Apart from food packaging, one great way to easily ingest plastic is to use synthetic clothing. Just a basic rubbing of a synthetic sleeve on your nose causes thousands of polyester particles to release in thin air, readily breathable.
Not just clothing, but also bedding is a huge issue. With pillows, mattresses and towels mostly made of synthetic fibers.
My usual instinct is: try rubbing the synthetic material; if it releases thousands of particles in thin air, stay away from it
Clothing industry has somehow gotten by unscathed during all the environmental awareness that has spread in the past 20 years. I am pretty sure clothes are the #1 cause of the microplastics that have inundated the ocean and our water supply.
We have been heavily pushed to drive less, recycle more, and use less water, but I have not seen messaging about not buying new clothes you don't need.
> Clothing industry has somehow gotten by unscathed during all the environmental awareness that has spread in the past 20 years. I am pretty sure clothes are the #1 cause of the microplastics that have inundated the ocean and our water supply.
Surprise surprise, it has actually been studied. One recent review article of the field:
From figure 2b) we can see that while microplastics from synthetic fibres are certainly an issue, they are far from #1. Dwarfed by tires, paint, and macroplastics (large plastic pieces thrown away slowly grinding down into microplastics e.g. by wave action).
The problem isn't really "buying new clothes," since most of the microplastics are released in the laundry. Sewage treatment plants aren't designed to remove them, so they get released with the discharge water. It can also clog up septic leachfields.
They do make purpose-built products to filter microplastic lint from laundry[1][2], but a more hacker approach is to just search for "pool filter."
I wish they made comparable products for the dryer.
There's an entire big and celebrated business sector that spends every working hour taking intact plastic products and grinds then into fine shreds, a process likely to contribute more than a fair share to microplastic dissemination. Maybe worth investigating, a good candidate for more microplastic release than the clothing industry.
> We have been heavily pushed to drive less, recycle more, and use less water, but I have not seen messaging about not buying new clothes you don't need.
It's there if you follow the right people on social media.
Campaigns that center around personal responsibility, however, aren't ever going to work, and there's obvious reasons why people are willing to pay to push this narrative but not the buying fewer clothes one (at least here in the US).
Oh no, I love my lululemon clothes. New fear unlocked. It makes sense though, these clothes still generate lint and it can only be thousands of synthetic particles and dirt.
Hum, almost all of my t-shirts are 100% cotton, or at least that's what the label says. I use mostly the same clothes from 15 years ago so maybe synthetic is more common nowadays? I think the only t-shirts I own that are not 100% cotton are those I've got for free on things like marathons and hackathons. Does it contain phthalate? I have no idea, there is no label saying what they are made of. Probably polyester. Does it have phthalates in any meaningful concentration? This review says basically that "it varies a lot" and "needs further study". https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138266892...
Interestingly Table 4 in that link shows "Plain weave cotton" and "polyster" having similar levels of phthalates.
I don't think phtalates are needed as plasticizers in polyster, so I guess they are coming from the dyes or something else used to treat the fabrics, meaning that the choice of cotton or polyster may not matter for phthalates specifically?
I wear mostly the same clothes too from 15 years ago I'd agree synthetic is more common nowadays? Shirts, underwear, hoodies, jackets, relzed fit stretchy pants/trousers all seem to be something just not cotton anyway.
All else being equal you're generally safer being exposed to stable things that don't break down than unstable things that happily react with all sorts of things (and tend to meddle with the chemical processes required for life).
If you get to choose between breathing tires and milk jugs pick the milk jugs every time.
Nobody is going around purposely breathing in plastic dust, there's been dust everywhere forever, and breathing in dust is a natural and unavoidable part of life.
What, exactly, do you think is normalized here? That people wear clothing? That people didn't throw out every polyester fiber the moment somebody said plastic can break down into small pieces? That people aren't freaking out over a danger that we know roughly nothing about so far?
People really need to stop finding excuses to freak out over things.
