Plastics
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), over 380 billion shopping bags are used annually in the USA, and one trillion may be used globally each year, equating to approximately one million bags per minute. A mere 0.6 percent of these bags are recycled.
It takes one plastic bag 1000 years to degrade. Because plastic was only invented 144 years ago, it means that except for the very small amount that has been incinerated,
every bit of plastic ever made still exists.
In addition to taking ten centuries to break down, plastic bags contain chemicals such as cadmium, lead, mercury, and a carcinogen known as diethyl hexyl phthalate. Other chemicals are also added to plastic for inflammability and flexibility.
Our health is paying dearly today as a result of the creation of plastic, as your body must constantly endure exposure to petroleum based industrial chemicals contained in things we take for granted, like plastic bags, bottled water, cosmetics and canned goods as they are plastic lined.
The actual production of plastic bags requires petroleum, sometimes natural gas and huge quantities of oil- it takes 430 000 gallons of oil to produce 100 million plastic bags.
An organisation in California against waste says if the State of California alone cut out half of their plastic bag use, over 2000 barrels of oil would be saved and 73 000 tonnes of garbage eliminated from landfills. Not only that, but plastic bags cost US retailers approximately $4 billion annually. Finally, this has led to San Francisco being the first city in North America to ban plastic bags from supermarkets and pharmacies, Ireland to put in place a 15% tax on plastic bags and Swedish home wares chain Ikea to start charging 5 cents per plastic bag.
In fact 23 countries including Germany and Australia have banned, taxed or restricted use of plastic bags to reduce the amount of clogged sewers, livestock with bags lodged in their throats and bags snared in fences trapping water and becoming breeding grounds for mosquitoes and other disease carrying organisms.
Each of us throws away around 185 pounds of plastic per year, an amount that we could easily reduce.
An expert on marine debris said that if there was to be an archaeological dig in 10 000 years, you would find a line of plastic. The archaeologists would ask what happened to these people!? Well….. they ate their own plastic and changed their genetic structure and became unable to reproduce and therefore killed themselves.
Not only is plastic invading our lives and bodies, but it is having catastrophic effects on the environment by making its way into our oceans and into the food chain. Dead seabirds washing up onshore in alarming numbers their bodies filled with plastic pieces that to a foraging bird resemble baitfish. Things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters and coloured scraps of plastic rubbish are commonly found in dead marine animals on beaches.
It is not only the seabirds that are being affected; all species are threatened, from whales to plankton. There is moral horror in seeing pictures of a turtle with a plastic band around it, squeezing it into an hourglass shape, or a humpback towing along plastic nets that cut into its flesh.More than 1 million seabirds, 100 000 marine mammals and countless fish die in the North Pacific annually, either from mistakenly eating rubbish or being trapped by it and drowning.
Even when plastic is broken down to a single molecule, it is still too tough for biodegration. Nurdle is the term given to the lentil sized pellets of plastic in its rawest form. These harbour many waste chemicals such as persistent organic pollutants (POP’S) which are a group of chemicals that includes the known carcinogens DDT and PCB’s.
Nurdles can absorb up to a million times the level of POP pollution in their surrounding waters, becoming supersaturated poison pills. They are so light that they can blow around like dust, spill out of shipping containers and wash easily into creeks and storm drains, eventually ending up in our ocean.When they reach the ocean, they are easily mistaken as fish eggs by fish and birds.
Once they have been consumed by the fish, they are headed directly for our dinner table, full of poisonous chemicals.
Plastics are in places and products where you would never expect to find them – PFOA a known carcinogen in plastic is used to treat the inside of your microwave popcorn bag. Enough of it can leach into your popcorn oil, and combined with the superheat of the microwave immediately increases the amount of chemical in your blood.
The other really nasty chemicals are the flame retardants, known as PBDE’s or Poly-bromylated diphenyl ethers. These in combination with other chemicals combine to create the much loved new car smell. These chemicals have been known to cause reproductive problems, liver and thyroid toxicity and memory loss in early animal studies, and can also be found in carpeting, computers and paint.
