McElligott's Plastic

“Ask for a cone, save the environment!” proclaimed the sign at the local Creamee. The girls asked for cups anyway, to catch the drippings of the oversized soft-serve half-and-half cones they'd ordered. “Guess we’re not saving the environment today,” said one, dipping her plastic spoon into the Styrofoam cup.

Styrofoam is one incarnation of polystyrene plastic – more affectionately known as “#6” or, the plastic we can’t recycle. Polystyrene is also the black polystyrene casing of my computer, my bicycle helmet, the foamed polystyrene clamshell we were offered to carry home the remainders from a local restaurant and, the countless little white Styrofoam pellets degraded from sheets of weathered insulation I spent the weekend picking from the weeds at the local junk-yard turned conservation land along with a handful of diligent volunteers.

While collecting the little white bits from the earth, I imagine how each year some portion of those beads along with larger rafts of insulation are blown or washed into the bordering Sawmill River, some journeying only as far as the local swimming hole, while others carried by the Sawmill make their way to the Connecticut and beyond. I imagine their journey a perverse version of Dr.Seuss’s McElligot’s Pool, where you never know what exotic species might make their way from the deep ocean to a backyard pond, only these make their way to the deep ocean. This isn’t fanciful fiction. Just this year scientists confirmed the presence of a plastic “patch” of our own in the North Atlantic, the evil twin of the infamous North Pacific trash gyre – a region known for its accumulation of plastic from soccer balls to microscopic bits of Styrofoam and other assorted plastics. Looking around at all the Styrofoam I’ve missed, the scientist in me wants to radio-tag those naughty bits and send them on their way. Maybe in a few years we’d know for sure if pieces of Montague were swirling about the wide Sargasso Sea.

Captain Charles Moore, an adventurer, environmentalist and researcher, credited with discovering the North Pacific patch once commented on the return of plastic to the oceans and its consumption by marine life in an article for Natural History Magazine, “Ironically,” wrote Moore “the debris is re-entering the oceans whence it came; the ancient plankton that once floated on Earth's primordial sea gave rise to the petroleum now being transformed into plastic polymers. That exhumed life, our ‘civilized plankton,’ is, in effect, competing with its natural counterparts, as well as with those life-forms that directly or indirectly feed on them.” Research by Moore and others, now shows that plastics in the ocean can accumulate toxicants long banned like PCBs and DDTs, and there is some concern that once ingested, contaminated plastics might release these chemicals, along with others used for plastics production including colorants, fire retardants and plasticizers into their host. Someday there may be no need to shrink-wrap seafood.

Like other plastics, polystyrene – the base material for Styrofoam or foamed polystyrene clamshell food containers, microwavable cups (think cup-o-noodles), plastic plates and coffee cups – is a polymer, a chemical chain of repeating units, like beads on a string. In this case the beads or monomers are styrene. Produced naturally by plants and animals, styrene – like many chemicals - is relatively non-toxic in these small amounts. And, like many chemicals, natural production is dwarfed by human production (at least in localized concentrations,) which in the case of styrene tops 13 billion pounds a year in the US alone. The majority is used to produce polystyrene. While polystyrene might not appear on the top ten list for toxic chemicals, it is made from benzene. Over 50% of all benzene that is produced from oil is eventually turned into styrene. And sweet smelling benzene is nasty stuff. Just a whiff brings me back to organic chemistry lab in college. We used it without a care until the day it was officially deemed a carcinogen – and then we didn’t. At the risk of showing my age, that was in 1979. And in a strange case of collective heads- in-sand, benzene was known to cause cancer since the 1920s. (We can thank industry along with federal regulators to for that small lapse.) Benzene is now one of the few industrial chemicals officially listed as a known human carcinogen – causing leukemia in this case – and it is industry workers who are most at risk.

So what happens to all that polystyrene? The EPA estimated that in 2007, nearly 3 billion pounds of it was used in the production of disposable goods, including foamed polystyrene plastic plates, cups, egg cartons, and packaging peanuts. Aside from the packaging peanuts we might bring to a UPS store for reuse, with a recycling rate for all polystyrene estimated as a mere 0.8%, most will end up in a landfill. At worst it’ll end up our local streams, rivers and oceans.

And, when it does according to new research by Katsuhiko Saido and colleagues from the Nihon University, in Chiba, Japan, it will not only degrade more rapidly than it would on land (under certain marine conditions) but it will also release toxicants including a small amount of bisphenol A, notoriously linked with polycarbonate plastics, and styrene which brings us back to – d’oh!

The good news is that like most other plastics, technically, polystyrene foam is recyclable. In fact, it can be recycled back into many of the products from which it came – plates, clamshells, egg cartons and insulation, or into less desirable “dead end” products like light-weight concrete. The bad news is that the process isn’t cost effective, at least in the US – and so isn’t all that popular.

Then there are the more creative uses for this problem plastic. Some, like Cass Phillips, writer and co-owner of Kamuela Greenhouse/Specialty Orchids in Waimea, Hawaii have considered turning the environmental blight into beauty. With USDA grant funding, Phillips is currently testing the utility of various locally collected and processed recycled plastics as a growth medium additive with an eye to providing a durable low cost product for the Hawaii orchid industry. When asked about foamed polystyrene, she responded:

“I found that a certain type of orchid, miltoniopsis (aka the pansy orchid), grew fastest and largest in straight granulated polystyrene foam, in a trial that included three controls (cinder, coconut fiber and orchid bark)…... What truly stunned me is that the pansy orchids went into their bloom cycle 2-3 months before any other sample." There could be several reasons for the accelerated growth. One might suppose improved water retention could be a factor, but the ground polystyrene foam dried out almost instantly. That leaves us pondering other possibilities, including one that could be considered insidious: the release of growth-inducing chemicals. Sorting out the differences will require further analysis, but in the meantime Phillips has found herself wondering about the wisdom of schools using Styrofoam plates in their lunch programs, and the consequences of slurping down cups-o-soup from Styrofoam tubs.

Of course the best way to keep this ubiquitous plastic from polluting the oceans and clogging the landfills is to reduce use (according to the American Chemistry Council, the PS industry has been in decline for the past four years, though they give no reason), and close the recycling loop. More immediately, I’m sure there’ll be many more opportunities to pick Styrofoam from newly acquired conservation land, and for those rare occasions when I can’t clean my plate while dining at one of the local eateries, I’ve begun asking for foil or cardboard for the leftovers.

The salty dumping grounds: a brief history of ocean dumping

In light of all the recent activity surrounding ocean plastics including voyages by both Captain Charlie Moore and Scripps, I thought it might be relevant to consider our practice (past and present) of using the oceans as receptacles for our waste. This is a little different than the typical posts (it's from an earlier project on plastics) and will be posted in sections. Here's the first.

