It’s not fair, however, to single out fast food and new cars. PBDEs, to
take just one example, are used in many products, incuding computers,
carpeting, and paint. As for phthalates, we deploy about a billion
pounds of them a year worldwide despite the fact that California
recently listed them as a chemical known to be toxic to our
reproductive systems. Used to make plastic soft and pliable, phthalates
leach easily from millions of products—packaged food, cosmetics,
varnishes, the coatings of timed-release pharmaceuticals—into our
blood, urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk, and amniotic fluid.
In food containers and some plastic bottles, phthalates are now found
with another compound called bisphenol A (BPA), which scientists are
discovering can wreak stunning havoc in the body. We produce 6 billion
pounds of that each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in nearly
every human who has been tested in the United States. We’re eating
these plasticizing additives, drinking them, breathing them, and
absorbing them through our skin every single day.
Most alarming, these chemicals may disrupt the endocrine system—the
delicately balanced set of hormones and glands that affect virtually
every organ and cell—by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. In
marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque
discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have sprouted female sex
organs.
On land, things are equally gruesome. “Fertility rates have been
declining for quite some time now, and exposure to synthetic
estrogen—especially from the chemicals found in plastic products—can
have an adverse effect,” says Marc Goldstein, M.D., director of the
Cornell Institute for Repro-ductive Medicine. Dr. Goldstein also notes
that pregnant women are particularly vulnerable: “Prenatal exposure,
even in very low doses, can cause irreversible damage in an unborn
baby’s reproductive organs.” And after the baby is born, he or she is
hardly out of the woods. Frederick vom Saal, Ph.D., a professor at the
University of Missouri at Columbia who specifically studies estrogenic
chemicals in plastics, warns parents to “steer clear of polycarbonate
baby bottles. They’re particularly dangerous for newborns, whose
brains, immune systems, and gonads are still developing.” Dr. vom
Saal’s research spurred him to throw out every polycarbonate plastic
item in his house, and to stop buying plastic-wrapped food and canned
goods (cans are plastic-lined) at the grocery store. “We now know that
BPA causes prostate cancer in mice and rats, and abnormalities in the
prostate’s stem cell, which is the cell implicated in human prostate
cancer,” he says. “That’s enough to scare the hell out of me.” At Tufts
University, Ana M. Soto, M.D., a professor of anatomy and cellular
biology, has also found connections between these chemicals and breast
cancer.
As if the potential for cancer and mutation weren’t enough, Dr. vom
Saal states in one of his studies that “prenatal exposure to very low
doses of BPA increases the rate of postnatal growth in mice and rats.”
In other words, BPA made rodents fat. Their insulin output surged
wildly and then crashed into a state of resistance—the virtual
definition of diabetes. They produced bigger fat cells, and more of
them. A recent scientific paper Dr. vom Saal coauthored contains this
chilling sentence: “These findings suggest that developmental exposure
to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during
the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the
dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year.”
Given this, it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that America’s
staggering rise in diabetes—a 735 percent increase since 1935—follows
the same arc. This news is depressing enough
to make a person reach for the bottle. Glass, at least, is easily
recyclable. You can take one tequila bottle, melt it down, and make
another tequila bottle. With plastic, recycling is more complicated.
Unfortunately, that promising-looking triangle of arrows that appears
on products doesn’t always signify endless reuse; it merely identifies
which type of plastic the item is made from. And of the seven different
plastics in common use, only two of them—PET (labeled with #1 inside
the triangle and used in soda bottles) and HDPE (labeled with #2 inside
the triangle and used in milk jugs)—have much of an aftermarket. So no
matter how virtuously you toss your chip bags and shampoo bottles into
your blue bin, few of them will escape the landfill—only 3 to 5 percent
of plastics are recycled in any way.
“There’s no legal way to recycle a milk container into another milk
container without adding a new virgin layer of plastic,” Moore says,
pointing out that, because plastic melts at low temperatures, it
retains pollutants and the tainted residue of its former contents. Turn
up the heat to sear these off, and some plastics release deadly vapors.
So the reclaimed stuff is mostly used to make entirely different
products, things that don’t go anywhere near our mouths, such as fleece
jackets and carpeting. Therefore, unlike recycling glass, metal, or
paper, recycling plastic doesn’t always result in less use of virgin
material. It also doesn’t help that fresh-made plastic is far cheaper.
Moore routinely finds half-melted blobs of plastic in the ocean, as
though the person doing the burning realized partway through the
process that this was a bad idea, and stopped (or passed out from the
fumes). “That’s a concern as plastic proliferates worldwide, and people
run out of room for trash and start burning plastic—you’re producing
some of the most toxic gases known,” he says. The color-coded bin
system may work in Marin County, but it is somewhat less effective in
subequatorial Africa or rural Peru.
“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very
small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” Moore says,
describing how the material’s molecular structure resists
biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as
it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold
gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: Even when plastic
is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for
biodegradation.
Truth is, no one knows how long it will take for plastic to biodegrade,
or return to its carbon and hydrogen elements. We only invented the
stuff 144 years ago, and science’s best guess is that its natural
disappearance will take several more centuries. Meanwhile, every year,
we churn out about 60 billion tons of it, much of which becomes
disposable products meant only for a single use. Set aside the question
of why we’re creating ketchup bottles and six-pack rings that last for
half a millennium, and consider the implications of it: Plastic never
really goes away.
Ask a group of people to name
an overwhelming global problem, and you’ll hear about climate change,
the Middle East, or AIDS. No one, it is guaranteed, will cite the
sloppy transport of nurdles as a concern. And
yet nurdles, lentil-size pellets of plastic in its rawest form, are
especially effective couriers of waste chemicals called persistent
organic pollutants, or POPs, which include known carcinogens such as
DDT and PCBs.
