100% this, I built laboratory.love almost entirely with my voice and (now-outdated) Claude models
My go-to prompt finisher, which I have mapped to a hotkey due to frequent use, is "Before writing any code, first analyze the problem and requirements and identify any ambiguities, contradictions, or issues. Ask me to clarify any questions you have, and then we'll proceed to writing the code"
burning man dust is definitely an irritant (alkaline), but salton sea dust seems to contain many additional contaminants (pesticides, metals, biologicals)
Currently building Laboratory.love — a community way to crowdfund independent lab testing of everyday products for plastic chemicals (BPA/BPS/BPF, phthalates).
We buy three different lots per product, test at an ISO 17025–accredited lab, and publish all results. If a product doesn’t reach its goal within 365 days, contributions are refunded.
We recently added pooled donations to auto-fund the leading unfunded test and I’m iterating on more readable result summaries.
Thanks! Yeah, I unfortunately can't shell out a straight $20k donation, but I saved the $25k over the year from my e-commerce business and justified it as a marketing expense if worse case scenario happens and it's found earlier than the math predicts. But if we get past break even then can't wait to write that check to help out the communities around here that are still recovering.
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.
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."
I certainly want to avoid any weird incentive misalignment. Because the testing is done by an accredited lab that provides an official Certificate of Analysis, I think I could reasonably accept funding from manufacturers once I build out a feature that would will allow visitors to download the COA PDF.
No manufacturer has reached out directly yet, presumably because a) this project is small and still gaining trust and b) they would probably want to do testing privately and avoid publication of 'bad' results anyway.
Personally I wouldn't have problem with companies funding if it's via the normal route, i.e. via the web interface, such that they are just providing funds and then the normal testing/reporting takes place. But I fear this is idealistic. I can well imagine companies wanting to send you samples directly, wanting you to remove results and even threatening legal action if they don't like the results.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I want to see the results of the test compared to the EU/US/Whoever recommendations. I want explanations of what the different chemicals are and preferably linked to peer reviewed studies explaining side effects.
Once even more tests are ran I want comparisons between product brands.
Overall still great but very much an engineer presentation to complex data. Not that its a bad thing, being transparent with data is important, but we aren't all experts.
Thanks, and yes these improvements are on my roadmap!
I'm 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.
Thanks, and yes these improvements are on my roadmap!
I'm 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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is really cool and I was hoping something similar existed earlier this year when looking into protein powders following the Clean Label Transparency Project report [1]. Basically they said about half of protein powders tested showed signs of heavy metals, but did not disclose which brands. I would be interested in funding testing for some specific brands as I am sure others would as well. I did a bit of digging on a few brands and found lawsuits against them for violating prop 65, sometimes multiple [2][3] from the same brand.
Some testing has been done on https://labdoor.com/ where they basically fund the testing with affiliate links, which I think could be another revenue source for your site. I did contact them in January and they said they would add the brands I requested to the list, it's just not crowdsourced the same way your site is. They received some form of backing from Mark Cuban [4].
(edit) To make this more clear - If you are looking for expansion or making it a little wider, allowing users to request other types of testing besides the plastics would be cool.
Awesome, thanks for the feedback. I will look into Labdoor and their funding models. I'm definitely open to expanding to other types of testing if/when this project grows. I'm actually already able to test for nearly everything you'd want to check for in a consumable, I'm just keeping the focus of the public website on plastic chemicals for now to avoid feature creep and scope management issues.
I have considered creating specific ad-hoc campaign pages for folks with special interests and let them drive people to the page (like a more focused Kickstarter or GoFundMe with a lab on the back end).
If anyone has a special interest I'm happy to mock up what funding targets would be.
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.
This is great, but I wouldn't consider a food to be "clean" just from this testing.
At a minimum it needs glyphosate testing. I suspect the avocado oil has no plastics but high glyphosate, it's one of the many reasons I only use high-quality olive oil and coconut oil in cooking.