In with the tides, Nantasket Beach, 1988

As far as plastics in the ocean, I needed no introduction. All along the sandy beaches of Hull, a thin barrier beach reaching out into Massachusetts Bay, where my family resided each summer, plastics washed up by the incoming tide were a common sight. We knew when Boston’s sewers had overloaded by the condoms, tampon applicators and other assorted bits of plastic that washed ashore after a storm. When lobstermen switched from the picturesque wooden traps to plastic coated metal, we knew by the fragments of trap that poked up from the wet sand below the high-tide mark. So when the Coastweeks cleanup came to Hull in 1988 my father, garbage bag in hand, wearing his Sears dungarees, faded blue denim shirt, and size 12 Jack Purcells, combed the beach separating plastic, metal and cardboard from the sand. My father, along with hundreds of other volunteers that year, collected a total of 25 tons of debris from Massachusetts’s beaches.

That fall, as I attended the annual Society of Toxicology and Chemistry Halloween Dance dressed as “Beach waste,” I was naïve about the dangers of plastics. As far as I knew plastic was a nuisance and an eyesore but was essentially inert unless burned; not all that interesting to a toxicologist. But it made a good costume. A necklace of pink and white tampon applicators and milk bottle caps collected by my father was the perfect accessory to the orange fishnet cape adorned with fading coke bottles, pieces of old lobster trap and other assorted beach waste items. Problem was, only other east coast attendees got that I was beach waste.

Back then, Alice Outwater, fresh out of MIT’s graduate school worked with the floatable scum of Boston - wastewater scum - for the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. She writes about the 1980s, “roughly fifty thousand tampon applicators a day were arriving at the wastewater treatment plants in Boston.”[1] Recently, I asked her about the fate of those applicators, “Most of the plastics in the wastewater,” she replied, “ended up in the scum, which, originally, was released on the outgoing tide. ” As recently as 1989, Boston’s sewage treatment plants released upwards of 10,000 gallons per day of that scum, which included grease, oil, and rosy pink tampon applicators,[2] and it was all legal.

Who would have thought that the applicators my sisters and I flushed from our Newton home might one day wash up on our beloved Nantasket beach in Hull? Did Playtex consider this when they manufactured the first silky plastic applicators back in 1962[3]? Or, did both Playtex and consumers assume, as generations before them, that flowing water combined with technology was the solution for much of our waste?

The solution to pollution

Our relationship with the world’s oceans includes worship, fear and contemplation, yet throughout history we have dumped our waste into the nearest water body. If the ocean was large enough to hide fearsome sea monsters, make ships disappear, and swallow Atlantis, surely it was large enough to absorb our waste. By one estimate, for every million molecules of the world’s waters, the ocean contains over 970,000 molecules, while glaciers and ice caps contain 21,000, rivers contain a single molecule[4], and all of life including us watery beings contains a mere half a molecule. So what could beings who represent less than one part-per-million of all the oceans water possibly do to harm the oceans? Turns out, quite a lot.

Four thousand years ago, the Sumerians not only figured out how to move water to where they wanted it, but they also managed to develop a sewer system to carry away their waste. Two thousand years ago Romans built public latrines that discharged via their central sewage system, aptly named the Cloaca Maxima, directly into the river Tiber. Despite all this historical precedent (although one might think we’d have figured this out sooner) western world city dwellers were still dumping chamber pots into the streets and ditches until well into the late nineteenth century. Fortunately for us, city engineers and health departments finally figured out what the ancients had known - that flowing water could carry away a city’s human waste. By early twentieth century, when my father’s father was setting down roots in his new country after a trip across the Atlantic, and in his new city Boston, Boston was being celebrated for having one of the best sewage treatment systems in the country thanks to a collection of pipes that sent the city’s wastewater out into Boston Harbor.

As east coast cities like Boston and New York exploded with immigrants like my grandfather and his family, so too did the amount of household waste, including ashes, garbage, night soil and cesspool cleanings (for those not hooked up to the cities sewers) which along with street sweepings and dead animals, ended up in watery graves along the eastern seaboard, out of sight. While our coastal ancestors paved the way for dumping at sea, inlanders were no different. For them, flowing water, was also the solution to growing waste problems. By the end of the nineteenth century, some Midwestern cities were dumping upwards of 270,000 tons of garbage, manure, night-soil and dead animals into the mighty Mississippi River, while others dumped into the Missouri, the Ohio[5] and the Great Lakes

Occasionally, all this dumping was problematic. Once in a while, dumping interfered with the boats and barges that worked the rivers, or the tides and winds conspired, pushing putrid waste back towards the shore. Navigation became difficult, and coastal areas became hazardous to one’s health. After this happened in Boston during the summer of 1898, ninety years before tampon applicators washed up in Hull, and almost 100 years before Alguita’s maiden voyage, the wisdom of dumping at sea was reconsidered[6]. By 1899 the country’s first law protecting our waterways was enacted.[7] Although key phrases like floatable waste and navigable waters separated the lawful from the unlawful, centuries-old habits die hard. Seven years after the new law, Bostonians were still sending literally tons of market waste, ashes and house dirt, street sweepings and cesspool and catch basin cleanings out to the coastal ocean. Dumping at sea was cheap. In 1912 for just 40 cents, Boston could unload a ton of garbage[8]. As long as the stuff didn’t reappear and as long as ships could still sail, there was no reason not to dump it.

Thankfully for us all, coastal garbage dumping eventually ceased, but our mindset, that the solution to pollution is the ocean, persists. Throughout the past century and into the next, coastal cities and towns have continued to rely upon local rivers and harbors to swallow up their citizen’s sewage. Yet the sewage and wastewater that traveled from my grandfather’s apartment out to the harbor was far different than the sewage that flowed from the subsequent generation of Bostonians who came of age living better through chemistry. Before the current age of plastics, much of what was dumped eventually degraded – even the oil. But plastics don’t break down – at least not within our lifetime. And as recently as 1987, over 1,000 major industrial facilities and nearly 600 municipal sewage treatment plants discharged directly into estuaries or coastal waters around the country[9] dispersing not only fugitive tampon applicators and other bits of plastics but industrial contaminants as well.

To find out more about plastics in our oceans today, check out websites of both the ORV Alguita (Captain Moore's vessel) and the New Horizon, (Scripps' vessel.)

The second part to this article can be found here.

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[1] Water, by Alice Outwater pg 169, and personal communication.

[2] http://www.mwra.state.ma.us/03sewer/html/sewhist.htm

[3] http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Playtex-Products-Inc-Company-History.html; "The new Gentle Glide tampon is a major breakthrough in design. Since 1962 when Playtex created the first plastic applicator tampon, we've continually improved the design of our feminine care products by listening to consumers and anticipating their feminine care needs. This exciting new product is designed to meet women's needs for ultimate comfort and protection", commented Julie Elkinton, Vice President of Feminine Care at Playtex.” From http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6908790/Playtex-Introduces-a-New-Gentle.html

[4] Gaia’s Body, Tyler Volk, p 112

[5] The Collection and Disposal of Municipal Waste, 1908, Wm F. Morse, The Municipal Waste Journal and Engineer, Ny, NY

[6] The Collection and Disposal of Municipal Waste, 1908, Wm F. Morse, The Municipal Waste Journal and Engineer, Ny, NY.

