This is it, folks. Years of suspicion and uneasiness is, to my great distress, vindicated by science. A team of Yale Scientists document that exposure to BPA, a synthetic estrogen that disrupts the endrocine system, will likely have grave consequences for human reproduction. When you cut through all articles out there documenting their findings, here’s one on the Huffington Post, and then another excellent Op Ed piece by Nicholas Kristof called “It’s Time to Learn From Frogs”, what you see is a glacially moving threat that gets over shadowed by seemingly more urgent crises like Iran or the economy.
Here’s an excerpt from Nicholas Kristof’s piece:
This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.
“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.
Next time you make an effort to be Green, like giving out re-usable green bags when people buy a cookie, please DO NOT HAVE THEM INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED IN PLASTIC. Defeats the purpose. OY!
Thanks to the great work that Junkraft.com and www.Algalita.org are doing, we’re getting a first hand look how the devestation plastic over-use has wrought in our oceans
My first real introduction to inane plastic over-usage was having children. There’s nothing quite like the mountains of toys and bits and pieces that only seem to be enjoyed during the “opening” portion of a birthday present. Then I’d notice curiously that my kids would receive far more hours of enjoyment over a cardboard box. It’s less about the material itself, but that kids are suckers for brightly colored things. Once they get over the rush of tearing open the clam shell plastic packaging, they literally never play with it again. I’d end up filling large plastic Glad bags (the really large one for leaves) with bits and pieces of toys that, once torn asunder, were never decipherable again.
And then, there are the straws.
Typical way restaurants serve kids drinks.
You’d think that the entire nation, with its pernicious overuse of the Starbucks cups, was incapable of weaning itself from sucking a nipple. No wonder waiters knee-jerk response to anyone under five feet tall is to give them a cup with a plastic lid and a straw. The minute I walk into any kind of restaurant with my kids, the waiters immediately slap some individually packaged Crayola crayons on the table (Crayola, shame on you!), the kids menu and a cup with lids and drinking straws.
I’m sure they think they’re doing me a favor. But my kids are not four and five years old, they’re nine and ten. Even if they were four or five, whatever happened to a simple used tupperware tub designated for used crayons?
But this is one teensy-weensy battle in a much larger war, the Waterloo of which is the plastic water bottle itself. As a population, we are so obsessed with being hydrated that you would think we have just been admonished by Moses for the golden calf and sentenced to wandering in the desert for forty years again. We pay more for bottled water than gasoline. Never mind the fact that the droplets that condense on the inside of a water bottle and suck the toxins from the container go into children’s bodies and hormones, elevating estrogen levels and god knows what else.
So, instead of merely whipping myself into a froth, I started this blog called “I Think I Hate Plastic” (www.Ithinkihateplastic.com) where I and a group of like-minded friends collect ditties about everything from hilarious Penn and Teller Videos, that gigantic plastic blob the size of Texas in the Pacific, to arguments over which is really is better is better at the grocery store, paper or plastic, etc.
I wasn’t equivocating on the name because a part of me likes plastic so much as the fact that “Ihateplastic.com” url was taken (probably by Dupont in a preemptive strike). And even though I’m quite certain that I hate plastic, I love my sunglasses and I don’t know how I might survive an operation without those plastic tubes coming out of my nose. So, let’s just say it’s complicated.
Nonetheless, I have in tiny ways and every day devoted my family’s daily habits to weaning ourselves off this petroleum by-product that takes hundreds of years to decompose, leaves toxic waste when it does, and yet is totally overused for things meant to be disposable, thrown away, or only used once.
In addition to me and pressing my entire being against the “Hoover Dam of Sugar” (I am the damn, the sugar is the water attempting to engulf and obesify my children –another blog altogether), I am also doing a body block against the Hoover Dam of Plastic. I once told the kids they can only buy toys for their birthday that don’t have plastic (try it, it’s nearly IMPOSSIBLE). I send the crayons back. I ask them for their drinks in glass cups.
As I continue to twirl in mid-air performing Matrix-like karate kicks to keep as much plastic away as I can, I hope you join me in the fight. If more mothers join me, we can take a pick ax to the frozen sea of other moms who aren’t simply hysterical with outrage over the plastic that pummels our children from every angle, restaurant and toy store shelf. Hmm… MothersAgainstPlastic.com, I better register that too. Happy Earth Day.
Ah, the sheer power of Oprah. I couldn’t believe how many people I know that didn’t know about the mass of plastic in the Pacific twice the size of texas until Oprah finally had a show about it. It’s a great horrifying movie that sums it up in a way that’s easy to understand. Maybe NOW we’ll actually do something about it
It depends on how much you use them according to Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris of the New York Times.
How Green Is My Bottle?
Earth Day is this Wednesday, and all things “green” will be celebrated. But it’s worth asking: how environmentally friendly are “green” products, really?