I think about this every time I clean out the dryer lint filter and a plume of lint dust comes off of it. I try to avoid breathing it in but it’s likely some is making it into my airways.
Try shaking out a piece of clothing in full sunlight. It helps you see the millions of future dust particles that will come off your clothing.
Over the years I found that of all the dust in my home the vast majority comes from my clothing. I deduced that because the collected dust looks the same as what I find in the dryer, and it feels like cotton too (my by far most warn kind of fiber).
That means rooms are full of tiny particles from your clothes, if I assume that my home is not an anomaly (and why should it be).
Direct sunlight really helps to see how much dust there is all around us, and how with every little movement we create more. That does not even show the particles too small to be seen. The difference is gigantic - without that sunlight you don't see any dust and think the air is clean.
I'm not too concerned, since humanity must have dealt with this for a long time. Particles from fire especially, and there are lots coming from even the tiniest flame. My main worry would be chemicals we add to clothes, but given that by now we ingest plastic pretty much all the time, with every meal, with every breath, we just have to wait and see. I don't see a way to end this long-running experiment.
The lint is also the residue from your clothes being worn away. If you can, consider not using the dryer at all, especially for synthetic clothing which air dry quickly compared to cotton.
Get a high-end vacuum with a hepa filter (such as the 0.3 micro rated S-24035 by DeWalt) and turn it on and hold it near the lint trap panel as you open the panel up.
> Not just clothing, but also bedding is a huge issue. With pillows, mattresses and towels mostly made of synthetic fibers.
Preach. I vacuum my bedsheets every day because my cats are insane shedders and I'd otherwise get breaded with cat fur, but the vacuum is full with so much what is clearly not cat fur...
I often wonder about carpet or seats and couches. Also made of all manner of synthetic fabrics. Even besides the effects of living in the same space flame retardants slowly gas off over the decades, we rarely deep clean any of this, so when we sit down a cloud of craps wafts up into our lungs.
I prefer noncarpets, but hard seating of course not.
Some of my polyester t-shirts have lasted more than 10 years without any loss in colour or quality, it's a damn shame they cause microplastics since it's probably better that people don't buy clothing every month if clothes lasted longer.
My mattress cover is like that, as it's made from polyester. When I pull it from the dryer it produces an invisible, but irritating cloud of particles.
All that while most of the shavings accumulate in the lint collector, so it could have been even worse.
For at least 10 years now, I only by 100% cotton or cotton-linen blend, or 100% wool - nothing else! Yet, there's so many sources of microplastics that can't be eliminated, unfortunately!
Yep. Specifically, why are 100% cotton socks so ridiculously hard to find now?
It used to be that they were a little more expensive - now you need to go online to find them.
'Fun' fact - the average brain has about 7 grams of microplastic [0] in it now, up 50% from 2016. At that rate...
SEVEN FUCKING GRAMS. Guys this is beyond stupid.
Even if plastic were totally inert, as I've heard people insist with certainty (where are they getting these ideas!), 7 grams of plastic in your brain is terrifying.
The story of phthalates really highlights the drinking from the fume hood aspects of our commercial norms. Phthalates are designed to squeeze between hydrophobic polymers such that their bulk mechanical properties are changed, while remaining chemically inert and not subject to breakdown. The question of what this would do in the human body, which is full of polymers with very sensitively evolved mechanical properties, was obvious - yet it was not asked in a funded capacity until we had been letting it accumulate in our kids for decades. The position of our institutions on this is a clear case of preferring not to know.
This whole thread is a great example of an interesting phenomenon... whenever people talk about this people come out of the woodwork to nitpick the details of whoever is criticizing the wonton use of likely poisonous compounds. Theyll argue things like this about the details of the exact likely bioactivity of the compound, or go on about how its impossible to have modern society without poisoning everything in a huge perfect enemy of the good argument.
Like, go drink from a cup of pthalates if youre so ok with it being in your brain, balls, ovaries, etc. No ones arguing we need to ban plastics, but maybe coating the world in single use water bottles without considering the effects is suboptimal. Shouldnt the onus be on proving its safe before spreading it everywhere, rather than proving its dangerous?