[7] http://www.eoearth.org/article/Rivers_and_Harbors_Act_of_1899,_United_States

[8] R. Hering and S. Greeley: Collection and Disposal of Municipal Refuse, 1921

[9] Wastes in Marine Environments, OTA, 1987 p.13.

Get your BPA FREE with each new bottle!

Roughly a year ago one of the first studies showing that BPA, the known estrognic plastic used to make polycarbonate bottles, leached into liquids under extreme conditions of heating and rigorous washing was published to much fanfare. The study raised a serious issue, although it seemed that unless you were routinely heating your liquids in a well washed bottle (huh? wash my water bottle? In the dishwater?) – a problem clearly relevant to new parents, but not so to folks like me who were done reproducing – ridding the household of all polycarbonate wasn’t a high priority. While I did replace the kid's bottles with the now suspect PET bottles (more on that one later) the old polycarbs still went to the tennis courts and up Mount Toby with me. I just couldn’t justify adding more plastic so the recycle or waste cycle so as long as I had it, I used it. Same with the gem-colored polycarb juice glasses we’ve used for years.

Well, as usual with chemicals we’re just getting to know more intimately than we’d like, there's always one more study that makes us wonder if "we've" really done our best when it comes to using chemicals wisely. This time it's a new study published in Environmental Health Perspectives by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health which reports that BPA molecules really don’t need all that much coaxing to be released from bottle to water. In fact, just regular use, filling them up with cold liquids and drinking was enough to raise concentrations of BPA in the urine of polycarb bottle using Harvard students.

After one week of drinking all their cold beverages from Nalgene Lexan bottles (could you fill this bottle rather than that beer stein please?), and peeing into a cup during the designated hours of 5-8PM, students increased their pre-polycarb urine concentrations by 69%. In other words – you get a little BPA with your water even if you don’t heat it up and abuse the bottle.

Given that the very young (newborns and infants) tend to retain their BPA a bit longer (because their metabolic system which clears chemicals like BPA is less active than adults) this study, one of the first to show that normal use of polycarb means exposure to BPA, should give pause to any parent still using the old polycarb baby bottles. It’s certainly enough to push me to take those pretty gem-colored juice glasses and relegate them to the craft cabinet.

A Very Disney Earth Day 2009

It took some digging, but the “Disney World Envirodisaster” article is now being replaced by a more circumspect, “They May be Behind the Times, but Maybe They’ve got Good Intentions,” article.The one week Disney Extravaganza organized by my daughter’s dance school (about 70 young dancers with parents in tow) which is what landed me in Disney, was, and was not, exactly what I’d expected.

The dancing plastic fairies, plastic pirates, plastic Mickey, plastic plastic at every turn, artificial ponds, and fried food mixed in with messages of conservation and recycling was expected – that I actually enjoyed myself as Disney was a pleasant surprise. The messages of conservation (in the “Circle of Life” Simba stops Timon and Pumba from laying waste to the land to build their vacation resort) by the organization whose originator “secretly bought up thousands of acres in Florida” to build a vacation resort (a boast you can hear on your Hollywood Studios back-lot tour) not only gave me more whiplash then the Test Track ride, but also left me wondering if this wasn’t the very definition of hypocrisy. Yes I know, they’ve devoted much land to conservation, and they did that back in the day, and they do convey the message through their movies. But there’s also plenty of land buried beneath layers of asphalt thanks to Disney and a whole lot of energy and resources devoted to marketing products that are broken or tossed within a few short years (but of course being plastic, will last for many, many more.) Not that hypocrisy is anything new – our political system thrives on it – but these hypocrites are directly addressing our kids. The Kids of America.

How do you explain to your kids, after Pumba and Timon’s parting message: recycle, recycle, recycle , that apparently there is no recycling (or no obvious recycling) in Disney’s Sunshine Season Food Fair located just outside the theater? Thankfully at least we weren’t eating surrounded by a sea of plastic dishes, plates and boxes, but rather paper plates – chalk one up for Disney. I guess they didn’t want to add to the billions of pounds of plastics released into the oceans each year – although I’m not sure what they plan to do with all the plastic utensils.

OK so I’m a skeptic. Hailing from Massachusetts’ Happy Valley, where small organic farm stands dot the road-side, solar panels gleam from yards and rooftops and where you can mix up your “leaf green” Prius with the five others in the parking lot – Disney is, indeed, another world. “You just have to let your brain float,” says one mom, as we sip acid coffee from styrofoam cups in a fish and chips joint in the even more befuddling and depressing Downtown Disney awaiting our children’s “Disney Performance of a Lifetime.” Maybe it’s a small price to pay to watch them smile, sing and hoof their way through a twenty minute routine they’d been rehearsing since September.

After a week of scribbling notes, while admittedly enjoying the parks (Animal Kingdom was my favorite – and yes I do reluctantly consider myself a hypocrite) I vow to look up Disney’s enviro record upon returning home. Something I look forward to after a week of Disney food, which my daughter observed, no matter what we got always seem to come out to be $16 per person. Pricey, but on a per calorie basis it’s quite a deal - the “single serving” chocolate cake is 200 calories “per serving,” and each little single foil serving dish provides 3 servings. Gobbling down my cake, I wouldn’t have noticed that little caveat had my friend Kata not pointed it out. So, upon returning home and doing a little digging, I was surprised to read about Disney’s commitment to “providing healthier options for families that seek them.” Either I wasn’t seeking hard enough or that must refer to the small packets of carrot sticks you can get with your chicken fingers and chocolate cake. Hooray.

Reviewing their Corporate Responsibility Report with a hefty dose of skepticism (rather than simply dismissing Disney based on experience) took some effort, not because there’s much content or detail but, because after going to the parks it’d be easy to write them off. They have grand plans and apparently they’re just getting started according to their 2007 “Enviroport”:

Last year, Disney President and Chief Executive Officer Robert A. Iger appointed an Environmental Council of senior executives from across the Company. The Council is putting into place a comprehensive plan to analyze and implement sustainable long-term strategies for minimizing Disney's impact on the environment within an ambitious corporate growth strategy. The Council includes members from a wide variety of academic and professional backgrounds, including biologists, chemists, engineers, and government affairs specialists. Together, they are taking a measured approach to the complex and important set of tasks at hand, frequently seeking expert external advice as part of the policy-making process.

