Chemicals used in packaging may play role in 100k US deaths a year – study
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
And just to get out ahead of it-- can we also not blame plastic consumers, who after all are just trying to eat, and probably don't want to poison themselves.
[edit] We're not trying to set the food in epoxy for all eternity - like this hot dog for instance [1]
Why have packaging that last x10 as long as the food inside ?
If you're going to blame someone/something (in addition to the very consumers who demand this):
> Stores took advantage of it because it meant they could carry more inventory without worrying about rotting.
I watched a documentary recently that compared frozen food to internationally shipped food and found significant nutritional loss in the shipped "fresh" food. As such, I think plastic preserved apparently fresh food could be an explanation for part of the obesity rise. One potentially consumes more calories to get the other nutritional factors that have broken down compared to eating food that can only be delivered actually fresh.
(Given that improved shipping life also turns the market for a vegetable global, I also think more people are priced out of buying produce that once had to be sold locally than are helped by less produce waste in the richest market the produce can now reach.)
If it is just moisture, wax paper works reasonably well.
It's now typically coated in PTFE or some other non-stick surface which normally isn't great for health.
[1] Quite typical rhetorics for such kind of shilling.
The death rate from food-borne illness is pretty low now (with advances in processing, transportation, packaging, phase-change refrigeration, and surveillance of outbreaks).
We might be able to have our cake and eat it to with better/different packaging, of course.
It seems very hard to weigh the cost/benefits of something like this especially when the evidence for the possible health costs are so difficult to collect. Think of all of the possible confounding factors that could result in these health outcomes, the fact that not all plastics are the same (phthalates are not the only compound of concern), and the fact that most probable adverse health outcomes are not acute (we have pretty strong evidence plastic packaging isn't acutely toxic), but would take a long time to develop which further increases the difficulty of forming any type of causal relationship between plastics exposure and health outcomes.
You're talking about life years. (The standard measure is actually QALYs, quality-adjusted life years.)
Billions lived at all and tens of millions died an early death? That’s a pretty great trade if your only choice is to take or pass on that as a sole, binary option.
In the limit there is no difference.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...
We used to use hydroelectric power to make hydrogen (using electrolysis) for Haber-Bosch, but gas reforming of methane ended up being much cheaper in the 1950s once that process became invented and widespread.
In practice it seems plastic flexible tubing uses a lot of plasticizers (BPA included) to make them flexible.
My point being that, even if you avoid the packaging and the relabeled cosmetic 'perfumes', it still seems that the flexible tubing you would find in most coffee vending machines and water filtration systems (and many other consumer applications that do not require medical regulation) is probably choke-full of plasticizers.
1: https://hero.epa.gov/hero/index.cfm/reference/details/refere... with the full paper here https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2346/87425/smith_art...
Are there any pipes that don't leach anything into the water?
Pure Soda Lime Glass
Synthetic Quartz
Diamond
Although these materials are poor choices for many reasons, they would be very unlikely to leach anything into the water more harmful than carbon or silicon atoms.
Municipal water is definitely tuned to make a passivation layer on the pipe work.
From what I have read it seems CPVC is used for residential hot water lines when copper is not being used (and copper is expensive).
I was assuming cPVC and PVC were the same but that is not the case. cPVC is more specialty when compared to PVC since it can handle a higher temperature and pressure, and costs a bit more [1].
1: https://pvcpipesupplies.com/cpvc-vs-pvc
—-
Some additional but not directly related info found along the way:
- https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/Phthalates_FactSheet.html
- https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-09/documents/ph...
It got to the point we were redesigning components to take into account vastly decreased maintenance intervals.
Whilst I don't want to defend the plastics industry, I have to find my delivery today funny: a small plastic part carrying a prop 65 warning. The part is made of polyacetal, and so contains no flourine, amine or cyano groups, no aromatics, not even a double bond.
How?!
which isn't to say that it isn't a problem either, but in relative terms here, what I'm saying is that water that sits in a plastic Nalgene bottle for a couple days probably is more concerning to me than water that passes through a few feet of plastic tubing inside a vending machine and never sits still for more than 10 or 15 minutes.
Although of course I suppose given the plastic tubes are more flexible than a hard plastic nalgene bottle, they may also have higher levels of plasticizers...
It's kind of sad that "this could kill you" is followed by "and think of the hospital bills"
It's one of the most decried industry (the insurance one) but one of the nicest thing about it is that it almost always have its interests aligned with those of its customers (in group) and thus can act as one of the most powerful stabilizing force in society.
Thus, I conclude demand is is mostly (piecewise) inelastic enough that the increased profitability you speak of is thrown into serious doubt.
source: 30 years in fragrance free household
At least for humans, it’d be great if we could somehow remove all the chemicals or find magic ones that are totally non-toxic, cheap, and easy to produce. Seems unlikely. We’re also not going to a world filled with wood and metal for all the reasons listed in the first paragraph. Seems like an untenable path unless someone invents something that is way better on the points that matter, or it’s regulated out of existence at great pain.
I’m pessimistic about the future of plastic.
In the past, if the media said "The President may have have committed perjury", they'd actually lay out the evidence - President testified X, but documents suggest X is untrue.
Today it seems like "may have" is just a cop out for generating smoke where there is no fire. And when someone comes back and says "you actually have no evidence that's true" they say "well, that why we said 'may have'".
Some products don't even need plastic packaging but are wrapped in plastic to avoid ink migration from their outer marketing shell.
I'd like to see a globalised effort to standardise packaging, either at national or continental level, imagine a standard set of containers manufactured by state sponsored companies, all of it being 100% recycled or reused, sellers get to chose between a few colors/fonts and a few types of packaging (frozen, liquid, solid, fresh food, &c.).
From a nature paper: “Individuals are primarily exposed to HMW phthalates via ingestion of food contaminated through processing or packaging [19], as well as via inhalation in buildings containing PVC flooring or other materials [20,21,22].” — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-021-00305-9
From abstract of paper reference by The Guardian: “Multivariable models identified increased mortality in relation to high-molecular weight (HMW) phthalate metabolites”.
Just in case your only concern about deaths is their economic impact...
[1] https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Ne...
[2] https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20...
Besides, I adapted the habit of always carrying two foldable plastic boxes in my car and two folded paper bags in my messenger pouch which I use since +5 years now anyways.
The reason they are doing it is fairly obvious and laid out in the article you linked: People don't give a fuck. Its enough to pretend to care about the environment so people can blissfully ignore the real changes and get a fuzzy feeling of having done something. Politically, it's much easier to enforce such a ban on plastic household items than trying to get the industry to change, who will object much more vehemently and with much, much more leverage than the average consumer.
Now that I think of it, some months ago I had a discussion about this ban with a women who legitimately thought plastic waste was somehow linked to global warming, as in more plastic waste => more global warming. Anecdotal of course, but it makes me wonder if this misconception (or close ones) are spread in the wider public perception or if this was just an outlier.