If I were a billionaire, one of my many pet projects would basically be a 100% privately-funded-by-me organization that does nothing but test consumer products - either directly or by third party
It would be so boring - no funding accepted, everything would be freely available, no political initiatives, no recommendations, nothing. Just a treasure trove of data
A man can dream - kudos to you for actually making it a reality - great inspiration
Question for you: in general, how much does this stuff cost? what if you wanted to expand to testing beyond plastic, e.g., verifying the potency of ingredients in supplements, verifying cleaning product ingredients, etc., is that possible?
For an individual acting on their own, single tests for phthalates and BPA/BPS/BPF normally cost ~$500. Laboratory.love tests three samples from different lots to ensure reliability (as PlasticList found variation of up to 59% between lots of identical products). Thanks to volume pricing and operational efficiency, we're able to target $425 per sample ($1,275 for triplicate testing). This covers not just the chemical analysis but also product acquisition, shipping, and operational costs. Right now there is only about 10% margin left as breathing room.
My partner lab specifically offers 300+ unique tests across the following categories: Contaminants, Elemental, Allergen, Preservatives and Additives, Microbial, and Phytochemical, Vitamin, and Actives"
So yes, expansion is definitely possible! If a billionaire wanted to fund a project like this it could certainly convert dollars into data, it's just a matter of choosing which products and contaminants to start chewing through first to ensure the data creates positive change in the real world.
FYI your website seems to trigger a filter/search every time I type a character. However, this causes the keyboard on iOS to collapse, which makes typing a tough task!
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
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.
So far a couple dozen products have received some funding, six products have been fully funded (five product results published, the sixth is at the lab as I write this!)
You can browse products, add your own, or just follow specific items you're curious about: https://laboratory.love
Looking at the tofu reports, I really don't know what to make of them. Is there a way to give more meaning to them for the average person? Also, I'd love to see a sort by "almost funded" option.
I love this idea. I imagine it could be extended to other types of testing - for example, I've always wished there was a way to more readily verify whether the contents of vitamins were as specified on the label.
I LOVE this idea. Tangentially, a more pimitive case: in trying to recycle or reuse jars or carboard containers food comes in, I wish there was a simple service for ranking brands. For example, some jam jars have labels that can be immediatey removed - others tear and stick to the jar. Similarly, some brands use excessive plastics and packaging, others less so.
I keep telling my euro-friends that food and health regulation could potentially be enforced by the free market more effectively than by corruptible government, and this is a perfect example of this.
I'd want to see all products I can buy in there, with all possible chemical, ingredients and nutrients, and clear indications of good/bad, a little bit like in Yuka. You should partner with them maybe even!
I agree "enforce" is a poor choice of words. It does not need to be "enforced" using state violence if any consumer can access facts with such transparency. What's missing today is this level of transparency with which the market will just naturally benefit to producer of sane and safe goods in a much more natural way.
Also, speaking of the "more free market in the US", my answer is that you don't hate capitalism, you hate crony capitalism.
> you don't hate capitalism, you hate crony capitalism
What distinguishes this from 'you don't hate socialism, you just hate every so-called socialist government'? I know this seems like lazy smartarsery, but I'm genuinely curious whether you think we have real-world examples of countries doing capitalism right -- and, if not, why that's not a bad sign in the same way that a dearth of examples of socialist success stories is a bad sign.
Wow, great idea, simple website and hopefully a positive impact, not often you see all three in one project :) Good job!
I'm guessing it's limited to US products and US labs? Would love something similar in Europe and/or EU, but it isn't clear if you're limited to US/North America right now, would be nice if it was a bit clearer up front :)
Really cool project. A quick note, I had to dig in your FAQ to find your definition for LOQ:
> "What does 'LOQ' mean in your results?
>
> Limit of Quantification (LOQ) is the lowest concentration we can reliably measure. Results below LOQ are marked "<LOQ" - this doesn't mean zero, just below our measurement threshold."