I'm not nitpicking the parent. The parent comment is just wrong, full stop. You should not listen to them.
They have an incorrect notion of what a phthalate is (usually a slightly greasy ester or an alcohol), how polar/hydrophopic they are (mixed; generally ampiphilic), and whether or not they tend to bioaccumulate (in general, they do not).
Your broader point is well-taken, however, but not in the way you intended: chemistry does not reward a shallow understanding. The details matter a lot.
You're assuming we're all being poisoned. We might not be, and clearly if we are, it's not a huge effect because we're still not obviously more diseasous than before. It could even be that the benefits of these chemicals on civilization outweigh the health costs so we're better off using them.
You can't just say "squeeze between hydrophobic polymers", as if that's a single thing, and therefore any such "hydrophobic polymer" will be vulnerable to a phthalate.
In particular, DNA is not hydrophobic -- it's an extremely polar environment. The known DNA/RNA intercalating chemicals are also very polar (at least, in critical selected locations). For example, Ethidium Bromide:
Point being: assuming that the paper in the headline is true (which I do not assume, but I digress), your theory of the mechanism is probably wrong, and therefore misleading.
Edit: having now looked at the paper, they're discussing one specific chemical (bezyl butyl phthalate) which is actually quite polar. It's also an ester, and trivially broken down by common enzymes into a number of different child compounds, any of which could be individually responsible for the claimed effects. Biochemistry is complex.
It gets into hydrophobic binding sites, and accumulates in lipids.
> Aromatic compounds, aliphatic hydrocarbons, and halogens are the hydrophobic parts of ligand PAEs. Hydrophobic contact is caused by the spatial proximity of the non-polar amino acid side chains and the hydrophobic substituents on the ligand PAE molecules. Water molecules are released from the hydrophobic region upon hydrophobic contact, and the unconstrained water molecules released can participate in the energy-favorable hydrogen bonding interactions, which enhance the overall binding affinity of the ligand [37,38,39]. Therefore, the hydrophobic interactions between ligands and receptors affect the ability of PAEs to bind to hormone proteins and influence the ability of PAEs to bind to DNA response elements.
I think this does have some ongoing influence on why more detailed analysis of common chemicals is not required.
From what I can tell, it looks like phthalates started with excess coal tar which contained tonnes of a solid waxy aromatic hydrocarbon called naphthalene that nobody probably had much of a way to monetize for quite some time.
Plenty of money was surely being made in other ways so regardless of the accounting methods, the surplus ends up being a no-cost item. When there are tonnes of an unutilized resource like this the full-scale effort would turn every tonne into something useful, and all it has to do is be the least bit useful and the least bit worth money for it look pretty good on paper. Plus the longer it builds up without having a good way to get rid of it can make a difference. Especially if one of the physical properties of the asset has something to do with combustibility and/or toxicity.
This gives extreme financial leverage compared to comparable chemical processes where a major raw material has a nominal cost, or even an attractive cost.
Anyway, naphthalene was an early source of cheap phthalic acids & anhydrides.
Also some oil fields have enough naphthalene content for it to be accumulated in the bigger refineries along with other waxy hydrocarbons which are processed in abundance.
Plus to meet increasing demand phthalic anhydride can also be made from ortho-xylene which many more refineries are commonly processing a stream of. This may not be zero-cost raw material, but it is still a hydrocarbon which is in bulk and easy to add value to if you're going to do something other than burn it for fuel.
In the 1980's the phthalate I would see the most of was "di-octyl phthalate", known as DOP. It was mostly di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate since the "octanol" that formed the diester was usually 2-ethylhexanol, not much n-octanol involved.
The 2-EH itself was some nasty-smelling stuff, one drop on your foot and you would have to leave your shoes outside when you got home. It was a byproduct of butanol & isobutanol manufacture, which themselves are relatively clean solvents. The 2-EH was clarified but it is a low-volatility solvent that doesn't dry up very fast, and stinks so bad it is not an ideal paint ingredient. There was no published laboratory testing procedure but I did do some pioneering chromatography anyway and there was a rich array of minor byproducts which are still most likely not fully identified chemically yet.
