Tag: pollution

EPA Fiddles while Neurotoxin In Our Food

Seth Anderson0 comment

Lovely

Keep away from children

One of the most comprehensive analyses yet of human exposure to PBDEs, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers, shows that the chemical — long used in everything from computers to sleeping bags — enters humans through their diets, not just their household.

“The more you eat, the more PBDEs you have in your serum,” said Alicia Fraser, an environmental health researcher at Boston University’s School of Public Health who headed the new study, published this month in Environmental Health Perspectives.

PBDEs are chemical cousins of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which are known to cause birth defects and neurological impairments. PCBs were banned throughout the world by the mid-1970s, when PBDEs were gaining popularity as flame retardants. PBDEs were soon found in most plastic-containing household products.

By the late 1990s, trace amounts of PBDEs had been found in people all over the world, with the highest exposures measured in the United States. Researchers became nervous: Low doses caused neurological damage in laboratory animals, and the highest human PBDE levels were found in breast milk.

Whether PBDEs posed an immediate threat to humans was uncertain. Direct testing is unethical, and population-wide epidemiological studies are difficult to run. But there’s enough reason for concern that the European Union banned two of the three most common PBDE formulations in 2004.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which in January admitted that it lacked the ability to establish basic standards of chemical safety, has not followed suit, but three states — California, Washington and Maine — have banned PBDEs since 2007. Many manufacturers have either stopped or plan on stopping their use.

“They are persistent in the environment. They don’t get broken down. Therefore, it takes a really long time for the contamination to leave our environment and our bodies,” said Fraser. “Even though we don’t know the health effects at this point, most people would want policies that would stop us from being exposed to them.”

[Click to continue reading Potential Neurotoxin Could Be in Our Food | Wired Science | Wired.com]

I’m sure the plastic council has a different answer as to the toxicity of PBDEs, but they have zero credibility. If the EPA wasn’t such a corporate tool, they would have been actively removing PBDEs from our environment decades ago.

Data Dump

The real long term solution would be to adopt similar practices to the European model: prove that a chemical is harmless before it is allowed to be used. In the US, there have to be lawsuits and deaths1 before the EPA will even begin to study if a chemical is harmful. Years of litigation follow, yadda yadda. A system that totally and unequivocally favors chemical manufacturers in other words.

REACH requires all chemicals sold or used in Europe to be registered with the European Chemicals Agency. Manufacturers or distributors must supply the agency with the chemicals’ properties, materials safety data sheets (MSDSes), risk management guidelines, and safety measures for downstream users. Many hazardous chemicals (over 1,500 of them) will require permission from the European Commission to use; some chemicals will not be allowed at all. Consumers can also request (could be WWF, Greenpeace, or just person) chemical safety and environmental impact data from manufacturers. Perhaps most importantly, the government is not burdened with proving any chemicals are harmful, it falls to industry to test the toxicity of their chemicals, and the EU need only do monitoring and compliance-checking when they believe a company has submitted incomplete or bogus information. REACH covers all chemicals, both substances and mixtures, existing and new (new chemicals are less than 1% of market). It includes intentionally released chemicals (like inkjet ink) and non-intentionally released ones (like dye in jeans); anything that will have more than one metric ton per year produced or imported into Europe. It includes not only the chemicals a company makes, but all the chemicals contained in a product the company sells. It also includes chemicals used in manufacturing that don’t end up in products, if the manufacturing happens in Europe. Unfortunately the amount of time for questions was very limited, so I didn’t get to ask what they define as a “chemical”; I presume it’s any substance that isn’t elemental and requires processing to get out of the natural world.

[Click to continue reading Worldchanging: Bright Green: What Does REACH Mean For Products?]

The US EPA is just a sick joke. A joke that damages all of us.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to assess toxic chemicals is as broken as the nation’s financial markets and needs a total overhaul, a congressional audit has found.