Like I said, you wouldn’t know it to visit the parks except maybe the part about corporate growth. If they’re conserving water in the parks why don’t they tell that to visitors? If they’re conserving electricity with LEDs, why don’t they let folks know? It’s almost as if they want to make sure they’re not seen as environmental educators, because after all, girls, like Jasmine, Cinderella and Snow White just want to have fun.

Although we did finally find recycling bins dotting the streets of Disney World, we wondered if maybe some Disney robotic squirrels were out back separating Sunshine Season’s trash. Maybe they were. Seeking information on Disney’s recycling programs I couldn’t’ find much, except a comment on another blog who also wondered about recycling at Disney:

Comment by Joe Shelby

2007-07-27 12:12:47

On the backstage tour, while showing us the VACKS (sp?) vacuum based trash system (also discussed in the Modern Marvels documentary - the main outlet site is backstage @ frontierland behind Splash Mountain, where it’s intentionally downwind, and downhill, of the park), our tour guide discussed how the trash is sorted, by hand (well, with tools to avoid touching it) for recycling and biodegradable materials as it’s brought into the landfill a mile away. They don’t bother with separate recycling bins because they’re often ignored, create an eyesore (and a violation of theme) in certain parts of the park, especially Main Street, and get filled with trash anyways by foreign tourists and ignorant bafoons who don’t know or don’t care what the recycling symbol means.

But they do recycle. Otherwise, he said, their landfill a mile away would have been filled up years ago.”

Interesting, but pathetic. Even more pathetic was Disney’s tribute to Earth Day when we happened to be stationed at the Magic Kingdom. A few hours set aside for Jimminy Cricket photo-ops, and a kiosk that could have been more effective had it been designed by a bunch of school kids rather than Disney’s Imagineers. Notably, and obviously there was a plug for their movie Earth and I suppose their offer to plant a tree for each ticket purchased during the first week is part of their green growth strategy. I just wish they were a bit more “out” about their enviro-plans at the parks where over twenty million people – that’s a heck of a lot of impressionable kids - visit a year. If anyone can teach the “kids of America” to respect their environment, reduce, recycle and reuse, Mickey, Jasmine and Prince Charming ought to be up to the task. Maybe then some Disney disciple might go home and say hmmm, how about we ditch the plastic, turn off the lights and reused the water, just like Mickey does?

This isn't your mother's melamine - or is it?

Melamine is yet another cool ‘50s invention that failed to enter my mother’s kitchen. While friends and neighbors stocked up on the nifty new light, durable and colorful plastic dishware, my mother filled her kitchen with white, pure white, simple, elegant, breakable ceramic. Her cupboards are still filled with the stuff – white, white, white. Not so at my in-laws, where the everyday dinner ware is red, blue and yellow melamine, pleasingly smooth, tough and virtually unbreakable.

Just a couple of years ago, Crate and Barrel in an effort to appeal to boomers who recall dining off the colorful plastic, offered melamine in colors that harkened back to the fifties and sixties – bright orange, acid green and red (far better on plates than on the cabinets and counters) and, being deprived of the plastic as a child, I pounced, buying a cute set of eight orange, green and red oval-shaped melamine dishes.

This is all to say that until a year or so ago any thoughts I had about melamine were pleasant and nostalgic. Now when I think melamine, I hear the rattle-snake sound of the old westerns, the sound that happens just before something bad is about to happen. Just before the good guy is about to drink the tainted water, or the heroine is about to drink the poisoned wine.

Chemically, melamine is a pleasingly round molecule made up of hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, and is used in the preparation and production of a range of items including house wares, flame retardants, and fabrics. When combined with formaldehyde and heated up – melamine is transformed into the dinnerware. Which by the way, when heated together with your favorite acidic food, (reheated tomato sauce anyone?) can release upwards of 2.5 milligrams of melamine per 100 cm2 according to the National Toxicology Program, that’s roughly 2.5 mg per one big round plate – but that’s a separate issue.

By itself, melamine’s acute toxicity is comparable with that of table salt (i.e. not very toxic) although recall that toxicity is often a moving target depending on the sensitivity of the endpoint, exposure duration, age of test subject and other considerations. That melamine causes kidney toxicity following longer exposures to high concentrations in test animals (say 2 – 4 parts per thousand in feed,) is well known and until now, not considered highly relevant, because those concentrations were considered unrealistically high. Here I’d emphasize were, but we’ll get back to that later.

What first brought melamine to our attention here in the states, is the toxic transformation that occurs when it combines with cyanuric acid, an FDA approved feed additive, also used to produce dyes, herbicides, antimicrobials and pool water disinfectant. That's when the "watch out" snake start rattling. Cyanuric acid, a derivative of melamine is also a ringed nitrogen containing structure, and like melamine it is considered not acutely toxic. But when these two chemicals get together, like the Witches of Eastwick, the mayhem begins. Following ingestion, the chemicals make their way to the kidney destined for simple excretion. Unfortunately should they meet up, melamine and cyanuric acid join together to forming melamine cyanurate crystals, a toxic combination capable of lodging in kidney tubules and causing acute renal failure and death.

A year ago contaminated pet food from China was implicated in the deaths of dozens of cats and sickened thousands of dogs and cats. The culprit was subsequently traced to melamine tainted gluten. Gluten, derived from wheat or rice, is a common source of protein. Protein is sometimes estimated by measuring gluten nitrogen content. Given the high amount of nitrogen groups in both melamine and cyanuric acid (available as “scrap residue” from the melamine industry) it isn’t hard to imagine unscrupulous processers adding the stuff to their products to dupe purchasers or regulators into thinking they were selling a higher protein product.
After the massive recall of over 150 brands of pet food one would think that the incident alone would deter anyone from trying the same thing again, at least anyone with a conscience. But sadly, like the string of corrupt Illinois politicians, there’s always someone next in line no matter the consequences.

This past fall over 50,000 infants became ill, and at least four died of kidney failure after drinking melamine laced formula in China. The scandal soon spread beyond formula to candy, milk, and other diary containing products produced by dozens of companies. To date, only melamine has been implicated – leaving scientists to wonder about the mechanism of toxicity – recall with the pet foods melamine was mixed with its evil twin, cyanuric acid.

According to the World Health Organization upwards of 6196.61 mg/kg have been measured in dairy products including infant formula. That’s 6 grams in one kilogram of product, or, 6 parts-per-thousand. While that may be the high end, recall the sub-acute toxicity tests mentioned above and those screamingly high concentrations now seem more relevant. Additionally, chemicals are most often tested in weaned animals – not nursing animals – so concentrations that might be OK for adults may not be OK for the very young.

The Sanlu Group one of China’s major diary and infant formula producers whose products were fist shown to contain the chemical quickly blamed the dairy farmers – suggesting that they were the ones who added melamine to fool protein tests.
More recently, according a news article in the journal Science, investigators concluded that the adulterated infant formula was “nothing short of a whole-sale re-engineering of milk,” a skill likely out of reach for dairy farmers, but perhaps not for milk-collecting companies or corporations higher up the milk-chain.