So 2-EH is another low-cost item but not much higher viscosity than the butanols.
Esterifying to combine with the phthalic and you get the compound DOP, the syrupy liquid used as a plasticizer that doesn't dry up much faster than the plastic solids themselves, and imparts the increased flexibility desired by the processor.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are some minor impurities in the DOP that trace back to the 2-EH raw material, which could be much more potent endocrine disruptors than the known plasticizer chemical itself. The statistical possibility is based on the number and variety of unidentified minor constituents, the way that very small amounts of hormones have very outsized effects, and the correlations that have been seen which incriminate the plasticizer and seem to show some connection.
Plus, after a few short years being a leading analyst of 2-EH and DOP, one day some highly purified 2-EH became available in "research grade", purchased it to serve as reference material, and it turned out to be relatively odor-free ! It was the 2-ethylhexyl aldehyde content that made it smell so bold. So I have known something was up for a very long time but still don't have all the details I would want.
Now if there is some minor component other than the known plasticizer bulk chemical itself which is causing disruption, and in-vivo work is being done on the highly purified reference material in order to evaluate the target plasticizer itself in the absence of as many unknowns as possible I'm not so sure the findings would apply as much in the real would as I would like.
At the beginning, phthalates were not optimized to serve as plasticizers.
They just happened to not fail at the task.
Got more popular, and non-surplus alternative sources of raw materials for plasticizing will break ground to meet the demand once the more-attractively-priced "chemical waste" has all been spoken for.
Something like a playbook that predates the plastic age.
CR showing how much of it is in our food. What’s crazy is how unpredictable it is, some have little, and other very similar products have 100x the amount. As a consumer I have little ability to control this.
"The study also showed that C. elegans metabolizes BBP in the same way as mammals, and is impacted at similar BBP levels that occur in humans, suggesting that C. elegans is an effective model for studying the impacts on people."
Said it before here and I’ll say it again. Now your #1 exposure is “luxury vinyl flooring” every hotel room is going to this as well as a ton of homes
Their magic number is 1:3 polymers to stone for that product to work
You’re absorbing it through your feet, luckily most people in the US wear shoes and slippers in the home. But it still releases up to 3% of its polymer volume into your home air within the first year.
In the south where it’s hotter, the process accelerates proportional to heat.
There aren't any in polypropylene plastic, polyethylene plastic or polycarbonates.
I'm sympathetic, less plastic is probably good - it does have to be a well thought through change. If the change reduces safety, or if it gets manufacturers to switch to a worse risk profile product, we could be net worse off.
Sadly it's not only about (intentional) additives.
Plastics — including those listed — act as chemical sponges, soaking up and concentrating toxins present in the ambient environment. For example in a household the airborne dust absorbs brominated fire retardants and formaldehydes. The total quantity of toxins in these tiny particles can exceed the gaseous concentration in the air by thousands of times, so microplastics act like a billion tiny Trojan horses for toxins to enter the body.
So when modelling these risks, it could be less about the equilibrium amount of microplastics in the body at any one time (the stock), so much as the constant re-introduction of new microplastics into the body (the flow).
Sadly I found a study at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3222987/ saying that many polypropylene polyethylene products release estrogenic chemicals (IDK if it's the same as phthalate) likely from additives, including when bent/deformed. And polycarbonates are infamously made of polymerized BPA and similar chemicals (usually endocrine disruptors).
This is the most relevant one IMO. You can buy glass cups and jars, it doesn't matter if the water you put into them comes through PVC pipes! Even if you buy BPA-free phthalate-free bottled water, I think it's safe to assume that at one point that water went through several meters of PVC pipes to get to that bottle!
PVC water pipes must be ubiquitous nowadays, and are certainly better than the older copper alternative, which in turn is better than the older lead alternative!