The Government Accountability Office has released a report saying the EPA lacks even basic information to say whether chemicals pose substantial health risks to the public. It says actions are needed to streamline and increase the transparency of the EPA’s registry of chemicals. And it calls for measures to enhance the agency’s ability to obtain health and safety information from the chemical industry.

Earlier in 2008, the Journal Sentinel revealed that the EPA’s Voluntary Children’s Chemical Evaluation Program, which relies on companies to provide information about the dangers of the chemicals they produce, is all but dead. And it disclosed that the agency’s program to screen chemicals that damage the endocrine system had failed to screen a single chemical more than 10 years after the program was launched.

[Click to continue reading EPA a failure on chemicals, audit finds – JSOnline]

No wonder so many EPA officials get jobs in the chemical industry after their EPA tenure is over.

Richard Wiles, executive director of Environmental Working Group:

“The EPA joins the hall of shame of failed government programs,” Wiles said.

The EPA is at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement and needs a broad-based transformation, the auditors found.

“The EPA lacks adequate scientific information on the toxicity of many chemicals that may be found in the environment – as well as on tens of thousands of chemicals used commercially in the United States,” the GAO report said. “EPA’s inadequate progress in assessing toxic chemicals significantly limits the agency’s ability to fulfill its mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

I haven’t been able to locate the GAO report yet, but did find this:

Since 1976, the EPA issued regulations to control only five existing chemicals determined to present an unreasonable risk. Its 1989 regulation phasing out most uses of asbestos was vacated by a federal appeals court in 1991 because it was not based on “substantial evidence.”

In contrast, the EU and a number of other countries banned asbestos, a known human carcinogen that can cause lung cancer and other diseases. The GAO previously recommended that Congress amend the TSCA to reduce the evidentiary burden the EPA

[Click to continue reading GAO: EPA Needs Stronger Authority to Improve Effectiveness of Toxic Substances Control Act]

Five substances in over 30 years? Yeesh, that’s pretty lame.

Footnotes:
  1. or at least lots of negative publicity [↩]

Illinois coal ash sludge ponds are common

Seth Anderson0 comment

Michael Hawthorne alerts us that Illinois is at risk for a coal ash disaster as well.

Withered and Died

More than a dozen Illinois power plants store toxic coal ash in sludge ponds similar to the one that burst and spread contaminated muck over 300 acres of eastern Tennessee last month, according to a Tribune review of federal records.

The sludge dumps, all Downstate, are among hundreds of makeshift ponds across the nation that are regulated far more loosely than household garbage landfills, despite years of studies documenting how arsenic, lead, mercury and other heavy metals in the coal ash threaten water supplies and human health.

Most of the water-soaked ash—the byproduct of burning coal to generate electricity—is stored close to bodies of water, including Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, the Mississippi River and the Illinois River.

[From Coal ash sludge ponds in use at some Illinois power plants — chicagotribune.com]

The administration of President Obama might be more interested in monitoring this potentially hazardous problem, but nobody really knows yet. Obama received a lot of campaign contributions from Exelon. Also, leaks don’t have to be quick to be dangerous, slow and steady contamination is just as deadly.

The dangers here are two-fold,” said Eric Schaeffer, a former Environmental Protection Agency official who now heads the non-profit Environmental Integrity Project. “You can have the sudden spill and the dramatic disaster that Kingston represents, or you can have slow poisoning as these impoundments leach toxic metals.”

Red and Green

Illinois is in the top ten in a dubious category:

14 of the state’s power plants dumped sludge containing a combined 2,826 tons of toxic metals into Downstate sludge ponds during 2006, the last year for which figures are available from the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory.

Only nine other states dumped more toxic metals in this way. Alabama led the nation with 6,680 tons; Indiana was fourth with 4,431 tons.

National environmental policies and regulations have to change, lest we all are buried underneath a veritable lake of toxic dust.

EPA veils hazardous substances

Seth Anderson0 comment

Oh, just lovely. Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger write:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency routinely allows companies to keep new information about their chemicals secret, including compounds that have been shown to cause cancer and respiratory problems, the Journal Sentinel has found.