IMO this definition should be on every results page, since most of the pages have more LOQs than anything else.
This is great. I thought about a different model even before plasticlist: make a subscription and test various products, but people will have a number of upvotes based on their sub streak. They vote for food to test, and then you show results to everyone subbed. Kind of like what examined does, but they do deep dives into medical topics for subs. I think this model will work better than the one you currently have. Awesome project anyways!
It is extremely weird to me that countries don't do that on taxpayers money and show the results publicly, this is what they should do.
I definitely considered a voting mechanism, but there are a few million active, buyable CPG UPCs in the U.S. at any given time. When conducting some basic market research for this project, I found that most people are only willing to pay to find results about the specific products they care about.
This is great. We definitely need something like this.
Where are the safe levels limits to interpret test results? This would be a small addition that would make any of the results interpretable. I had to open the PlasticList website to get the baseline safe thresholds for each chemical and to do some rough approximations.
What would be a good strategy to prevent companies from cottoning on to this and gaming the system? They could for example change packaging on production runs for a product that’s undergoing laboratory.love funding campaign.
It's an interesting thought. Companies do change packaging somewhat regularly. However, the underlying skew usually remains the same. Changing the packaging and/or the SKU is very expensive. It's probably cheaper and more beneficial to your company to do your own Plastic Chemical testing and get ahead of the problem.
My suspicion is if this was gameable, this would be a solved problem by a number of companies. The truth is there is no single simple or even hard step to take, it’s mostly like numerous steps that multiple actors would need to do.
I suggest you xpost to Bryan Johnson's Blueprint community. I think might help you get a lot more food tested. That community is probably ICP and also can amplify the message.
Folks at Blueprint actually reached out to me when they saw this project at the beginning of the year and essentially tried to acquire it by hiring me as a contracted engineer. I politely declined.
Blueprint Quantified, which is linked in the below comments, went live after these conversations. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
This is so incredibly important, well done. The problem of our food being steeped in plastic hits the news here and there, but it should be front and center in my opinion. Testosterone has been plummeting for decades and it scares the heck out of me. The hormone whose job is "form goals, shrug off failure, and try again!" is being destroyed and corporations are given a free pass to pump us full of phthalates and bisphenol. It's infuriating.
And anecdotally, I've still been forming goals and shrugging off failure five years into suppressing most of my endogenous testosterone with exogenous estrogen
Well that's great for you, but I was making a generalized statement about the role of testosterone, scientific data showing huge decline, and more and more studies linking it to plastics. We can't just alter a key hormone within the span of a few decades and shrug it off. My levels are great for a 40 year old
And yes there are certainly other factors, but that's not what the original comment was talking about?
I don't know if it's a joke, in the EU we do enjoy a lot more strict regulations, good and bad sometimes, but to me the US system just seems more 'reactionary' rather than proactive.
It is ABSOLUTELY a joke. Downloaded Oasis app last night. My ‘Whole Foods’ water, ya turns out I’m drinking levels above what I should of arsenic, amongst other nasty shit
React + Vite + Tailwind on the frontend; Netlify Functions for backend with Stripe, Supabase, and email integrations; content via Markdown build script; deployed on Netlify; linted with ESLint; JavaScript-only codebase
The product label images loading on the homepage are huge right now. They are displayed in 128px * 128px box but are about 2 MB in size each. May be generate resized versions at build time and use <picture> tags?
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While PlasticList has already tested hundreds of products and found plastic chemicals in 86% of them, laboratory.love lets you crowdfund testing for the specific products you actually buy.
Think of it as democratizing PlasticList's methodology: you choose what gets tested, we handle the logistics of sample collection + lab work, and results are published openly to pressure companies toward cleaner supply chains.
My go-to prompt finisher, which I have mapped to a hotkey due to frequent use, is "Before writing any code, first analyze the problem and requirements and identify any ambiguities, contradictions, or issues. Ask me to clarify any questions you have, and then we'll proceed to writing the code"