"All plastic should be labeled as hazardous waste," Captain Charles Moore, discoverer of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," said to me the other night at a Surfrider Foundation anti-plastics campaign benefit. At least three new studies about plastic's negative impact on our health and the environment confirm his statement. Moore was here with many others to present research at the UNEP/NOAA Marine Debris Conference in Honolulu last week, during which, incredibly enough, the word "plastic" was kept out of official circulation, replaced by the euphemism "marine debris," as the Plastic Pollution Coalition reports. "Almost all so-called 'marine debris' is plastic," Moore told me. Conference sponsors included Coca Cola and the American Chemistry Council (ACC), which has been pouring money into efforts to block bans on disposable plastic grocery bags nationwide.
Meanwhile, the latest science shows that plastics are really, really bad news. For years, the conventional wisdom has been that while some bad plastics, such as polycarbonate (PC #7) release toxic chemicals, notably hormone-disrupting Bisphenol-A (BPA), other plastics are safer. Unfortunately, they aren't. Hormone-disrupting, estrogenically active (EA) chemicals were found to be leached from all kinds of plastics, including those labeled BPA-free, in a study published by EHP in March. "In some cases, BPA-free products released chemicals having more EA than BPA-containing products," wrote researchers, who tested 450 baby bottles, water bottles, plastic food containers and wraps bought from retailers including Wal-mart and Whole Foods. Seventy percent of the items released EA into solutions at room temperature, and 95% leached EA after stress tests simulating normal use in dishwashers and microwaves.
There's more. In a small but compelling study released yesterday in EHP online, BPA levels in urine samples taken from five Bay Area families -- 10 adults and 10 children -- dropped by 66 percent over just three days when they stopped eating packaged food, including food from plastic packages and cans -- most of the latter are lined with BPA-laced epoxy resin. Participants' levels of DEHP phthalate, another hormone-disrupting chemical commonly found in flexible PVC plastic, dropped by 53-56 percent. This is good news!
There's another way we can get exposed to plastic chemicals -- by eating fish. Algalita's latest findings: Thirty-five percent of plankton-eating lantern fish, the bottom of the marine food chain, had plastic in their bellies. Like dioxins, mercury, PCBs and toxic fire retardants, this toxic plastic plasma will rise in the food chain and find its way into our bellies if we don't stop contributing to it soon.
What to Do?
First, we've got to stop buying single-use plastic. We should also recycle, rather than toss our old plastics in the trash. "Everything eventually makes its way into the ocean," Captain Moore says. His research voyages to the Great Pacific Gyres off Hawaii and Japan, and the waters between, show that the ocean is fast turning into a plastic plasma. Discarded plastic bottles, containers, toys, and fishing line are broken up into microscopic fragments, about plankton size.
We can reduce our levels of BPA and phthalates like those families by eating mostly fresh, not processed, packaged foods. Check out the SF Chronicle's interviews with the researchers here
What Else You Can Do.
Read about and support ongoing research by Moore's Algalita Foundation.
Help stop the use of single-use grocery bags in your community. Take the Plastics Pledge and learn more about Surfrider Foundation's Rise Above Plastics campaign.
Follow Mindy Pennybacker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/greenerpenny
I'm glad that you suggest a grassroots effort to diminish the consumption of plastics, since the industry has grown so large is such a short amount of time. A legislative ban on plastics will not come from a trickle-down source. There is too much profit and the promise of high profit margins at stake for those with the means of societal control.
rtgmath makes a valid point. As a technology, plastic has proven to be invaluable to conventional food and goods preservation. But as people have began to realize, as Ms. Pennybacker has, the side-effects of plastics on, not only our health, but by proxy that of many ecosystems, may be more malignant that officially construed.
That being said, a corporate response will only be initiated once they are presented with a win-win situation. Safe, biological alternatives to plastics require massive R&D, which will only be considered a financial investment once revenues from current products begin to drop.
Whether that primarily requires communal bans or personal consumer choices is irrelevant. For all intents and purposes, it ultimately necessitates both.
To join in the movement and make your voice heard, take the plastic-free challenge and/or contribute a quilt square (or many!) to the ever-growing International Plastic Quilt Project by CreatePlenty.org. Visit our website or follow us at www.facebook.com/cre8plenty.
This is a perfect project for concerned individuals, schools, and groups of all sizes and walks of life.
Cheers, to a world without waste.
Plastic produced from crude oil leeches toxic chemicals, and it is overused in unneccessary ways and not reused and recycled resulting in environmental issues like the oceanic garbage patches (one in Pacific and a smaller one in Atlantic).
Plastics can be non-toxic and sustainable when produced from plant material and properly recycled, reused, and repurposed.
If Ms. Pennybacker wanted to say there are no safe trains, no safe cars, no safe airplanes, no safe anything -- I would agree. No plastic is safe in much the same way.
On the other hand, telling us to "eat fresh" is a myth. We don't all grow our own food, nor can we. Food is a seasonal commodity, and only available at certain times of the year. Without plastic, we would be back to the harder and costlier processes of canning -- which, by the way, have considerably higher risks of contamination. That's right. Botulism is definitely not pretty.
Plastics help us transport and store foods safely, helping us eat without as much danger. Want to complain about the chemicals in plastic? Go ahead. We can always do better. But if you are ok with eating food contaminated with bacterial wastes or rodent feces, tell us to do without plastics all together.
Plastics allow medical products to be stored and administered safely. If Ms. Pennybacker ever goes to the hospital, I guarantee the only reason she will be safe is because of plastics. Other materials not only can be infected, but are much harder to disinfect.
I urge the author to balance her one-sided approach with honest investigation. Are there problems? Yes. Does that mean we can safely do without? No. We need to make things better.
F&F