The newspaper examined more than 2,000 filings in the EPA’s registry of dangerous chemicals for the past three years. In more than half the cases, the EPA agreed to keep the chemical name a secret. In hundreds of other cases, it allowed the company filing the report to keep its name and address confidential.

This is despite a federal law calling for public notice of any new information through the EPA’s program monitoring chemicals that pose substantial risk. The whole idea of the program is to warn the public of newfound dangers.

The EPA’s rules are supposed to allow confidentiality only “under very limited circumstances.”

Legal experts and environmental advocates say the practice of “sanitizing,” or blacking out, this information not only strips vital information from the public, it violates the agency’s own law.

Section 14 of the Toxic Substances Control Act, the foundation for all the EPA’s toxic and chemical regulations, stipulates that chemical producers may not be granted confidentiality when it comes to health and safety data.

“The EPA has chosen to ignore that,” said Wendy Wagner, a law professor at the University of Texas-Austin.

The newspaper’s findings are just the latest example of how EPA administrators more often than not put company interests above the needs of consumers.

[Click to continue reading EPA veils hazardous substances – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online]

not really news, just further confirmation that the EPA hates humanity.

Pollution is not Stewardship

Seth Anderson1 Comment

George Bush and his Republican lackeys envision a world without environmental regulation as a good thing, a goal worth striving for. I’m afraid they want this to happen:

The Citarum River, which winds its way through West Java past terraced rice paddies and teeming cities, is an assault on the senses. Visitors can smell the river before they see it.

Some fishermen still make their living off the river’s fouled waters, but many are no longer casting lures. Instead, they row their boats through floating garbage, foraging for old tires and other trash they can sell.

The river, considered by many environmentalists to be among the world’s most polluted, is woven tightly into the lives of the West Javanese.

…

Environmentalists blame rapid, and unregulated, industrialization and urbanization over the past 20 years for the degradation of the 5,000-square-mile river basin.The environmental damage is already costing lives; flooding, caused by deforestation and drains clogged with garbage, is a constant problem in cities along the Citarum.

[From Trying to Stop Pollution From Killing a Lifeline – NYTimes.com]

You might think I’m using hyperbole, but Bush doesn’t believe in being a steward of our planet: he’d rather corporations evade a few onerous regulations than protect the environment, and us.

Tim Dickenson of Rolling Stone writes:

With president-elect Barack Obama already taking command of the financial crisis, it’s tempting to think that regime change in America is a done deal. But if George Bush has his way, the country will be ruled by his slash-and-burn ideology for a long time to come.

In its final days, the administration is rushing to implement a sweeping array of “midnight regulations” — de facto laws issued by the executive branch — designed to lock in Bush’s legacy. Under the last- minute rules, which can be extremely difficult to overturn, loaded firearms would be allowed in national parks, uranium mining would be permitted near the Grand Canyon and many injured consumers would no longer be able to sue negligent manufacturers in state courts. Other rules would gut the Endangered Species Act, open millions of acres of wild lands to mining, restrict access to birth control and put local cops to work spying for the federal government.

“It’s what we’ve seen for Bush’s whole tenure, only accelerated,” says Gary Bass, executive director of the nonpartisan group OMB Watch. “They’re using regulation to cement their deregulatory mind-set, which puts corporate interests above public interests.”

While every modern president has implemented last-minute regulations, Bush is rolling them out at a record pace — nearly twice as many as Clinton, and five times more than Reagan. “The administration is handing out final favors to its friends,” says Véronique de Rugy, a scholar at George Mason University who has tracked six decades of midnight regulations. “They couldn’t do it earlier — there would have been too many political repercussions. But with the Republicans having lost seats in Congress and the presidency changing parties, Bush has nothing left to lose.”