China’s response to the tragedy, according to Science, is to pledge greater transparency and vigilance. In addition, China plans to open Food and Drug Administration offices here in the U.S. and the US FDA recently opened three offices in China. But old habits die hard and according to Chen Junshi a risk assessment specialist at China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and quoted in Science, it’s likely that food adulterers will only become cleverer. Those willing to make money at the expense of their fellow citizens, will seek alternative methods challenging both Chinese agencies and the newly opened US Food and Drug Administration offices in China.

Now, about those colorful plates...

Wrapped in Plastic

First Printed in the Montague Reporter Nov 2008

I pull a gallon sized Ziploc bag from its sunny yellow box, one of several boxes my mother, who shops at Costco, sent home with me last weekend, and swallow the guilt as I add yet another virginal plastic bag to the relatively permanent archive of plastic things in the world.

Just to be clear, I don’t buy plastic bags. Well, not unless it’s for a good cause like packing away the twenty pounds of wild low-spray blueberries we raked last summer. I tell myself I’ll reuse them, and I do, from storing bagels, to blueberry muffins, to banana bread before tossing them in for a spin in the wash whenever a greasy film builds up. But then the inevitable happens. The plastic zipper tab breaks off, or the blue and yellow tracks warped by warm water and dryer heat no longer join. For a while the bag limps through still storing food, closed up with a rubber band, or rolled up tight and tucked away. But that only puts off its fate for so long – eventually the plastic shows its age, as small cracks and holes begin to let in air or let out drips of last night’s soup.

That’s when it’s pitched into the trash. I’d add them to the Stop&Shop recycling (or down cycling) pile – which allows shopping bags, dry cleaning bags and newspaper bags - but wary of “contaminating” plastic batches with Ziplocs I refrain, and make a note to ask Stop&Shop about this.

As frugal as I am about Ziplocs and Saran wrap, my mother is not. But it wasn’t always that way. I can still recall my envy over the little plastic sandwich baggies Amy Ellis, my best friend in grade school, pulled from her lunch box each day. Her mother, a decade younger than my 42 year old mom, was far more “with-it,” or so I thought. If there was a new product, Amy had it. While her sandwiches were moist and soft, good material for a lunch-time trade, mine, in its wax-paper sandwich bag, couldn’t compare. Now the shoes are on my slightly older feet and I refuse to pack my kids’ lunch in plastic baggies. Just check out the garbage pail in any school room around the country and you’ll find plenty. Their total useful life-time? About three hours.

According to the history of plastic bags, those little baggies, thin sheets of blown polyethylene film sealed along three sides first came into being around 1957, roughly twenty-four years after the discovery of the stuff, and ten years before the ubiquitous and larger, produce bag.

Plastic produce bags, primarily LDPE or low density polyethylene, now fill the cotton shopping bags of the most plastic-wary consumer whether they’re shopping the farmer’s market, the local co-op, Whole Foods or Big Y. So I was heartened last week when I loaded my bagels into a recycled plastic produce bag at Whole Foods. If only the darn thing didn’t break open and spill six bagels onto the floor! I’m sure in time they’ll get it right.

Like sandwich baggies, by some estimates the useful lifetime of produce bags is measured in minutes, or however long it takes to stuff some string beans into the bag, hit the check-out counter and dump them into the colander for dinner. Though the most fastidious of us might reuse them or cart them back to Stop&Shop for recycling, plenty still end up in the trash.

Like all plastics, plastic baggies flow from the crude oil tap which is refined and distilled before cradling our organic broccoli. Crude oil is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons – carbon and hydrogen containing molecules. Some are long, some are short. They are straight, or branched – but all have a carbon “back-bone,” or a chain of carbons C-C-C-C. For years I had a small vial of crude oil in my office, rescued from the Valdez Oil spill, the label thanked me for helping to remove some ridiculously small percentage of the original spill (it now sits somewhere on my son’s science teacher’s desk – beseeching impressionable minds to think more deeply about the consequences of using oil.) This particular crude is the darkest of browns, a thick balled up tar-like substance floating atop the Prince William Sound water captured along with it. It is hard to imagine the link between the transparent filmy Ziplocs in my pantry and a vat of crude oil.

During distillation successively lighter fractions are boiled off and collected, the shorter carbon chain the lighter the fraction. Gasoline for example is “light,” and one of the first fractions collected, while the heating oil that warms our house is thicker, heavier and consists of longer carbon chains. Carbon chains can also be “cracked” into shorter chains, like ethylene, a simple two-carbon molecule. Ethylene is a highly versatile molecule used in hospitals and medical offices for sterilization, fruit ripening (it is also a naturally produced fruit hormone which initiates fruit ripening – try storing some apples next to an overripe banana and see what happens), antifreeze, a one-time gasoline additive, and plastics.

It is one of the highest volume organic (carbon containing) chemicals in production. According to a recent report by SRI consulting in 2006 “…global ethylene production amounted to about 110 million metric tons, with an estimated value of $122 billion.” 110 million metric tons, and guess what? Over half of that goes right into the production of polyethylene plastics including bags and plastic wrap.

“Everyone’s asking about plastic wrap in the microwave,” says my mother one afternoon. Apparently some of her friends had read or heard about the email promising death and destruction by dioxins and other “toxins dripping into your food.” For years she’s been using plastic wrap when reheating. Her reheated food is moist and her oven clean. I don’t cover, and my oven is encrusted with splatter and my food dry. Turns out the email was a hoax, but – according to both the American Chemistry’s Plastic’s Info site (Better Living with Plastics), and the FDA (for what it’s worth these days), consumers should be wary of combining their wrap with their food when microwaving. According to the Plastic’s Info, site, “..most manufacturers recommend leaving at least an inch between the food and the wrap covering the dish. This is to prevent the plastic wrap from melting, which could result from contact with extremely hot foods.” Not to mention allowing chemical additives present in some of the clear cling wraps to leach other chemicals into your food.

Plastic wraps are made from LDPE or polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Concern about toxics leaching from PVC wrap started the rumors flying. Although plastics are incredibly versatile materials, sometimes they are tweaked with chemical additives to get just the right clinginess, or color or flexibility. That meant diethylhexyl adipate (DEHA) in the case of chlorine containing cling wraps. Problem was under the right circumstances, like heating in a microwave, particularly heating things with high fat content, like cheese or meat, DEHA, a reproductive and developmental toxicant (although so far as we know just at relatively high doses) migrated from the plastic wrap resting on top of last night’s Buffalo Chicken Wings into the wings.
While the FDA acknowledges that substances like DEHA can and do transfer from plastic to foods during reheating, the controversy is over how much leaches and how toxic. While FDA maintains whatever leaches out is safe, some countries have banned the additive, while S.C. Johnson, producer of the granddaddy of all cling-wrap, Saran, switched from PVC to LDPE, winning an EPA “Designing Greener Chemistry Award” in the process.

