One Great Big Plastic Hassle
By Jane Akre, Conscious Choice. Posted February 19, 2007.
Disturbing health trends indicate our passion for plastic may be threatening our reproductive survival.
Cheap, durable and convenient, plastic has been the country's chosen miracle-material since World War II. When added to polyvinyl chloride (PVC), the petroleum-based industrial chemicals in plastic -- chief among them plasticizers such as phthalates (THAHL-ates) -- make our upholstery comfier and our pipes more flexible. To keep up with the world's affection for all things plasticized, the U.S. produces a billion pounds of phthalates a year.
Today, phthalates are one of the top offenders in a group of 70 suspected endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that we spray in our homes and yards and use in our makeup, nail polish, detergents, flame retardants, plastic bottles, metal food cans and even children's toys.
When we're done with these products, we flush them down our sinks or burn them in our incinerators, where their runoff filters into our national waterways. Even if you eschew plasticized products in your personal lives, it's impossible to avoid contamination; EDCs are in the bodies of every man, woman, child and fetus in the U.S.
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Beyond EDCs, public waterways are contaminated with growth hormones and antibiotics from cattle feed, residual hormones from birth control products and other medicines, waste chemicals and pharmaceuticals. These substances can pass intact into the water supply
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As scientists continue to tackle testing our chem-saturated environment, EDC damage to human health is likely to rank up with cancer as the environmentally induced medical concern of our time.
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