[From Bush’s Final F.U. : Rolling Stone]

and despite common belief that the new President will be able to just overturn these last minute regulations, that isn’t really the case:

John Podesta, the transition chief for the Obama administration, has vowed that the new president will leverage his “executive authority” to fight Bush’s last-minute rule changes. But according to experts who study midnight regulations, there’s surprisingly little an incoming executive can do to overturn such rules. TheBush administration succeeded in repealing just three percent of the regulations finalized before Bill Clinton left office in 2001. “Midnight regulations under Bush are being executed early and with great intent,” says Bass of OMB Watch. “And that intent is to lock the next administration into these regulations, making it very difficult for Obama to undo what Bush just did.”

To protect the new rules against repeal, the Bush administration began amping up its last-gasp regulatory process back in May. The goal was to have all new regulations finalized by November 1st, providing enough time to accommodate the 60-day cooling-off period required before major rule changes — those that create an economic impact greater than $100 million — can be implemented.

Now, however, the administration has fallen behind schedule — so it’s gaming the system to push through its rules. In several cases, the Office of Management and Budget has fudged the numbers to classify rules that could have billion-dollar consequences as “non-major” — allowing any changes made through mid-December to take effect in just 30 days, before Obama is inaugurated. The administration’s determination of what constitutes a major change is not subject to review in court, and the White House knows it: Spokesman Tony Fratto crowed that the 60-day deadline is “irrelevant to our process.”

Once a rule is published in the Federal Register, the Obama administration will have limited options for expunging it. It can begin the rule-making process anew, crafting Obama rules to replace the Bush rules, but that approach could take years, requiring time-consuming hearings, scientific fact-finding and inevitable legal wrangling. Or, if the new rules contain legal flaws, a judge might allow the Obama administration to revise them more quickly. Bush’s push to gut the Endangered Species Act, for example, was done in laughable haste, with 15 employees given fewer than 36 hours to review and process more than 200,000 public comments. “The ESA rule is enormously vulnerable to a legal challenge on the basis that there was inadequate public notice and comment,” says Pope of the Sierra Club. “The people who did that reviewing will be put on a witness stand, and it will become clear to a judge that this was a complete farce.” But even that legal process will take time, during which industry will continue to operate under the Bush rules.

Clean Coal Myth

Seth Anderson0 comment

There really isn’t any such thing as clean coal, well, other than a marketing tool utilized by energy company hacks to greenwash coal, one of the dirtiest energy sources ever created. Clean coal might be created in the future, but then again, so might cold fusion1. Or robots with bees in their mouths.

Satanic Gift

http://www.ThisIsReality.org

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdHuB7Ovl2o

I hope Barack Obama and Joe Biden will alter their campaign positions supporting clean coal, but I’m not holding my breath.

Withered and Died

From Greenpeace:

Coal washing results in the formation of large quantities of slurry. This is placed in waste piles. Rain drains through the piles, picking up pollutants which end up in rivers and streams. This runoff is acidic and contains heavy metals.

…

Between 7 and 30 percent of coal consists of non-combustible material that just has to be eventually disposed of. “Clean coal” technologies attempt to trap these waste products before they leave the smokestalks; waste material that is trapped is then used (despite containing a number of toxic elements) or dumped as landfill.

The use of higher quality coal – lower in ash and sulphur should reduce emissions and increase efficiency, but thermal efficiency is increased by only one percent. If clean coal is used to meet the increased electricity demand predicitions of govenments instead of cleaner renewable alternatives, there will in fact be a net increase in carbon dioxide emissions.

According to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) mercury and its compounds are highly toxic and pose a ‘global environmental threat to humans and wildlife.’ Exposure to it has been associated with serious neurological and developmental damage to humans. The report also states that coal-fired power and heat production is the largest single source of atmospheric mercury emissions. According to the Coal Utilization Research Council ‘there are no commercial technologies available for mercury capture at coal-fuelled power plants’. Furthermore, a US Department of Energy commissioned report, states that the consistent, long-term performance of mercury control has yet to be demonstrated. Experimental removal of mercury is prohibitively expensive at $761,000/kg mercury removed and even then 10% of the mercury still remains.