Now, if we just can figure out how to consistently recycle all that wrap and all those LDPE baggies – we’ll all be a little bit greener.

More questions about BPA regulation

Though I am not in the habit of citing newspaper articles – after receiving the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s weekly Integrity in Science Watch, I linked to over the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which over the past year or so has done quite a bit of digging around on the issue of BPA.

Here’s the latest from Milwaukee: last week, the Sentinel accused the FDA of relying a bit too heavily on chemical and plastics industry citing 1) an FDA subcommittee chair whose institution accepted millions of dollars from a donor who had repeatedly expressed his views that the chemical was “perfectly safe;” and 2) using the consulting firm ICF, currently under investigation by the Committee on Energy and Commerce, which according to a letter sent to FDA commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach “…has done prior work for BPA manufacturers, and whose board members have ties to BPA manufacturers.”

Writes the Sentinel, “…Columbia University professor David Rosner, who researches the relationship of industry and government regulators of toxic substances, has compared the controversy over bisphenol A to tobacco and asbestos.” A few years back, Rosner, together with colleague Gerald Markowitz, authored Deceit and Denial: the deadly politics of industrial pollution, one of the better books I’ve read about the role of the chemical industry on regulation.

Coming from Rosner, as far as health scandals go, that’s a pretty serious comparison.

Just another brick in the wall: more on bisphenol A

My neighbor, the “real” doctor, called the other day, asking for “The Neighborhood Toxicologist.”

“So, what are you doing about your bicycle bottles,” she asked.

She’d just read the latest study and related commentary on the potential dangers of bisphenol A in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It’s rare that I get to advise Katta, most often it’s me calling her – how does Sophie’s staph infection look? What do you think of this little black spot on my arm? I just called an ambulance for Ben, do you think you could come take a look at him while we wait?

I leaned into my expertise. “Well,” I said, “you know those aren’t polycarbonate. It’s just the polycarb that has bisphenol A. Those bicycle bottles are polyethylene,” I said with some authority – impressing myself with my own recall. “As far as I know no-one’s found anything bad about those,” I pause, “not yet anyway.” Not unless you consider the filmy black crude (I’m guessing something biological rather than chemical) that inevitably coats the insides of those bicycle bottles – even if all you’ve ever had in them is water.

What’s confusing about the polycarbonate issue is that it provides s a perfect (or maybe imperfect) opportunity for the public to crab about the wishy-washyness of scientists. Most folks just want an answer – yea or nay, good or bad. But with bisphenol A you get two conflicting answers from two federal organizations, the FDA and the National Toxicology Program.

While the National Toxicology Program (under the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences) concludes, as far as anyone can conclude, that bisphenol A “is of “some concern” for effects on development of the prostate gland and brain and for behavioral effects in fetuses, infants and children” (for details check out their final report, NTP-CERHR Monograph on the Potential Human Reproductive and Developmental Effects of Bisphenol A ,) the FDA gives the A-okay all-clear for the chemical. According to their recently issued draft report, “…FDA concludes that an adequate margin of safety exists for BPA at current levels of exposure from food contact uses for infants and adults .”

So what gives? The FDA’s overall findings suggest that the available studies are “inadequate” (problems with dosing, species, timing – you name it.) It’s true that all of these can impact the outcome and that even the very best study on a particular contaminant can be rendered relatively irrelevant because the concentrations say, were screamingly high (for example beyond those anyone would ever be exposed to unless they ate their pretty blue bottles); or that the method of exposure is irrelevant (say, injecting a chemical – essentially mainlining it – rather than feeding it to experimental animals); or the so-called mechanism of action – how a chemical causes toxicity – is unique to a particular test species (though this one goes both ways – the sedative thalidomide offers a tragic example of why chemicals need to be tested in several different species.)

Unfortunatley, sometimes we just have to do the best with what we’ve got when it comes to data. Sometimes knowing what’s lacking informs experimental design, so studies that are “most appropriate” can be done. While I won’t review the review that reviewed the review (FDA’s most recent draft) I would like to point out that there are no conflicts about BPA’s femininity. The chemical is indeed estrogenic – scientists knew that long before it ever became a part of those polycarbonate bottles. Estrogen, as we all know is a pretty powerful hormone.
And estrogenic chemicals can bind with, and activate estrogen receptors (referred to below as ERα and ERβ) which means that, like estrogen, they can also elicit all or some of the biological outcomes triggered by estrogen.

But contaminants like BPA must compete with both estrogen in the body and other ingested estrogens, here’s FDA again, “In fact, BPA has an approximately 1000 - 10,000 fold lower affinity for ERα and ERβ as compared to E2, whereas genistein, a phytoestrogen, has a much higher affinity than BPA for ERα and ERβ. Accordingly, if equal concentrations were available, the assumed order of binding to the ERs would be E2, genistein, and then BPA.”

Here’s where even I’m a little confuzuled as my daughter used to say. Though I hesitate to reveal my ignorance – and I do pledge to take this on and fully understand the implications one day – are they saying that it doesn’t matter that BPA binds a powerful receptor because there are several other more “natural” chemicals that will beat it out? When we know that too much estrogen, or estrogen exposure at the “wrong time” could be bad (what I mean by “wrong time” is that there are times during say, development – particularly development in the male when natural concentrations of estrogen may be very low)? Why not take the cautious approach that adding another estrogen to the mix could also be bad – particularly one that is apparently easy to avoid – stop using BPA containing bottles (although that still leaves can linings.)

What follows is an excerpt from a review by Alex Vidaeff and Lowell Server explaining why just knowing the relative potency of estrogens isn’t necessarily enough:
“It has been said that xenoestrogens and phytoestrogens, being weak estrogens with a low level of environmental contamination, are not sufficient to produce adverse effects. The opinions were mainly based on the observations derived from DES-exposed cohorts where only “sufficient” doses of DES generated adverse effects [71] . Such considerations, based on an estrogen potency threshold, or dose-response effects, may underestimate environmental estrogens activity. Hazard identification and assessment in this area cannot rely solely on linear measurements of estrogen activity. Undoubtedly, the xenoestrogens are weaker estrogens than estradiol or even estriol, but studies focusing on binding activity may overlook the complexity of ER action as described above, and the fact that factors other than the binding affinity of the ligand for the receptor may affect gene expression…... When vom Saal et al. [70] observed an increase in prostate size after prenatal exposure to estrogens in mice, the dose-response curve was an U-shaped curve, whereby lower doses also resulted in larger effects. This supports the possibility that even low doses of estrogen in fetal life may affect the expression of genes involved in the morphogenesis of the prostate gland and possibly other genital tissues.”

