Infographic: Plastic Bags and the World

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Infographic: How Plastic Bags are Suffocating the World

Environmental Toxins - Time Magazine investigates the chemicals found in everyday products

The ingenuity of the chemical industry has created tens of thousands of new chemicals over the last century, which are now used in vast quantities in many everyday products. Unlike medicines and pesticides, governments have generally required no testing of these chemicals to show that they are safe.
While many synthetic chemicals are undoubtedly harmless, others, especially those mimicking natural hormones known as "endocrine disruptors" such as phthalates, are increasing being linked with disease and developmental abnormalities.
Time magazine has investigated this area with a series of stories on Environmental Toxins, including The Perils of Plastic (which amongst other things documents the growing scientific concerns about the safety of bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates), Pharma in the Plumbing and The Top 10 Household Toxins.

Recommended reading

Update:
Please note that as this is a Time Magazine story the "governments" referred to are successive US governments. Other parts of the world such as Europe and, judging from Erica's comment below, Australia have much stricter regimes. Even so chemicals such as phthalates and BPA are still found in Australian products.

Saying goodbye to single use plastic water bottles

Plastic water bottles come in for a lot of stick these days, but are fairly ubiquitous in our society as people have come to expect to have water on hand.
After-all it's a fair question to ask how necessary it is to buy spring/ filtered tap water/ branded tap water in the first place when you live in a first world country with safe water. While single use plastic bottles pretty much epitomize the silliness of our throw-away culture and despite recycling a lot of plastic still makes it way into the environment and end up in places like the great pacific garbage patch.
The final bottled product also carries the embodied emissions of manufacturing the bottle, sourcing/filtering the water, transport, chilling etc etc.
One way to reduce the impact of plastic bottle is to reuse them, which for a lot of bottles isn't what they are designed for and so you risk bacterial growth and potentially degradation of the bottle over time.


So what are the alternative options for those of us who like to have a drink bottle handy? Luckily options abound with varying degrees of usefulness

1) Use drinking fountains (ok in some cities, not so good away from them)
2) If it just sits on our desk at work, why not use a glass bottle.
3) Buy a proper reusable drink bottle that won't break, leak and leach and is recyclable. You could get a proper plastic drink bottle but make sure to avoid plastics #3 and #7 as they can leach toxins into the water. An increasing popular option is to buy a steel or aluminum bottle. Reputable brands of steel/aluminum bottles includes Sigg, Nathan, Klean Kanteen and Thermos. From the customers perspective these have the advantage that they last years, shouldn't contaminate the water and are just as useful hiking in the mountains as they are on your desk.


From an environmental perspective one metal bottle is obviously worse than one plastic bottle, so what's the break even number? I couldn't find a published life-cycle analysis comparing the two, but the New York Times had a piece last year which stated that for greenhouse gasses after your metal bottle has displaced 50 plastic bottles it's better for the climate and after it has displaced 500 plastic bottles it's better for the environment in all aspects (and that wasn't including the impact producing the water present in the plastic bottles). Given how long a metal bottle last (unless you lose it) it should eventually be better for the environment.

So, if you like drinking water and you like water bottles, consider getting a steel/aluminum one and say goodbye to plastic bottles.

Phthalates and PVC – the not good, the bad and the ADHD

At our last meeting, TTKD set up a packaging group to encourage companies to use less packaging, recyclable packaging and as this post will detail, non-toxic packaging. The case in point being the presence of Phthalates in PVC plastic.

Phthalates are added to some Polyvinylchloride (PVC and no.3 plastic) to make it more flexible and soft. However the phthalte molecules are not bound to the PVC and are able to leach or evaporate out. Some products made from PVC include food packaging, vinyl flooring, children's chew toys, pacifiers and children’s bottles.

