In 1998, Dr. Patricia Hunt of Case Western University in Ohio discovered that damaged or worn or warm plastics made from polycarbonate resin can leach biphenyl.
As I am sure you know – biphenyl is a chemical suspected of causing damage to the reproductive organs. Other studies have confirmed those findings and just recently Canada has banned the use biphenyl in babies bottles
When you eat or drink things stored in plastic, wear plastic, sit on plastic, taste it, smell it, and so on, plastic is incorporated into you.
There is a bi-directional communication between plastic and things that contact it, meaning that plastic gets into the food, and food gets into the plastic, as well as you.
So, when you eat the things that plastic contacts, quite literally, it becomes you. In other words, you are what you eat. . . drink. . . and breathe. . . plastic!
What’s so bad about having plastic in you and on you?
Two things make it hazardous.
First, plastic is made by combining many toxic synthetic man-made chemicals by a process called polymerization. The plastics industry tells us that this process binds the toxic chemicals together so tightly that they are no longer toxic to us. But they don’t tell us that the polymerization process is never 100% perfect. It always leaves some of those toxic chemicals available to migrate out of the plastic product and into whatever contacts it—your food, you, air, water, and so on.
Secondly, many of these chemicals not only cause cancer, but also disrupt the normal functioning of the endocrine system of most animals, including humans. They have been given the name endocrine disruptors. These toxic man-made chemicals have been shown to be accumulating in the bodies of both humans and the animals we eat.
Hormones act in single digit part/per/trillion (PPT) concentrations, and have an effect on virtually every bodily function. The effects of disrupting the normal activities of hormones can be devastating and permanent. The industry answer to the warnings of environmentalists is that the toxic chemicals that make up plastics do not come out.
Once understand that you are aware of the fact that those toxicants always migrate from all plastics, then they change their tune and say that it happens at extremely low levels that cause no harm, and that the migration happens well below the regulatory limits. On that point they are mostly right, but they wrote the regulations and eased them into law through political contributions.
There is more detail on this below, but understand that there are no regulations that protect anyone or thing from the PPT concentrations that do get into our food, water, air, and bodies. One thing to remember when reading this is that a great deal of the harm caused by plastics cannot be repaired. The damage is permanent.
There are now several companies out there in internet land who offer compostable party ware and new products are appearing all the time. We got ours from Denny’s.
Want to cut down on more of your plastic rubbish? – you can find other plastic free products with the A-Z plastic free index.
Biodegradable waste in a trashcan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Composting is essential to a plastic free life – it makes giving up bin liners so much easier..
I’ve had my compost bin for 14 months now and I am very pleased with it. I use it for garden litter which saves on boring trips to the tip, and kitchen waste which it gobbles up by the bucket load. This, rather than compost, is what I bought it for. Biodegradable waste does not do well in the unnatural conditions of a rubbish dump. It bubbles away producing methane which adds to the greenhouse effect. Simply by putting my kitchen waste in a different bin I am reducing my carbon footprint.
It is also a practical investment for the future. The Uk government is committed to reducing the amount of biodegradable waste in landfill by 50%, by the year 2020; I don’t know how they plan to do this – compulsory composting perhaps? Separate waste collections? Investing in herds of municipal swine? Whatever – as 30% of uk domestic waste is organic this is bound to affect us all. Setting up a home composting system seems a sensible precaution.
There are many different ways to compost, from the traditional heap at the bottom of the garden to micro biological systems. Being new to composting I chose the easiest and cheapest option – a plastic bin stood in the garden.
If you want advice on composting visit Recycle Now
More information can be found at
Living without bin liners
Want to reduce your plastic rubbish? Check out these plastic free products sourced as part of our boycott >>>The A-Z plastic free index<<<
Heres and interesting post on an interesting survery
http://gracefulflavor.net/2007/04/30/70-of-americans-dont-know-plastic-comes-from-oil/#comment-47920
I bet a lot of Brits dont either
Human sweat does not actually smell bad – its the bacteria that gather to feed off waste particles in the sweat that cause the stink. Leave them for long enough and phew!! One way to combat this is of course to spray on the old anti-perspirants. Which comes in a massive amount of packaging – much of it plastic.
Not only do they come with a massive amount of packaging, anti-perspirants contain aluminium salts (they may be listed as aluminium chlorohydrate or aluminium zirconium). These are small enough to lodge in the pores of the skin where physically block the sweat glands. This prevents the sweat from flowing out.
No sweat means no bacteria. Its an effective solution but well its just not right is it? Blocking the sweat glands is preventing them from flushing the body of waste products. Not only that, aluminium salts get absorbed into the body. Some scientists believe there are links between aluminium, altziemers and breast cancer. Other scientists deny it but whatever the boffins say, I don’t like the idea of my pores being deliberately clogged; or my waste products not being purged; or having bits of aluminium floating round my organs.
Deoderants mask the smell with perfumes. They too come with massive amounts of packaging.
However there is an old and natural remedy for this old and natural problem – ammonium alum. This is a naturally occurring mineral salt with antiseptic properties. It inhibits the bacteria growth that causes odour. Alum molecules are far too big to be absorbed by the skin so they just sit there doing the job.
You can buy alum in a spray, as a push up stick or in lump crystal form. The first two involve nasty plastic packaging and lots of it. Better, environmentally speaking, to buy it in lump form. Pit Rok sell a single 80 gram crystal in a small cardboard box. Minimal packaging, completely natural, and fragrance free.