Maybe the next step is special PVC for water piping. Until then I guess we're better than we have ever been, water piping-wise.
Just about any kind of flexible or soft-ish plastic you encounter as a consumer that is not PET (soda bottles, plastic bags, polyester) is going to have phthalates in it.
You mean like perfume and cosmetics? Sturdy glass with carpets near the bathroom sink and the shower will do the trick. I'll take a few cuts through my life over cancer and chronic diseases.
I mean, you could make a simple and cheap bottle out of aluminum probably?
We had shampoo before the widespread usage of plastic bottles, though you are right that they used to come in glass. Perhaps we could use that fancy unbreakable soviet glass.
Sounds like a good business idea actually..
Edit: Actually thinking about it, that really is a good business idea. If anyone wants to build that business with me, email me at the address in my bio.
see "Green Chemistry" in the USA about 20 years ago.. science was well-developed.. also "Body Burden" search term.. largely stone-walled at the politics level.
"Product liability is a third-rail in American politics" yes
We should also ban plants while we are at it, since there are only a few letters of difference.
In other words: Banning certain types of plastics makes sense and we do that all the time. Banning "plastics" is about as sensible as banning dihydrogenmonoxide.
I try to avoid reheating things in plastic containers. It's about the only thing I can think of I can do as a consumer to reduce the risk of chemicals leeching into the food.
> would drive prices of basic household goods up 400%
Glass is nominally more expensive and works. Our go-to food storage is mason jars. $12/dozen, probably cheaper by volume than the plastic crap on the shelves at Target or Walmart.
I think furniture and carpet would get it worse than most stuff. The alternatives to plastic (largely glass) in other cases are more like 20-50% more expensive, but furniture? Carpet? Solid wood and wool, leather—god, I dunno what you’d even use for cushion fill that’d last anywhere near as long. Those are closer to 400% the price of synthetic stuff. Or more.
> I'm all for pushing back on chemicals wherever possible, especially in food packaging, but let's be real.
The devil is that food that comes pre-packed under vacuum or inert atmosphere in plastics lasts much, much longer than food that gets stored in anything else - including tin cans by the way, they're all lined with plastics because acidic food would otherwise literally eat away the can.
There are "bulk" stores that have no packaging and you fill up what you need into reusable containers that you either buy or bring yourself. They generally have common bulk items like flour but also lots of options for typical grocery store fare. The prices at those stores generally aren't 400% of what they are at a regular grocery store, and if they are higher I'm sure a large part is that this is a niche kind of store rather than how everyone gets their groceries.
That's obviously not the whole supply chain, and I'm sure many goods still arrive at that kind of store in plastic, but these tend to be run by the types that avoid plastic anyway so whatever they can get in reusable packaging I'm sure they are getting wrapped in something other than plastic. Anyway, if plastic is going to be used, the exposure from a single 100lbs bag of something that you refill into a container is probably vastly lower than from 100 individually wrapped 1lbs bags
There is already a mountain of research showing that phthalates are endocrine disruptors and cause developmental defects. The FDA knows this and is doing nothing.
It seems generally impossible to do much to avoid ingesting plastic. It's literally everywhere. The personal choices you make as a consumer are a drop in the bucket.
Readit News
Not just clothing, but also bedding is a huge issue. With pillows, mattresses and towels mostly made of synthetic fibers.
My usual instinct is: try rubbing the synthetic material; if it releases thousands of particles in thin air, stay away from it
We have been heavily pushed to drive less, recycle more, and use less water, but I have not seen messaging about not buying new clothes you don't need.
Surprise surprise, it has actually been studied. One recent review article of the field:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl2746
From figure 2b) we can see that while microplastics from synthetic fibres are certainly an issue, they are far from #1. Dwarfed by tires, paint, and macroplastics (large plastic pieces thrown away slowly grinding down into microplastics e.g. by wave action).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2020-00137...
It has also begun to subsidize the clothing repair industry:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/13/business/france-shoe-clothing...
