Lots of lovely plastic…

Sperm whale with netting wound round its lower jaw

Originally uploaded by Bag the Bruck

floating round the sea … killing all the sea beasts and ending up in me.

Plastic Free Breasts

Whats in plastic might cost you your lady lumps. Not a nice subject I know but check out this breast cancer website – it might help you keep your bits.

I’m a Barbie Girl…

Lifes fantastic when your plastic…. better had be as we’ve all got the plastic in us

The chemicals im plastic appear to be mobile – ie they can leach from the plastic product into your food.

If its not the leaching its the fish and chips. When it finally does finally break down plastic doesn’t actually biodegrade it photo degrades. It falls apart in to smaller and smaller toxic particles. These are then absorbed into the surrounding environment entering the water and earth and so the food chain and so into us.

Some of the chemicals used to make plastic have not actually been passed as fit for human consumption – or are known to affect our hormones. At the moment everyone is worried about BPA which can now be found in nearly everything. So I might not be a barbie girl for much longer

Whats in your plastic?

The chemicals in plastic are added to give plastic a wide range of properties. However some of those chemicals are extremely toxic. Here are some of the baddies – for more details click names.

Dioxins
Dioxins, which are highly toxic even at low doses, and are produced when plastics are manufactured and incinerated.

Bisphenol A or BPA

BPA can leach into food from the epoxy linings in cans or from polycarbonate bottles. Many studies have evaluated BPA as a hormone disruptor. Pregnant women and very young children are considered by some to be especially at risk.

Phthalates
To make clingflim clingy manufacturers add various toxic chemicals known as “plasticizers” during production. Traces of these chemicals can leak out of PVC when it comes in contact with foods. Yikes. Whats more they are “reasonably anticipated” to be carcinogens and are not good for lab rats.

Antimony
#1 PETE plastic water bottles have been shown to leach antimony into water. Small dose of which make you sick large doses can kill you. Ughh.

Follow the link to find out how the plastic gets inside you – go to the plastic in me

Antimony

#1 PETE plastic water bottles have been shown to leach antimony into water. A recent study conducted by University of Heidelberg researcher Bill Shotyk, and published in the January 2006 Journal of Environmental Monitoring, found antimony levels in PETE water bottles were higher than levels found where the water was sourced. According to Shotyk, consumers should not be concerned about drinking water bottled in PETE plastic, as the levels found in water are below safe drinking standards. Nonetheless, it’s important to remember that leaving water in any plastic bottle for a prolonged period of time allows for chemical leaching to occur.

Taken from the thegreenguide click here to visit

Plastic In Us Studies

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

The plastic in you

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.

http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/6th-Basic-Food-Group.

Mermaids tears

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6218698.stm

Among clumps of seaweed or flotsam washed up on the shore it is common to find mermaids’ tears, small plastic pellets resembling fish eggs.
Some are the raw materials of the plastics industry spilled in transit from processing plants. Others are granules of domestic waste that have fragmented over the years.
Either way, mermaids’ tears remain everywhere and are almost impossible to clean up.
Raw materials
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.

Trash Vortex

Gannet, Cornish Coast –

click the photo to see more plastic in the sea

A ”plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. The  Independant tells it as it is

Is how the Independant newspaper describes it.

Though Greenpeace have been worried for a while

Many seabirds and their chicks have been found dead, their stomachs filled with medium sized plastic items such as bottle tops, lighters and balloons.

However others are picking up the story try schnews for the nasty nurdles

billions of tiny plastic pellets, called nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, many ending up in the sea. These act like chemical sponges, soaking up other toxic man-made chemicals, all artificial pollutants (for toxicity think DDT pesticide etc), concentrating them up to a million times more than in normal sea water.

But  lets give Dr Erikson as quoted in the Independant the last word

They then enter the food chain. “What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It’s that simple,” said Dr Eriksen.

Why are there no photos?
Oysters garter has the best answer

other articles to read on the subject are
Naked man in the tree

the great photo is by plasticbagpics   check out the rest

Save the birds by going plastic free. Find  plastic free products with the >>>A-Z<<< plastic free index