And then there’s that JAMA article. What alarmed Dr. Katta wasn’t the squabbling over laboratory studies or the reproductive and developmental impacts in rats – but the more recent finding that very real concentrations of bisphenol A in human urine samples (yes we drink the stuff in and pee it out in small but measurable amounts) was positively associated with heart-disease and type 2 diabetes in adult humans in addition to the prostate and brain effects which are of concern to the National Toxicology Program.

But remember, an association is just that – the two things tend to travel together. In this case those with more BPA in their urine tended to have a higher incidence of disease but that doesn’t mean disease was caused by BPA – maybe those with more disease just eat more canned food compared with fresh potentially healthier food (can lining is another source of BPA.) It will take further laboratory studies to confirm any cause and effect linkages. But what’s notable about the study was that there are already rat data linking the chemical to insulin resistance – which in turn is key in the development of type 2 diabetes.

If you’ve read to this point – you must, by now get the idea of how complicated it can be to figure these things out. Oh only if we could just sit a bunch of infants down and have them chug warm milk from polycarb bottles – and then wait and see what happens.

Oops we’ve already done that.

Great Future in Plastics

First published in the Montague Reporter, May 2008

It was a simple enough design. Pink and white tampon applicators separated by blue milk bottle caps and strung into a necklace. Those treasures washed by the sea onto our beach, and collected by my father over the course of a few hours one Sunday morning, provided the perfect accessory to the orange fishnet cape adorned with fading coke bottles, pieces of old lobster trap and other assorted beach waste items. Twenty years later, the image of my father, in his faded blue oxford shirt, dungarees and size 12 Jack Purcells sterilizing a pot of tampon applicators in my mother’s kitchen and in my mother’s soup pot, reminds me of a rare moment of father-daughter complicity.

That year as I attended the annual Society of Toxicology and Chemistry Halloween Dance dressed as “Beach waste,” I was naïve about the dangers of plastics. At the time those tampon applicators and milk bottle caps simply signaled failures of waste handling and sewage treatment – an issue George Bush the first used disingenuously to his advantage while campaigning against Massachusetts’ Michael Dukakis.

What I didn’t know back then was that the plastic army of tampon applicators, bottle tops, fishing nets, coffee cups and Barbie dolls (an occasional head, arm or leg had been know to wash ashore) wasn’t just gathering on the shores of my beloved Nantasket beach. These insidious soldiers of the chemical revolution were infiltrating oceans world-wide – and worse, over the years bits of plastic have literally become a part of life. In their relatively short time on earth (in 2007, synthetic plastics celebrated centennial birthday) plastic now contaminants marine mammals, seabirds and most of us – kids and pets included.

I’m sure John Wesley Hyatt hadn’t intended to promote such a legacy when in an effort replace the ivory used for billiard balls he invented one of the first known plastic back in 1863. Although, it’s not clear that his intention was to save the thousands of elephants slaughtered for their tusks, but rather to collect a $10,000 award offered for suitable ivory replacements. Nor should he have been concerned, since his process used natural substances including cellulose, a compound more prone to biological degradation than its synthetic followers, (and 140 years later, a compound that is back in style.)

Probably Leo Baekeland, hadn’t envisioned the reach of his invention either, when, in 1909 he developed Bakelite the world’s first synthetic plastic and wonder material. As a thermoset plastic, a magical resin that could assume any shape as a liquid resin, and then once hardened remain resistant to heat and solvents – Bakelite quickly found its way into the American dream – from telephones to electrical devices, automobiles and jewelry.

But it’s not Bakelite that scientists are finding in North Pacific albatrosses, or in us. It’s the next generation of polymer plastics which have invaded our lives for better or worse. In 2007, the American Chemistry Council reported upwards of 13 billions pounds of plastic resin produced by U.S. industries a year. This is 13 billion pounds of substances resistant to degradation and substances which we are now just beginning to understand can impact the development and function of reproductive systems in subtle yet potentially very important ways.

By now, unless you live radio-free and newsprint free you’ve likely heard about bisphenol-A which leaches from those colorful polycarbonate Nalgene bottles we all bought to avoid buying bottled water, and hard plastic baby bottles and some food-can linings. If not, you must have heard about phthalates – the plastic additive used to soften poly-vinyl chloride (or PVC) and which leaches from items like IV bags, those cute yellow rubber duckies my kids used to mouth during bath-time, teethers and soft plastic books. (Phthalates are also ubiquitous in personal care products including shampoos and lotions –another route of exposure for infants.)

Bisphenol A, and some forms of phthalates act like the potent sex hormone estrogen. For decades scientists have known that exposure to unnatural levels of sex hormones (either too much or too little), particularly during key periods of sexual development can result in tragic outcomes for both sexes. Estrogen is a naturally occurring hormone, which acts by binding with an estrogen receptor. Any other chemical that binds with this receptor and turns it on is an estrogen mimic. Some chemicals may bind with the estrogen receptor but instead of acting like estrogen, block the receptor from any further action – these substances are referred to as antiestrogens. The same is true of other hormones like the male sex hormone testosterone – there are mimics and inhibitors. Collectively these substances are called endocrine disruptors.

The impacts of synthetic estrogen exposure are best illustrated by diethylstilbesterol or DES. For those who don’t recall, DES was a synthetic estrogen prescribed to women from the 1950s through the 1970s to stem complications during pregnancy. Although eventually found ineffective, it continued to be prescribed until the consequence of extraneous estrogen exposure reared its ugly head in the form of clear cell adenocarcinoma in daughters exposed in utero. Later, structural differences in the reproductive tract and infertility were identified in both DES sons and daughters.

That bisphenol A acts as an estrogen is no surprise. Back in the 1930’s the chemical was almost developed as a synthetic estrogen, until DES stole the show. So seventy years later how does this stuff – a known estrogen - end up in plastic drinking bottles and plastic can liners?

Plastics are polymers – that is, they’re made up of many repeating units, strung together like a paper chain. The broad range of plastics we’re familiar with today results from the diversity of repeating units and chain formations discovered and developed at a feverish pace over the past century: vinyl, polyurethane, polystyrene, Teflon, Nylon, neoprene, polyethylene, polypropylene, and in 1953, researchers resurrected bisphenol A in the form of polycarbonate. That’s right. A key link in the polycarbonate chain is bisphenol A. Only back then, we can only hope, no one figured their grandchildren would be sucking down mom’s milk, lovingly pumped so that she could continue to work, from polycarbonate plastic bottles, or that food cans would be lined with the stuff. Or maybe no one figured that individual units of plastic could actually break loose.

But the fact is they do. And the more scientists look, the more they seem to find – whether it’s bisphenol A leaching from polycarbonate bottles, or phthalates leaching from IV bags. And as with many toxicants like mercury and lead, it’s our precious next generation that bears the brunt of our collective ignorance.