Phthalates are also found in a wide range of other products (see the Wikipedia page of phthalates for an overview). While daily exposure to phthalates from a single product may be quite low (1), exposure to all the phthlalates that find their way into indoor air, foods, dust etc, from the many products containing phthalates, means the cumulative daily dose may exceed the safe maximum daily intake. Eg: In one study it was found that the "tolerable intake of children is exceeded to a considerable degree, in some instances up to 20-fold" (2).

Phthalates are endocrine disruptors, which essentially means they are reproductive and developmental toxins. Exposure to phthalates has been linked to a number of different adverse effects including:

Autism in children (3).
Asthma and allergies in children (4).
ADHD in children (5).
Obesity (6).
Abnormal sexual development due to prenatal exposure in males and because of this effect phthlates have been linked (along with other toxins) to the observed decrease in male fertility (7).

While many of these studies are very recent and need to be replicated they show a growing concern about the safety of phthalates and how they might “synergise” with other endocrine disruptors to cause significant deleterious health effects. Countries are now putting bans or limits on phthalates because of this and it would be sensible at an individual level to avoid products containing phthalates, which brings us back to PVC.

Currently PVC products are not marked at to whether or not they contain phthalates, meaning all Plasticized PVC (PPVC or just PVC) should be assumed to contain them and should be avoided.

So to summarise, products containing phthlates (of which PVC is one) are not safe, with children (both post-natal and pre-natal) being most sensitive to their deleterious effects. Because of this household use of PVC (no.3 plastic) should be avoided.


References (click to expand)

(1) Corea-Téllez KS et al 2008 Estimated risks of water and saliva contamination by phthalate diffusion from plasticized polyvinyl chloride. J Environ Health.
(2) Heudorf et al 2007. Phthalates: toxicology and exposure. Int J Hyg Environ Health.
(3) Larsson et al 2009. Associations between indoor environmental factors and parental-reported autistic spectrum disorders in children 6-8 years of age. Neurotoxicology.
(4) Jaakkola et al 2008. The role of exposure to phthalates from polyvinyl chloride products in the development of asthma and allergies: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Environ Health Perspect.
(5) Kim et al 2009. Phthalates Exposure and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in School-Age Children. Biol Psychiatry.
(6) Desvergne et al 2009. PPAR-mediated activity of phthalates: A link to the obesity epidemic? Mol Cell Endocrinol.
(7) Hu et al 2009. Phthalate-induced testicular dysgenesis syndrome: Leydig cell influence. Trends Endocrinol Metab.

An alternative to plastic bags: Onya weigh bags

To reduce the use of plastic bags a lot of people have switched to using "Green" bags when shopping in general, however putting loose fruit and veges into separate plastic bags at the supermarket or local farmers market is still very common.
Personally I don't have any problem with my broccoli hanging loose with my corn and apples etc inside one big "green" bag, but realize it's not as convenient when getting things weighed at the checkout. To the rescue comes Onya Weigh bags.

Onya weight bags are super thin, ultra lightweight, transparent bags, contained within a pouch. They are they are strong and durable so can be used over and over again.

Onya weight bags are made of a fine mesh meaning you can use them as a collander and wash your produce while it is inside the bag. And if the bags get dirty you can put them in the wash and afterwords they dry almost immediately.

As the Onya website says
"So you have remembered your reusable bags, but still need to use plastic for your fruit 'n' veg.....Not any more"!

*This Turquoise pouch contains 5 strong Tulle bags (each can easily carry 2 kilos of produce)
*They are incredibly lightweight, so they don't weigh anything on the scales
*Being see-through, shop assistants know what's inside
*Because washing fruit 'n' veg is important, these bags are designed so you can use each one as a collander washing the produce inside
*Most fruit 'n' veg store better not sitting in a plastic bag where they can sweat

Other uses:
*Just as useful in the Health Food shop for: nuts, grains, rice and lentils etc
* Laundry bag.

Onya bags come in sets of 5 or 8 can be purchased from onyabags.com or from biome stores
For more information see the onya bags website