…

Despite $5.2 billion of investment in the US alone , clean coal research has been plagued with difficulties. For example, of the 13 clean coal projects that the US General Accounting Office looked at, eight had serious delays or financial problems – six were behind schedule by 2-7 years and two were bankrupt and will not be completed.

The operators of the $297 million Healy Clean Coal project in the USA intend to retrofit the current clean coal plant with traditional technologies. The plant has been closed since January 2000 because safe, reliable and economical operation was not possible with the experimental technology.

Hidden Social and Environmental Costs

Social and environmental problems caused by the use of coal begin at the point where coal is mined. Mine workers are at great risk of death, injury and illness. Local communities suffer from land degradation and pollution and in many cases are forced to relocate.

At a coal-fired power plant, coal is pulverised and burnt in a high temperature furnace. Various toxic gases and tiny particles are released from the furnace into the smokestalks; pollution devices are used to try to trap pollutants before they are released into the atmosphere. The use and disposal of solid wastes trapped in the furnace and the release of gases and fine particles from the smokestacks have severe impacts on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and people’s health.

Footnotes:
  1. note, not the cold fusion discovered by Kevin Gugan late at night at Guff House after he had been up for weeks at a time snorting speed. Ok, getting off point here. [↩]

Arsenic in Water at EPA Approved Standards Linked to Heart Disease

Seth Anderson0 comment

This is the true legacy of George Bush, Dick Cheney and their evil crew: an Environmental Protection Agency that actively works towards lowering our national health.

Battle for Hearts and Minds

In the U.S., many locations are known to have groundwater containing arsenic concentrations in excess of the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standard of 10 parts per billion. But now comes research that suggests the EPA’s supposedly “safe” level of arsemic allowed in water supplies for public consumption isn’t safe at all. In fact, water laced with the federally-approved amount of arsenic could be causing high blood pressure and artery-clogging arhterosclerosis.

According to animal research by University of Pittsburgh scientists set to be published in the December issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, and available online now at http://www.jci.org/articles/view/35092, arsenic at EPA-approved levels for drinking water causes pores in liver blood vessels to close, potentially leading to cardiovascular disease and hypertension. This study calls into question whether present Environmental Protection Agency standards (currently based only on the risks of arsenic causing cancer) are stringent enough.

[From Arsenic in Water at EPA Approved Standards Linked to Heart Disease]

Rural (so-called Red States) are prime targets for the death dealers at the EPA:

The current federal standard for arsenic in public water systems not only may be too high, but it only applies to drinking water sources that serve more than 20 people. “We are especially concerned about water from individual wells in small, rural and semi-rural communities that are exempt from the EPA requirement and often contain levels of arsenic that exceed the EPA limit,” Dr. Barchowsky stated in the press release. “Our findings raise some concerns about whether current EPA-developed standards can effectively protect against cardiovascular risks posed by arsenic in drinking water.”

The study is a strong reminder that no one in the U.S. should assume that because their water supply is dubbed “safe” by the EPA that it doesn’t contain not only arsenic but other toxins. For example, most public water supplies are known to contain a host of pharmaceutical and pesticide residues,too. Testing your water or finding a proven system of safe water filtration are the only known ways to make sure you are putting pure water into your body.

Plastic linked to smaller penises

Seth Anderson0 comment

Nice. No wonder the Republican EPA wants to ensure phthalates in the nation’s water supply: parity. Republicans already start out with a disadvantage, they are looking for anything that can even the odds.

Exposure of expectant mothers to phthalates, a common ingredient in many plastics, has been linked to smaller penis size and incomplete descent of testicles in their baby boys, according to a new research paper that found the chemical also appears to make the overall genital tracts of boys slightly more feminine.

The findings are sure to add more controversy to phthalates, a chemical that is added to polyvinyl chloride plastic to make it less brittle, and to many types of personal care products including fragrances, hair sprays and nail polish.

The research was conducted on children from three different areas of the United States, and found a strong statistical correlation between expectant mothers who had above-average levels of the chemical in their urine while pregnant and the feminizing effect on their sons.