“So what would you do?” asked my neighbor, mother of two young boys. “Do you still drink out of plastic?”

Her mother had just given her the “You’re intelligent, how can you feed your children that stuff,” lecture – but she hadn’t yet tossed the sippy cups, rubber duckies and baby bottles.

I nodded sheepishly. I do love those colorful polycarbonate drinking glasses I purchased at Stop&Shop several years ago. And yes, last hiking trip we all sipped from the bright red Chaco Canyon polycarbonate liter bottle.

“I figure the water’s not sitting there all day,” I said, explaining that the greatest leaching of bisphenol A was reported after liquids were heated, or in very “well-used” or distressed polycarbonate. We didn’t even get into the phthalate issue, which extends beyond the use and leaching of phthalates from plastics, to personal care products

“But,” I conceded, “I did just buy some new water bottles, made from polyethylene, for the kids.” Unlike polycarbonate, polyethylene doesn’t leach any thing toxic, at least not that we know.

As I said this, I am sure that the little enviro-region of my brain, the one that lights up every time I do something hypocritical, began flashing away. Did I say I replaced one plastic with another? And did I say that while wearing my favorite purple polyester fleece and polyvinylchloride-bottomed Dansko clogs? Did I say that after dumping a box of broken plastic toys – nonrecyclables – into our 40 gallon plastic barrel?

Even more concerning than the plastic and related compounds in our food and beverage containers – substances which can eventually be manufactured out of these products, or avoided by the careful consumer, are the reports that millions of tons of plastic, from fishing nets to bits of what might once have been tampon applicators and polyester clothing, now circulating in the regions of the Central North Pacific Ocean (gyres). By some estimates, these trash or plastic gyres cover an area equivalent to the size of Texas. And although plastics may not degrade they can break into bits – some as small as 20 microns, creating a plastic soup served up to unsuspecting wildlife.

Writes Charles Moore founder of Algalita, a marine research foundation focused on the protection of marine environments, “I now believe plastic debris to be the most common surface feature of the world's oceans. Because 40 percent of the oceans are classified as subtropical gyres, a fourth of the planet's surface area has become an accumulator of floating plastic debris.”

Further, scientists suspect that some of that plastic may be circulating around for hundreds of years to come. For better or worse – plastics are part of our lives. But they don’t have to be part of us and they don’t have to be part of all creatures on earth. Improved production practices, and products that are easily recycled back into the same products, rather than dead ends like lawn furniture and plastic lumber, and improved public awareness might not rid the North Pacific of its trash right now – but maybe generations from now.

In the ‘60’s movie The Graduate, when Mr. McGuire, a family friend of young Benjamin Braddock advised “Plastics…..There’s a great future in plastics,” he had no idea.

Polycarbonate redux

I am listening to NPR’s All Things Considered – it’s a story about bisphenol A, a common chemical that many of us have heard about by now. You know the estrogenic chemical that’s in those colorful polycarbonate clear plastic bottles that we all bought when we didn’t want to use bottled water, as well as in the linings of food tins and clear plastic baby bottles – that yes, I’m sure I used with my kids. And I’m thinking maybe we all ought to drink a little bisphenol A if it’s true that a little estrogen is good for improving memory.

Here’s why.

There is no question that exposure to estrogenic contaminants is problematic – particularly when exposure occurs during fetal development and in young children. There are reams of data that demonstrate adverse impacts on the development of reproductive organs, timing of puberty, and other effects on both male and female offspring of test animals exposed in utero and during lactation. Then there is the unfortunate example of diethylstilbesterol or DES, the synthetic estrogen prescribed to women back in the twentieth century to stem complications during pregnancy. It was found to be ineffective in the 1950’s but prescribed until the ‘70s (go figure) when the consequences of exposure to extraneous estrogenic chemicals during development first reared its ugly head in the form of clear cell adenocarcinoma in the daughters exposed in utero.

But did you know that at one time, back in the 1930’s scientists seeking synthetic estrogens like DES found that bisphenol A also behaved as a weak estrogen? That’s right. Back in the 30s this was known. Then some genius discovered that it could be linked together to make plastic. And voila – perimenopausal women like me just have to drink from our polycarbonate bottles to replenish our estrogen. Apparently back then no one figured anyone would be drinking from the plastic, or storing food in it, or sealing children’s teeth – and then when they did discover these uses of the plastic they must have forgotten that it was a known estrogen.

Seriously, we could all use a memory boost. Here’s a Science News article from back in 1999 by Janet Raloff which, besides being so last century, is so similar to recent reports about leaching of bisphenol A from polycarbonate that I did a double take when I came across it on the web (actually I probably read it back then, being a fan of Ms. Raloff, but have since forgotten.) It’s uncanny. Right down to reports that bisphenol A is more likely to leach from well-used polycarbonate and when liquids are heated in polycarbonate.

If that was then, why has it taken us ten years to toss our bottles? Maybe it’s because as Raloff pointed out, the jury was out. Well, almost ten years later it has returned in the form of a report by the National Toxicology Program’s Expert Panel evaluation of bisphenol A, here’s what they conclude (their emphasis):

“The NTP concurs with the conclusion of the CERHR Expert Panel on Bisphenol A that there is some concern for neural and behavioral effects in fetuses, infants and children, at current human exposures. The NTP also has some concern for bisphenol A exposure in these populations based on effects in the prostate gland, mammary gland and an earlier age for puberty in females.”

“The NTP has negligible concern that exposure of pregnant women to bisphenol A will result in fetal or neonatal mortality, birth defects, or reduced birth weight and growth in their offspring.”

Although I’ve confiscated my kids bottles I might keep them around for a few years in case I’m needing a little extra estrogen – if I can remember where I’ve stashed them!

Bisphenol A in the news again

For those interested in reading more about the estrogenic plasticizer bisphenol A (BPA), the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel just published its own review of BPA literature in response to the recently released National Toxicology Program (NTP) report, which according to the Sentinel, found "bisphenol A to be of some concern for fetuses and small children. It found that adults have almost nothing to worry about."

The article discusses conflicting conclusions by two different panels one convened by the NTP the other by National Institutes of Environmental Health and Safety) and NTP's recently released BPA report.

The Sentinel analyzed 258 studies, although a search of the links provided along with the article didn't lead to a list of those articles, nor the depth of their analysis, and who actually did the analysis, they do provide a graphic summarizing general conclusions of each study (found an effect, vs. did not find effect or were not looking); the dose range (low verses high); and the funding agency for each study (industry, nonindustry.)

If you want to read more about the scientific reports (those produced by government panels rather than the Sentinel), check out what J.Lowe has to say over at Impact Analysis in his blog about the "Tangled story of bisphenol A."

Cross posted from the earthportal forum