For Pit Rok stockists in your town go to http://www.pitrok.co.uk/stockists.asp. and type in the name of. They do not differentiate between the products. In my experiance the health food shops are morelikely to sell the crystal form. If you want to buy on line go to http://www.amazon.co.uk and search for deodorant crystal.
TOILET CLEANER
LAUNDRY LIQUID,
FABRIC SOFTENER,
MULTISURFACE CLEANER,
The above ECOVER products are all available as refills. Simply take your empty bottle to the Green Shop in the Alternative Technology Centre at Hebble End Mill -
telephone number 01422 842121.
So though the bottle is indeed plastic it can be reused many many times.
If you are not local then Ecover have a postcode search on their site to find the nearest refill point:
http://www.uk-marketingdatabase.com/ecover/ECOVER.search.show_parms
Do you remember back in the old days when a squeezy bottle full of cold water and your enemies, the vile Roberts brothers, about to walk past your cunningly concealed ambush, was the height of fun. Obviously arming your troops was of paramount importance and demand for weapons was high. These days of course, the availability of high powered water pistols and the fact that I am actually an adult, has meant I no longer need to stockpile empty, washing-up liquid bottles.
In fact, as they are of course plastic, they need to be eradicated from my life.
I did try to use soap flakes to wash up. Though I was assured this was possible, I did not find it a pleasant experience.
I also tried using soap flakes to make washing up liquid – again not a success.
Then I found that I can get my ECOVER washing up liquid bottle refilled with more of the environmentaly sound good stuff at Half Moon Health Foods 6 Half Moon Street , Huddersfield
So though the bottle is indeed plastic it can be reused many many times.
I now have three bottles on the go – that allows for forgetting to take the empty into town, not once, not twice - but for weeks at a time.
But I can proudly say I have thrown away no washing up bottles since.
If you are not local then Ecover have a postcode search on their site to find the nearest refill point:
As taken from the aromantics website – they are the guys I buy my DHA from
A Self-Tanning Agent, DHA is a natural substance derived from the bioconversion of glycerol extracted from Palm or Rapeseed Oil. DHA is also present in the human body. As a consequence, the risk of an allergic response is very low. The result of using DHA is a natural looking brown or golden hue to the skin, without exposure to the sun. The induced tan provides photo-protection against UVA radiation. To use, dissolve in a little cold water and then add while the product is under 40°C. Add 5-8% to Self-Tanning Preparations and 0.5%-3% to Sun Screens. The raw material needs to be kept dry, away from light and in the fridge. NB pH needs to be under 5.5. Test your product with Litmus Paper and either add Lactic acid, Citric acid or Ascorbic acid to reduce the pH, if necessary.
Visit the Aromantic Skin Care Library on our website for more information about DHA. There is a link to the library on our home page.
Plastic doesnt biodegrade rather it degrades – it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. However small it is still plastic. It is now so small it is entering the foodchain from the very bottom.
Copied from BBC News
Dr Richard Thompson at the University of Plymouth is leading research into what happens when plastic breaks down in seawater and what effect it is having on the marine environment.
He and his team set out to out to find out how small these fragments can get. So far they’ve identified plastic particles of around 20 microns – thinner than the diameter of a human hair.
In 2004 their groundbreaking study reported finding particles on beaches around the UK. Historical records of samples taken by ships plying routes between Britain and Iceland confirmed that the incidence of the particles had been increasing over the years.
Now the team has extended its sampling elsewhere in Europe, and to the Americas, Australia, Africa and Antarctica.
They found plastic particles smaller than grains of sand. Dr Thompson’s findings estimate there are 300,000 items of plastic per sq km of sea surface, and 100,000 per sq km of seabed.
So plastic appears to be everywhere in our seas. The next task was to try and find out what kind of sea creatures might be consuming it and with what consequences.
Thompson and his team conducted experiments on three species of filter feeders in their laboratory. They looked at the barnacle, the lugworm and the common amphipod or sand-hopper, and found that all three readily ingested plastic as they fed along the seabed.
“These creatures are eaten by others along food chain,” Dr Thompson explained. “It seems an inevitable consequence that it will pass along the food chain. There is the possibility that chemicals could be transferred from plastics to marine organisms.”
Other contaminants
There are two ways in which this might happen. Firstly, the Plymouth scientists want to establish whether there is the potential for chemicals to leach out of degraded plastic over a larger area after the plastic has been ground down.
The second aspect of this research is focusing on what happens when plastic absorbs other contaminants.
So-called hydrophobic chemicals such as PCBs and other polymer additives accumulate on the surface of the sea and latch on to plastic debris.
“They can become magnified in concentration,” said Richard Thompson, “and maybe in a different chemical environment, perhaps in the guts of organisms, those chemicals might be released.”
Whether plastics present a toxic challenge to marine life and subsequently to humans is one of the biggest challenges facing marine scientists today.
The plastics industry’s response is that much of the research is speculative at this stage, and that there is very little evidence that this transfer of chemicals is taking place in the wild.
It says it is doing its bit by replacing toxic materials used as stabilisers and flame retardants with less harmful substances.
Whatever the findings eventually show, there is little that can be done now to deal with the vast quantities of plastic already in our oceans. It will be there for decades to come.”
Oh crap – thats not good news…. just another reason to boycott plastic
The photo shows chickens eating polystyrene. For more pictures of plastic pollution visit our sister sites at Facebook Planet Trash and Flickr Plastic Is Rubbish and You Tube.
Inspired to boycott plastic – and fish? Check out my range of plastic free products with the >>>A-Z<<< plastic free index