Consider, for example, this paragon of eco-virtue: the stainless steel water bottle that lets us hydrate without discarding endless plastic bottles. Using a method called life cycle assessment, we have evaluated the environmental and health impact of a stainless steel thermos — from the extraction and processing of its ingredients, to its manufacture, distribution, use and final disposal. There were some surprises. What we think of as “green” turns out to be less so (and, yes, sometimes more so) than we assume.
David de Rothschild is making a statement and voyage with a vessel made of plastic bottles. He and his crew are constructing a 60-foot catamaran which, with exception of the metal masts, is made entirely from recycled plastic. He plans to set sail from San Francisco in April and make the 11,000 journey to Australia to raise awareness and boost recycing of plastic bottles. The boat is “all sail power” he explains. “The idea is to put no kind of pollution back into the atmosphere, or into the oceans for that matter, so everyting on the boat will be compoted. Everything will be recycylces. Event the vesssel is goint ot end up beng recycled when we finish.”
Recently over a vegan lunch, a girlfriend of mine told me of her favorite way to make a baked potato. She covers it in plastic wrap and puts in the microwave. I cringed, and held back the urge to lecture her over our tofu laden lunch.
There may not be evidence that plastic wrap leaches toxic chemicals when heated, but there’s plenty of evidence that other plastics do, and it’s probably not a good idea to have it draped over your food while super hot. BPA (bisphenol A) a chemical found in many plastics, is believed by scientists to pose serious health risks when leached into food products. The FDA has not had the opportunity to “fully investigate” the findings on their own, but lucky for us they have decided maybe they should take another look.
They announced last week they would conduct studies over concerns that products such as baby bottles, water bottles, and microwavable containers might be poisoning people. According the center for disease control BPA is found in 90% of Americans urine samples, and since this chemical is not naturally occurring, we know where that came from. For example, when you buy a refrigerated bottle of water, how do you know that it was not sitting for days in a hot truck, and the water is not full of the tasteless, odorless BPA? I can’t help but think of the recent film Wall-E, where the whole planet was so toxic that nothing could grow. There’s so much plastic out there, that it’s even difficult for scientists to study the effects on humans because we are exposed to so many toxins, how do you isolate?
The Soy Connection
Three years ago I became vegetarian thinking this was the humane and healthy choice. That’s until I started hearing about soy and estrogen. There’s something in soy just like BPA (in plastic) that acts as an estrogen simulator in the body. According to some studies this is a big risk, especially for women (think breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and other hormone related issues.) The irony is for years I drank a giant bottle of water (figi & volvic) and ate tons of soy, thinking all the while these were brilliant choices. It makes me wonder if this is how smokers felt when they found out cigarettes killed. It seemed so innocent, and hip. The jury is still out on soy (search soy, health risks), but my fear is that in my effort to live toxin free, I’ve really been pumping all these fake estrogen’s into my body that will lead to a mastectomy in my future. I’m going to the doctor next week.
If You Have A Dog Watch Out For These
With all these risks swirling in my head I started thinking of other places that a cancer might be ready to invade. Watching my dog play with his favorite vinyl chewy toy, my heart sank. Is this thing poisoning my dog too? Just like the kids toys, they come from China, red flag number one. Then I did a google search, and surprise surprise…
“Nov. 25, 2008 — A consumer watchdog group is urging parents to avoid buying soft plastic toys this holiday season because of a risk that the toys may contain toxic chemicals.”
If the chemicals are in the kids toys then they are definitely in the dog toys, which barely anyone bats an eye over. The chemical in this kind of plastic is different from the BPA, but non the less, pose similar documented health risks.
What to do?
We all know the FDA has not done a very good job protecting us from a wide variety of things imported into this country, and in some cases grown within. And since it appears they are at least 5-10 years behind on the science, or burying it because of insider interests, we the people have to do our homework. The unfortunate thing is that the toxins are everywhere, I even read recently that studies done on cows near a plastic manufacturing plant are showing altered DNA. This is for another blog. In the meantime, I’m opting for a sensory deprivation tank. Which of course, as luck would have it is made of plastic too.
Well revelations come in many forms and this one happens to come in the form of a website! Just when I thought I hated plastic (and I really do), I just learned that using plastic bags is better than paper but only if you ‘REUSE’ them… (much better than recycling). Check out this website www.savetheplasticbag.com. It will give you a zillion reasons why plastic can be better than paper when you’re checking out of the grocery store. It even has a section about how Whole Foods Gets It Wrong because it has banned plastic bags. The only problem with this whole idea, conceptually, is that I don’t have confidence that people won’t let them blow in the wind, gather on the side of the road or throw them away. But maybe we can change behavior if we raise awareness. This is a darn good start. Www.savetheplasticbag.com
