_Weevil_Eradication_Progra...

this is cool, if you'd like some help on the web UI stuff, I'd love to contribute.

I think this would integrate well with Yuka

Any connection/collaboration with https://www.plasticlist.org/ ?

It looks like just a wrapper around the data from plasticlist for now. One can fund other products, but I searched and could not find any others that were funded as a result of this project. Some transparency about the cost seems critical for successfully running such a crowd-funding project.

This is a great idea! It could also expand to testing non-food items for dangerous chemicals (lead, heavy metals, etc). Many products keep a certification on-hand confirming that the product has been tested and found not to exceed the threshold, but I always am suspicious of (1) how thorough the initial testing actually is and (2) how well these results hold up as manufacturing continues. I realize I'm just plugging my pet-peeve though, not sure if others are as concerned about this.

Is the identity of those who make donations protected in any way? Could a company seek legal damages against all or some crowdfunders for what they might deem as libel (regardless of merit)? I doubt people who donate $1 here or $2 there have the capability of warding off a lawsuit.

wow! all the best to you.

Great initiative! Would it not be cheaper to produce home testing kits that can consumers can purchase?

> the FDA allows levels 100x higher than what Europe considers safe

I thought it was an exaggeration so I checked. It's actually even worse:

EU is 0.2 ng/kg body weight and US is 50 µg/kg body weight. So the US limit is 250,000 times higher.

Incredible.

Often desired something like this so thank you for making this happen.