They do make purpose-built products to filter microplastic lint from laundry[1][2], but a more hacker approach is to just search for "pool filter."
I wish they made comparable products for the dryer.
[1] https://www.filtrol.net/
[2] https://planetcare.org/
Name of that business sector? Plastics recycling.
It's there if you follow the right people on social media.
Campaigns that center around personal responsibility, however, aren't ever going to work, and there's obvious reasons why people are willing to pay to push this narrative but not the buying fewer clothes one (at least here in the US).
Pretty sure I don't need the ones made of microplastics!
Deleted Comment
I don't think phtalates are needed as plasticizers in polyster, so I guess they are coming from the dyes or something else used to treat the fabrics, meaning that the choice of cotton or polyster may not matter for phthalates specifically?
All else being equal you're generally safer being exposed to stable things that don't break down than unstable things that happily react with all sorts of things (and tend to meddle with the chemical processes required for life).
If you get to choose between breathing tires and milk jugs pick the milk jugs every time.
What, exactly, do you think is normalized here? That people wear clothing? That people didn't throw out every polyester fiber the moment somebody said plastic can break down into small pieces? That people aren't freaking out over a danger that we know roughly nothing about so far?
People really need to stop finding excuses to freak out over things.
Over the years I found that of all the dust in my home the vast majority comes from my clothing. I deduced that because the collected dust looks the same as what I find in the dryer, and it feels like cotton too (my by far most warn kind of fiber).
That means rooms are full of tiny particles from your clothes, if I assume that my home is not an anomaly (and why should it be).
Direct sunlight really helps to see how much dust there is all around us, and how with every little movement we create more. That does not even show the particles too small to be seen. The difference is gigantic - without that sunlight you don't see any dust and think the air is clean.
I'm not too concerned, since humanity must have dealt with this for a long time. Particles from fire especially, and there are lots coming from even the tiniest flame. My main worry would be chemicals we add to clothes, but given that by now we ingest plastic pretty much all the time, with every meal, with every breath, we just have to wait and see. I don't see a way to end this long-running experiment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35990858
Preach. I vacuum my bedsheets every day because my cats are insane shedders and I'd otherwise get breaded with cat fur, but the vacuum is full with so much what is clearly not cat fur...
I prefer noncarpets, but hard seating of course not.
Source?
All that while most of the shavings accumulate in the lint collector, so it could have been even worse.
How thin should the air be and how do you measure the particles?
It used to be that they were a little more expensive - now you need to go online to find them.
'Fun' fact - the average brain has about 7 grams of microplastic [0] in it now, up 50% from 2016. At that rate...
SEVEN FUCKING GRAMS. Guys this is beyond stupid.
Even if plastic were totally inert, as I've heard people insist with certainty (where are they getting these ideas!), 7 grams of plastic in your brain is terrifying.
0 - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/23/health/plastics-in-brain-...
Like, go drink from a cup of pthalates if youre so ok with it being in your brain, balls, ovaries, etc. No ones arguing we need to ban plastics, but maybe coating the world in single use water bottles without considering the effects is suboptimal. Shouldnt the onus be on proving its safe before spreading it everywhere, rather than proving its dangerous?
https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/06/wor...
Theyll call me extreme/ignorant/naive, but maybe a society where we have to poison ourselves to sustain "growth" isnt worth sustaining.
Not to mention the constant alarm bells about rising GI cancers in younger people. "OH BuT YOU HAVNEnT staTIstiCALLY prOved A cAusAL AssOCiaTION".
They have an incorrect notion of what a phthalate is (usually a slightly greasy ester or an alcohol), how polar/hydrophopic they are (mixed; generally ampiphilic), and whether or not they tend to bioaccumulate (in general, they do not).
Your broader point is well-taken, however, but not in the way you intended: chemistry does not reward a shallow understanding. The details matter a lot.