The phlalates used to make the plastics soft and pliable leach out easily from many everyday products, including varnishes, cosmetics and packaged foods and time release pharmaceuticals and go directly into our amniotic fluid, breast milk, seminal fluid, saliva, blood and urine.
We are eating, drinking, breathing, inhaling and absorbing them every day.
Our endocrine system, a balanced arrangement of glands and hormones that virtually affects every organ, is directly disrupted by these chemicals such as bisphenyl A (BPA).They have the unbelievable ability to mimic our sex hormones.
In marine environments, the excess oestrogen has produced discoveries of male seagulls and fish that have sprouted female sexual organs. For us humans, things are as disturbing.
Our fertility rates have been declining for some years and exposure to the synthetic oestrogen can have adverse effects. The damage not only applies to us but prenatal exposure, even if in low doses, can cause irreversible damage to an unborn baby’s reproductive organs.
The most vulnerable are children, who are exposed to plastics even in the hospital, and then through bottles and toys. If the bottles are microwaved (and this goes for other plastic containers as well), the amount of BPA leaching into your food is increased. It is advised to stay away from polycarbonate baby bottles, because in newborns, the immune system, brain and gonads are still in development.
Small doses of BPA, because of its ability to mimic the sex hormone estradiol, can cause:
- Structural damage to the brain
- Hyperactivity
- Abnormal sexual behaviour
- Increased fat formation and risk of obesity
- Early puberty and disrupted and irregular reproductive cycles
Studies in rats have shown that a very low prenatal dose of BPA increased their postnatal growth – that is, BPA made them fat.
Their insulin level surged and then became resistant, which is the virtual definition of diabetes. Their bodies then produced more fat cells of a larger size, suggesting that a developmental dose of BPA could be contributing to the obesity epidemic that has been observed in the last two decades, directly correlating with the increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year.
There has also been a dramatic rise in America’s diabetes incidence – a 735 percent increase since 1935 – coincidence?
A report published based on research by National Institute of Health states finding uterine damage in newborn animals with exposure to BPA. The damage could be a possible predictor of reproductive abnormalities in women including endometriosis, cystic ovaries and cancer.
This is the first study to find specifically female reproductive disorders, however earlier studies have shown early stage breast and prostate cancer and also reduced sperm count in animals exposed to low doses of BPA.
Of the seven common plastics that are used today, only two are recycled in any way.
PET (#1 inside the triangle on bottle and used for soft drink bottles) and HDPE (#2 inside triangle on bottle and used for milk bottles) are the only plastics that can have some sort of aftermarket.
There are improvements being made on plastic as we know it. New biodegradable starch and corn based plastics are now being produced, with Wal- Mart in the USA signing on as a customer.
10 Tips for Reducing Your Exposure to BIS phenol A (BPA)
1. Only use glass bottles and dishes for your baby
2. Give a baby natural fabric toys instead of plastic ones
3. Store food and beverages in glass and not plastic containers
4. If you choose to use a microwave at all, don’t microwave in a plastic container
5. Stop consuming canned food and drinks
6. Avoid using plastic wrap ( never microwave anything covered in it)
7. Throw away and recycle if possible plastic dishes and cups and replace with glass
8. If using plastic kitchenware, be rid of the older, scratched containers; avoid putting them in the dishwasher and don’t wash with harsh detergents as this can cause more chemicals to leach into your food.
9. Avoid using bottled water, filter your tap water using a high quality filter
10. Before allowing a dentist to apply a sealant to your own or to your children’s teeth, ask the dentist to verify that it does not contain BPA.
If you opt to use plastic containers for your food, steer clear of those that have Recycling label No. 7 marked on the bottom, as these may contain BPA.
Recycling labels No. 1, No.2 and No. 4 do not contain BPA; however they may contain other nasty chemicals best avoided by using glass instead.
As for cosmetics, look for varieties made without plasticizers and paraben.
As we only have one Earth, no-one would choose to live in a toxic wasteland or to spend our lives being pumped full of drugs and chemicals to combat cancer and deal with our haywire endocrine systems.