Phthalates are “probably reproductive toxins and should be eliminated from products gradually because we don’t need them,” said Shanna Swan, director of the Center for Reproductive Epidemiology at the University of Rochester’s school of medicine, who led the team of scientists who examined the boys.

The paper is published in the current issue of the journal Environmental Research.

[From globeandmail.com: Plastics ingredient linked to smaller penises]

EPA hates Americans

swanksalot1 Comment

The Bush cronies in the EPA want to kill and maim American citizens, presumedly to bring on The Rapture. Their latest scheme to damage public health: ignore perchlorate in the nation’s drinking water because cleaning it up would cost the Pentagon too much money. The Pentagon has much more important tasks to accomplish with its trillion dollar budget: like killing people in other countries.

The Environmental Protection Agency has decided there’s no need to rid drinking water of a toxic rocket fuel ingredient that has fouled public water supplies around the country.
EPA reached the conclusion in a draft regulatory document not yet made public…

The ingredient, perchlorate, has been found in at least 395 sites in 35 states at levels high enough to interfere with thyroid function and pose developmental health risks, particularly for babies and fetuses, according to some scientists.

The EPA document says that mandating a clean-up level for perchlorate would not result in a “meaningful opportunity for health risk reduction for persons served by public-water systems.”

[From EPA won’t limit rocket fuel in U.S. drinking water – USATODAY.com]

I like to eat paste

The EPA chooses to ignore common sense, and the criticism of non-Bushies like Barbara Boxer:

“This is a widespread contamination problem, and to see the Bush EPA just walk away is shocking,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate’s environment committee.

Lenny Siegel, director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight in Mountain View, Calif., added: “This is an unconscionable decision not based upon science or law but on concern that a more stringent standard could cost the government significantly.”

The Defense Department used perchlorate for decades in testing missiles and rockets, and most perchlorate contamination is the result of defense and aerospace activities, congressional investigators said last year.

The Pentagon could face liability if EPA set a national drinking water standard that forced water agencies around the country to undertake costly clean-up efforts. Defense officials have spent years questioning EPA’s conclusions about the risks posed by perchlorate.

BPA in plastics linked to diabetes, heart disease

Seth Anderson1 Comment

But never worry, I’m sure the FDA will issue reassurances that plastic is good for you. Good enough that no FDA employee will ever use a plastic water bottle again, but we wouldn’t want to cause panic, nor cause our close friends in the plastic industry to lose any shareholder value.

Thirsty?

The chemical Bisphenol A (BPA), widely used in plastic food and beverage containers, has been linked to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and liver abnormalities, according to a study released Tuesday.

The report to be published in the September 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that adults with the highest concentrations of BPA in their urine had nearly triple the odds of cardiovascular disease, compared with subjects found to have the least amounts of the compound in their systems.

Of 1,455 adults studied, those with the highest BPA levels had more than double the odds of having diabetes, the report found.

“Higher urinary concentrations of BPA were associated with an increased prevalence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and liver-enzyme abnormalities,” the authors wrote.

[From The Raw Story | Chemical in plastics linked to diabetes, heart disease: study]

Plastic, it’s what’s for breakfast1

NPR ran a story on the same topic, and concluded:

At this time, the FDA finds the current level of exposure to BPA through food containers safe.

[From FDA Weighs Safety Of Bisphenol A : NPR]

Don’t you feel much better now? Especially after 8 years2 of fealty to corporate profit instead of consumer safety?

Footnotes:
  1. and lunch, and dinner [↩]
  2. though, one could easily add the Clinton years here to this total, and Bush the Smarter, and Reagan. So really 28 years of the FDA and similar regulatory agencies protecting the interests of industry over the health of citizens [↩]

Great Salt Lake’s High Mercury Levels

swanksalot1 Comment

Stewards of our planet, failing again.

Wheel of transformation
[Wheel of transformation]

The Great Salt Lake is so briny that swimmers bob in the water like corks. It is teeming with tiny shrimp that were sold for years in the back of comic books as magical “sea monkeys.” And, for reasons scientists cannot explain, it is laden with toxic mercury.

