Why Don’t We Use Mothballs Anymore?



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If you’ve snooped around your grandma’s attic or wound through the shelves at a vintage bookstore, then you might be familiar with the smell of mothballs. We just don’t really see—or smell—them much anymore. For more reasons than you might think.

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43 Comments

  1. When I worked at a department store, there was a woman we called "The mothball Lady". You could smell her coming from the back of the store. It was extremely pungent. She would buy our whole stock of mothballs every time. I still can feel that smell 🤢

  2. Call me cynical but, all the old "let's use a simple chemical or two" remedies went because no one could claim the rights.

    Hard to get venture capital funding for a mix of baking soda and vinegar.

  3. My friends dad was working in the attic of his vacation house where there were a bunch of mothballs. I forget if they were already there, or he’d put them there. Either way, there were enough that he got enough exposure that he landed in the hospital with toxicity to include profound anemia, and they figured out it was from the mothballs

  4. x_x It always somehow still shocks me to see people on Nextdoor recommending others spread mothballs in their yard to keep this or that animal away. How do they not realize how toxic they are and that rain melts them into the ground.

  5. It was suprising for me to learn that they were invented after the WW2, because as far as I remember, there were mothballs in the Wardrobe that was the entrance to Narnia. And the chilren were in that old house beacuse their were hiding from the war in the countryside.

    I remeber reading about the mothballs quite vividly, because I had not known them and it was a new concept to me. I was suprised that moths eat clothes, the moths I knew only ate food (especially flour). Different kind of moths, I know. But the fact that I had not known the wool moths nor the mothballs made me remember the mothballs in the Narnia story so well.

    The story was written after WW2, so maybe the author did not know that they had been invented later. Or is there a mistake in the video?

  6. Speak for yourself, I have upwards of 40 pure wool items in my wardrobe. I actively avoid plastic fibers in everything I can. So moths are a real danger and something I am vigilant about. But to get rid of them it's good to buy the wasp species that prey on them and set them free in your house. Works wonders if you have an infestation.

  7. Yes yes remember just wash your wool garments in extra hot water because wall is notoriously durable and the fibers don’t shrink or loosen. They just stay the same size no matter what.

  8. I once transported a classic car for my work and it reaked of "mothball" fumes and there were a couple of recently dead mice in the vehicle. I looked up whether the fumes were toxic and found out they were, so I refused to transport the car till I bought a chemical protection facemask.

    When I got the car to its destination a couple days later, there was at least one mew dead mouse that hadn't been there when I picked it up.

    So clearly the car had an active mouse infestation and someone had just put a bunch of the "mothball" chemical in the car to get rid of them. The chemical was toxic enough to quickly kill the mice and make me dizzy being around it.

  9. The video is too long but the reasons are very short. These specific group of people or country no longer use mothball because it's toxic and can cause cancer. That's what the video is all about.

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