Jane Akre: One Great Big Plastic Hassle

[marmar]

from AlterNet:


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.

In the seminal 1967 film, The Graduate, baby-faced Dustin Hoffman was told the wave of the future -- "Plastics." The lucrative career tip slipped on the QT to young Benjamin the day of his graduation bore no cautionary message about the veritable Pandora's Box the petrochemical plastics industry had opened in the post-war era some twenty years before the film's setting. The overzealous Plastic Man knew the only thing he needed to know: The world would always be hungry for plastic.

That celluloid prediction has proved right on target. 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. ......(more)

The complete article is at: http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/47849/