What’s the Fuss Over Plastic?
By Linda Mason Hunter

Look around you. We live in a sea of plastic. We carry around personal water bottles made of plastic, feed our babies from plastic bottles, wrap trash in plastic bags, bring vegetables home in flimsy plastic sacks, and eat soup from aluminum cans lined with plastic. It coats our cookware, and is even in our medical devices. What is this doing to our planet? What is this doing to our health? The health of our children?

Here’s the skinny: Scientists are discovering that, while plastic may be terrifically versatile and amazingly economical, it’s not doing us any favors.

Environmentally speaking, plastics are forever. Made from oil and natural gas, they take 1,000 years to decompose in a landfill, if at all. They accumulate in ever greater amounts on land and in water. The results can be overwhelming. In the North Pacific, currents have swept together a floating island of plastic twice the size of Texas composed of tires, toys, all kinds of plastic waste. Rather than dispersing, it has doubled in size in the last six years (according to National Geographic’s Green Guide), trapping animals in lost plastic nets and shopping bags. There’s a similar “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.

Making the matter personal, plastics are harming our health in ways scientists are just beginning to understand. Synthetic chemicals making plastic soft and pliable are composed of toxins that leach into food, beverages, and disperse into the air when heated. Amounts detected in studies are at levels that cause neurological and developmental damage in laboratory animals, and mimic the hormone estrogen at low levels in humans. Problems include genital defects, behavioral changes, and abnormal development of mammary glands. Changes to mammary glands are identical to those observed in women at high risk for breast cancer.

The chemical currently in the public eye is Bisphenol-A (BPA), banned in the European Union and in the process of being banned in Canada, but still present in a wide array of food-related products in the U.S.A. The latest revelation (November 2008) is that BPA is present in more kinds of plastic than previously thought. It’s not just plastics with the #7 recycling code, but in plastics with recycling codes 1, 2, and 4, as well. That means BPA is present not only in hard, clear plastics (such as baby bottles), and the lining of food cans, it’s also found in frozen food trays, microwave soup containers, plastic food packaging, microwave popcorn bags, to name a few.

Two additional studies, published in Environmental Health Perspectives last fall, found that BPA lingers in the body longer than previously thought, and that newborn babies are more exposed to BPA than had previously been thought. Blood urine tests showed many infants had ten times the level of BPA in their blood as did adults, and one child had 350 times the median level found in adult blood. Scientists believe that young bodies are not mature enough to process the chemical as adults do, so it lingers longer, and is more likely to have ill effects.

The United States leads the world in number deaths from cancer. One in two men and one in three women will receive a cancer diagnosis at some point in their lives. I think we need to start paying attention.
To avoid Bisphenol A, experts recommend following these seven tips:

1. Do not microwave food or beverages in plastic.

2. Do not microwave or heat plastic cling wraps.

3. Do not place any kind of plastic in the dishwasher.

4. If using hard polycarbonate plastics (water bottles, baby bottles, sippy cups), do not use for warm or hot liquids.

5. Use safe alternatives, such as glass.

6. Avoid canned foods when possible.

7. Look for labels on products that say “BPA-free.”

This is important and critical information. Please heed.

© 2009, Linda Mason Hunter

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