In particular, DNA is not hydrophobic -- it's an extremely polar environment. The known DNA/RNA intercalating chemicals are also very polar (at least, in critical selected locations). For example, Ethidium Bromide:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethidium_bromide
Point being: assuming that the paper in the headline is true (which I do not assume, but I digress), your theory of the mechanism is probably wrong, and therefore misleading.
Edit: having now looked at the paper, they're discussing one specific chemical (bezyl butyl phthalate) which is actually quite polar. It's also an ester, and trivially broken down by common enzymes into a number of different child compounds, any of which could be individually responsible for the claimed effects. Biochemistry is complex.
> Aromatic compounds, aliphatic hydrocarbons, and halogens are the hydrophobic parts of ligand PAEs. Hydrophobic contact is caused by the spatial proximity of the non-polar amino acid side chains and the hydrophobic substituents on the ligand PAE molecules. Water molecules are released from the hydrophobic region upon hydrophobic contact, and the unconstrained water molecules released can participate in the energy-favorable hydrogen bonding interactions, which enhance the overall binding affinity of the ligand [37,38,39]. Therefore, the hydrophobic interactions between ligands and receptors affect the ability of PAEs to bind to hormone proteins and influence the ability of PAEs to bind to DNA response elements.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10488033/
Deleted Comment
I think this does have some ongoing influence on why more detailed analysis of common chemicals is not required.
From what I can tell, it looks like phthalates started with excess coal tar which contained tonnes of a solid waxy aromatic hydrocarbon called naphthalene that nobody probably had much of a way to monetize for quite some time.
Plenty of money was surely being made in other ways so regardless of the accounting methods, the surplus ends up being a no-cost item. When there are tonnes of an unutilized resource like this the full-scale effort would turn every tonne into something useful, and all it has to do is be the least bit useful and the least bit worth money for it look pretty good on paper. Plus the longer it builds up without having a good way to get rid of it can make a difference. Especially if one of the physical properties of the asset has something to do with combustibility and/or toxicity.
This gives extreme financial leverage compared to comparable chemical processes where a major raw material has a nominal cost, or even an attractive cost.
Anyway, naphthalene was an early source of cheap phthalic acids & anhydrides.
Also some oil fields have enough naphthalene content for it to be accumulated in the bigger refineries along with other waxy hydrocarbons which are processed in abundance.
Plus to meet increasing demand phthalic anhydride can also be made from ortho-xylene which many more refineries are commonly processing a stream of. This may not be zero-cost raw material, but it is still a hydrocarbon which is in bulk and easy to add value to if you're going to do something other than burn it for fuel.
In the 1980's the phthalate I would see the most of was "di-octyl phthalate", known as DOP. It was mostly di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate since the "octanol" that formed the diester was usually 2-ethylhexanol, not much n-octanol involved.
The 2-EH itself was some nasty-smelling stuff, one drop on your foot and you would have to leave your shoes outside when you got home. It was a byproduct of butanol & isobutanol manufacture, which themselves are relatively clean solvents. The 2-EH was clarified but it is a low-volatility solvent that doesn't dry up very fast, and stinks so bad it is not an ideal paint ingredient. There was no published laboratory testing procedure but I did do some pioneering chromatography anyway and there was a rich array of minor byproducts which are still most likely not fully identified chemically yet.
So 2-EH is another low-cost item but not much higher viscosity than the butanols.
Esterifying to combine with the phthalic and you get the compound DOP, the syrupy liquid used as a plasticizer that doesn't dry up much faster than the plastic solids themselves, and imparts the increased flexibility desired by the processor.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are some minor impurities in the DOP that trace back to the 2-EH raw material, which could be much more potent endocrine disruptors than the known plasticizer chemical itself. The statistical possibility is based on the number and variety of unidentified minor constituents, the way that very small amounts of hormones have very outsized effects, and the correlations that have been seen which incriminate the plasticizer and seem to show some connection.
Plus, after a few short years being a leading analyst of 2-EH and DOP, one day some highly purified 2-EH became available in "research grade", purchased it to serve as reference material, and it turned out to be relatively odor-free ! It was the 2-ethylhexyl aldehyde content that made it smell so bold. So I have known something was up for a very long time but still don't have all the details I would want.