“We’ve got a problem, but we don’t know how big it is,” said Chris Cline, a biologist for the federal Fish and Wildlife Service who has been collecting the eggs of cinnamon teal ducks from nests along the rim of the lake so that they can be cracked open and analyzed in the laboratory.

Three years ago, in an alarming finding, tests by the federal Geological Survey showed the lake had some of the highest mercury readings ever recorded in a body of water in the United States.

…

Researchers say mercury released into the atmosphere from coal-fired power plants in the West, gold mines in Nevada, volcanoes in Indonesia or industries in rapidly developing countries such as China or India may be settling in the lake.

[From Studying Great Salt Lake’s High Mercury Levels – NYTimes.com]

Let us speculate: man-made pollution from coal plants, or some unknown natural phenomenon? What are the odds? My money is on coal plants, whether locally, or elsewhere.

Plastic Fantastic

Seth Anderson0 comment

You have to be insanely dedicated to even consider removing plastic from the items you consume. Just too ubiquitous, in nearly every food packaging, on your clothing, on your shampoo, toothpaste, everywhere. The scientific proof of harm from the body may still be murky1 , but the fear of plastic is custom made for our worry-wart culture. Another thing to feel inadequate about being unable to change about our environment.

Sun Like a Drug

[Frederick vom Saal, a biologist at the University of Missouri] is a prominent member of a group of researchers who have raised worrisome questions in recent years about the safety of some common types of plastics. We think of plastic as essentially inert; after all, it takes hundreds of years for a plastic bottle to degrade in a landfill. But as plastic ages or is exposed to heat or stress, it can release trace amounts of some of its ingredients. Of particular concern these days are bisphenol-a (BPA), used to strengthen some plastics, and phthalates, used to soften others. Each ingredient is a part of hundreds of household items; BPA is in everything from baby bottles to can linings (to protect against E. coli and botulism), while phthalates are found in children’s toys as well as vinyl shower curtains. And those chemicals can get inside us through the food, water and bits of dust we consume or even by being absorbed through our skin. Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 92% of Americans age 6 or older test positive for BPA–a sign of just how common the chemical is in our plastic universe.

Scientists like vom Saal argue that BPA and phthalates are different from other environmental toxins like lead and mercury in that these plastic ingredients are endocrine disrupters, which mimic hormones. Estrogen and other hormones in relatively tiny amounts can cause vast changes, so some researchers worry that BPA and phthalates could do the same, especially in young children. Animal studies on BPA found that low-dose exposure, particularly during pregnancy, may be associated with a variety of ills, including cancer and reproductive problems. Some human studies on phthalates linked exposure to declining sperm quality in adult males, while other work has found that early puberty in girls may be associated with the chemicals.

Does that mean even today’s minuscule exposure levels are too much? The science is still murky, and human studies are few and far from definitive. So while Canada and the Democratic Republic of Wal-Mart are moving to ban BPA in baby bottles, the Food and Drug Administration maintains that BPA products pose no danger, as does the European Union. Even so, scientists like Mel Suffet, a professor of environmental-health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, say avoiding certain kinds of plastics is simply being better safe than sorry.

As researchers continue to examine plastic’s impact on our bodies, there’s no doubt that cutting down on the material will help the environment. Plastic makes up nearly 12% of our trash, up from 1% in 1960. You can literally see the result 1,000 miles (1,600 km) west of San Francisco in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of plastic debris twice the size of Texas. The rising cost of petroleum may get plastic manufacturers to come up with incentives for recycling; current rates stand at less than 6% in the U.S. But the best way to reduce your plastic impact on the earth is simply to use less.

[Click to read the rest of The Truth About Plastic – TIME]

Don’t forget that the oil barons who run our country don’t really want to change anything that might interfere with profits, so don’t expect any FDA or EPA studies concerning the interaction with humans and plastics anytime before the Rapture.