Now if there is some minor component other than the known plasticizer bulk chemical itself which is causing disruption, and in-vivo work is being done on the highly purified reference material in order to evaluate the target plasticizer itself in the absence of as many unknowns as possible I'm not so sure the findings would apply as much in the real would as I would like.
At the beginning, phthalates were not optimized to serve as plasticizers.
They just happened to not fail at the task.
Got more popular, and non-surplus alternative sources of raw materials for plasticizing will break ground to meet the demand once the more-attractively-priced "chemical waste" has all been spoken for.
Something like a playbook that predates the plastic age.
CR showing how much of it is in our food. What’s crazy is how unpredictable it is, some have little, and other very similar products have 100x the amount. As a consumer I have little ability to control this.
"......in worms."
In the south where it’s hotter, the process accelerates proportional to heat.
There aren't any in polypropylene plastic, polyethylene plastic or polycarbonates.
I'm sympathetic, less plastic is probably good - it does have to be a well thought through change. If the change reduces safety, or if it gets manufacturers to switch to a worse risk profile product, we could be net worse off.
Plastics — including those listed — act as chemical sponges, soaking up and concentrating toxins present in the ambient environment. For example in a household the airborne dust absorbs brominated fire retardants and formaldehydes. The total quantity of toxins in these tiny particles can exceed the gaseous concentration in the air by thousands of times, so microplastics act like a billion tiny Trojan horses for toxins to enter the body.
So when modelling these risks, it could be less about the equilibrium amount of microplastics in the body at any one time (the stock), so much as the constant re-introduction of new microplastics into the body (the flow).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02697...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/plastics-and-ch...
PVC is used in water pipes, bottles, packaging films, blister packs, cling wraps, and seals on metal lids.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phthalates [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride#Application...
This is the most relevant one IMO. You can buy glass cups and jars, it doesn't matter if the water you put into them comes through PVC pipes! Even if you buy BPA-free phthalate-free bottled water, I think it's safe to assume that at one point that water went through several meters of PVC pipes to get to that bottle!
PVC water pipes must be ubiquitous nowadays, and are certainly better than the older copper alternative, which in turn is better than the older lead alternative!
Maybe the next step is special PVC for water piping. Until then I guess we're better than we have ever been, water piping-wise.
plastic containers for perfume and cosmetics don’t bother me. beauty products tend to last much longer than soap anyway.
Sounds like a good business idea actually..
Edit: Actually thinking about it, that really is a good business idea. If anyone wants to build that business with me, email me at the address in my bio.
plastic was invented 100 years ago. people did just fine in the house without it.
"Product liability is a third-rail in American politics" yes
In other words: Banning certain types of plastics makes sense and we do that all the time. Banning "plastics" is about as sensible as banning dihydrogenmonoxide.
I'm all for pushing back on chemicals wherever possible, especially in food packaging, but let's be real.
Glass is nominally more expensive and works. Our go-to food storage is mason jars. $12/dozen, probably cheaper by volume than the plastic crap on the shelves at Target or Walmart.
The devil is that food that comes pre-packed under vacuum or inert atmosphere in plastics lasts much, much longer than food that gets stored in anything else - including tin cans by the way, they're all lined with plastics because acidic food would otherwise literally eat away the can.
That's obviously not the whole supply chain, and I'm sure many goods still arrive at that kind of store in plastic, but these tend to be run by the types that avoid plastic anyway so whatever they can get in reusable packaging I'm sure they are getting wrapped in something other than plastic. Anyway, if plastic is going to be used, the exposure from a single 100lbs bag of something that you refill into a container is probably vastly lower than from 100 individually wrapped 1lbs bags
https://www.fda.gov/food/hfp-constituent-updates/fda-respond...
There is already a mountain of research showing that phthalates are endocrine disruptors and cause developmental defects. The FDA knows this and is doing nothing.