Footnotes:
  1. though compelling enough for this writer [↩]

Junk journey highlights plastic soup of Pacific

swanksalot0 comment

One of these days we’ll have to do something about the sea of plastic polluting the ocean.

Sailing 4,000 miles on the Pacific Ocean made Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal sick. It wasn’t waves that turned their stomachs, but the amount of plastic garbage they encountered on a voyage with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation earlier this year.

The activists wanted more people to share their disgust about plastic litter that swirls, relatively unexplored, in continent-size patches of ocean.

To that end, they have built a motor-less craft from 15,000 recycled beverage bottles, fishing nets, and the cockpit of a Cessna, and are sailing it more than 2,000 miles from southern California to Hawaii. They left Long Beach, Calif., on Sunday.

[From Junk journey highlights ‘plastic soup’ of Pacific Ocean | Green Tech – CNET News.com]

We are all affected by global pollution, whether we realize it or not.

 

On the last Pacific voyage that ended in February, Eriksen and Paschal helped marine researcher Charles Moore assess the extent of pollution in the waters leading up to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of plastic debris some estimate to be as large as the United States.

In early tests, a sample showed 48 parts of plastic to each part of plankton.

“They haven’t finished processing the samples, but there was an exponential increase in the plastic,” said Anna Cummins, who was also aboard and serves as Algalita’s education adviser. “What looked on the surface like clean water, when you pulled it up, it looked like plastic soup. It was disgusting.”

Algalita researchers said the floating, soupy landfill isn’t well understood because satellites can’t spot the translucent particles. And although efforts by scientists to explore plastic in five gyres around the world have been lacking, interest is expanding as the public learns more.

“No one really knows what’s out in the other gyres,” Cummins said. “In the north Pacific alone there’s Capt. Moore with his research boat. We are a small organization with five or six paid staff members.”

Eighty percent of the plastic comes not from ships but from land, where tossed consumer goods eventually travel from beaches and rivers into the ocean, according to Algalita.

Plastic concentrates poisons such as PCBs at levels a million times higher than found in the water, according to Japanese researchers.

I had only heard of one gyre, five is even worse. Maybe we should test putting Daniel Burd’s decomposition microorganism in one of the gyres.

More Plastic Water Bottle Blues

Seth Anderson0 comment

Do Not Attempt This At Home

That’s it, I’m sticking with beer, wine and Jameson’s from now on…..

Alina Tugend writes:

The type of plastic bottle that typically holds water, soda and juice is made from polyethylene terephthalate, a petroleum-based material also known as PET that is labeled No. 1.

The trouble with reusing those plastic bottles is that each time they are washed and refilled they become a little more scratched and crinkly, which can lead them to degrade. That can cause a trace metal called antimony to leach out, said Frederick S. vom Saal, a professor of biology at the University of Missouri who has studied plastics for years.

[snip]

But perhaps a better alternative — in terms of health and the environment — is to use the hard plastic bottles made with polycarbonate plastic, often known by the brand Nalgene. It has the numeral 7 stamped at the bottom and is the same type of material used to make some baby bottles, the lining of tin cans and other products. I have some of those around the house. They are just too big to fit into our car cup holders so I retired them to the basement.

Time to dig them out?

Not quite. Environmental groups and some scientists have raised concern that such plastic can leach bisphenol A, an endocrine-disrupting chemical.

[Click to read more of The (Possible) Perils of Being Thirsty While Being Green – New York Times]

Which plastic bottle to use then? Can’t always count on having the


“Sigg Samurai Spirit Water Bottle” (Sigg)

“If I was to use plastic, I would stay with No. 2 and No. 5,” Professor vom Saal said. No. 2 is high-density polyethylene; No. 5 is polypropylene. Both are used in margarine tubs and yogurt containers for example.

But, he warned, do not heat anything in any type of plastic in the microwave.

If you do use these hard No. 7 plastic bottles, the Green Guide, published by the National Geographic Society, advises you to avoid washing them in a dishwasher or with harsh detergent to limit wear and tear.