>Heart disease deaths worldwide linked to chemical widely used in plastics
First thing I thought of is how much DEHP is used is the hospital, including for medical devices implanted in the heart. Such as pacemakers, catheters, stents and valves.
DEHP as a component is something like 30% of flexible tubing used in a hospital setting.
Phthalates leach because they aren't integrated with the base plastic by design - that's how they work. Phthalates sit in between the polymer chains (such as PET), rather than being bonded to them, which is precisely what affords that material flexibility, and also why they leach so easily.
On a similar note, we had the big push towards "BPA-free" plastic a few years ago. Manufacturers just replaced the BPA with related bisphenols like BPF which is probably just as bad as BPA and BPS which is probably worse than BPA.
This is what happens when you allow companies to dump unvetted, novel, synthetic chemicals into products and packaging. Especially when the audience for those products has substantially less information than the companies who produce them en masse.
A friend of mine who works in the field says that we make some effort to not remember that glass was a thing for a reason after the epidemy of the plastic from the 60s and 70s
I wish plastic were as easily manageable as asbestos. Asbestos has always been far better contained than plastics — it's basically only ever been used “behind the scenes” in buildings. Now that we've phased out its use, you basically only need to manage asbestos when demolishing or doing extensive work on a building, when those cordoned-off spots become exposed.
Meanwhile plastics have already permeated our environment. Even if we stopped all use today, it would be practically impossible to remove every trace of them from the environment.
It seems like 200 years could be an extremely optimistic timeline without major improvements to our technologies used for removing plastic from the environment. At the moment those technologies hardly exist
Removing plastic from the environment has more to do with keeping it out in the first place. Make sure your county has proper recycling facilities and that the waste processing companies deal with plastic responsibly instead of exporting it abroad or burning it.
We can't remove it from the environment but we can bury it and we can filter it. We may be able to remove it if we can find compounds to bind with it in the soil. Everything else will be going into a landfill and our water will just be tainted forever (because it goes into the ocean and comes down in rain). So start investing in water filtration companies, in addition to the companies that will own all the water rights.
It's extremely difficult to avoid exposure to these plastics. I started buying "pthalate free" bath products only to learn there if the bottle that holds them is plastic, then you're still getting exposed to pthalates. Most foods are exposed to these plasicizers as well, especially meats and dairy.
It's pretty crazy how bad for us meat/dairy is in a huge variety of ways yet people hand wave away most of the issues.
Antibiotics usage is still a huge issue in beef/dairy. Environmental destruction is still a huge issue in beef/dairy. Hormone exposure thru beef/dairy is still an issue. Etc. Etc.
I think in some countries people understand all these issues and some do change their behavior, but it takes much longer than you would assume (reference: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumpti... - note the peak consumption is in the past).
On the other hand you might downplay how bad can be for some people to totally eliminating meat/dairy. I know a couple of examples that had big issues with iron deficiency due to that. Pills didn't work for years, while restarting eating for a couple of months meat fixed all their health issues.
I do agree though that people eat way more than they need, but probably it is not only meat related (also sugar, carbs and others).
Antibiotic residue in milk is highly regulated, at least in the USA. When we treat a dairy cow with antibiotics (to cure an infection and save it's life) we don't/can't sell it's milk for several days after the end of the round of antibiotics.
How else am I supposed to get swole? I buy my meat from local butchers. Getting 200g of protein from vegetables and lentils and stuff would be impossible.
For a lot of the foods on the list, the DEHP, BPA, etc., come from the packaging materials.
So, for example, Whole Foods organic grass fed beef appears to be very high in DEHP...if you get it in the plastic wrap container, but would have almost none if wrapped in wax paper (note: not the same thing as parchment paper). Similarly, a lot of restaurant to-go orders will test high for endocrine disruptors because they come in plastic containers, but would be low in these chemicals if tested at the restaurant.
I remember when this link went around that this 1% column didn't really quite make sense. 1% makes it sound like it's well within the limit, even if you ate 10 in-n-out cheeseburgers a day.
I guess the question is, at what percent of the "tolerable daily intake" of DEHP do very bad side effects (like the heart issues in this post) start to occur?
I mean yeah, the creators of PlasticList explicitly stated that they didn't change their eating habits based on their findings. Perhaps plastic contamination of food just isn't a huge issue in developed countries.
Yeah, most of the comments here are crap. The regulation for this stuff (and there are so many it's stupid) started in "the west" around 1999 and is pretty complete post 2022. Remember when polycarbonate water bottles were a thing, when they took chemicals out of kids toys and couches? That was all bad, but virgin PET, PP, silicone, and HDPE don't really leach plasticizers. That's WHY they're used. Really, this borders on a 25 year human clinical trial on South America, Africa, and SE Asia... well maybe we can measure reintroduction to the US now that corruption is a thing and regulation or rule of law is out the window. Thanks, Obama.
"These recent regulatory measures reflect a growing awareness of the harmful effects of DEHP. However, it is notable that many of these regulations were not in place at the time of data acquisition for the present study and their effect is not reflected in our results." (pg 11)
We are seeing results from pre-regulation era in this data.
Obama's administration passed regulations on the most well-known endocrine disrupters in 2016. They wanted to include more on the list of regulated chemicals, but the chemical industry's GOP buddies blocked that.
So basically you're blaming Obama for not managing to do something perfectly. Are you part of the "all or nothing" camp of policymaking?
Readit News
First thing I thought of is how much DEHP is used is the hospital, including for medical devices implanted in the heart. Such as pacemakers, catheters, stents and valves.
DEHP as a component is something like 30% of flexible tubing used in a hospital setting.
Phthalates leach because they aren't integrated with the base plastic by design - that's how they work. Phthalates sit in between the polymer chains (such as PET), rather than being bonded to them, which is precisely what affords that material flexibility, and also why they leach so easily.
That's a very good pun even if it wasn't intentional.
Meanwhile plastics have already permeated our environment. Even if we stopped all use today, it would be practically impossible to remove every trace of them from the environment.
Asbestos was at times used in:
* cigarrette filters
* water filters
* hair dryers
* space heaters
* anti-scorch pads (stoves and bunsen burners)
* HVAC duct sealing
* boiler, pipe, and duct insulation (buildings, machinery, vehicles)
* brakes
Antibiotics usage is still a huge issue in beef/dairy. Environmental destruction is still a huge issue in beef/dairy. Hormone exposure thru beef/dairy is still an issue. Etc. Etc.
On the other hand you might downplay how bad can be for some people to totally eliminating meat/dairy. I know a couple of examples that had big issues with iron deficiency due to that. Pills didn't work for years, while restarting eating for a couple of months meat fixed all their health issues.
I do agree though that people eat way more than they need, but probably it is not only meat related (also sugar, carbs and others).
https://www.plasticlist.org/
and sort by the "DEHP" column.
If I understand correctly, an RXBAR could have up to 1% of your tolerable daily intake for DEHP, and most foods are well below that.
Based on the OP, it seems like DEHP might be a bigger issue in developing countries.
So, for example, Whole Foods organic grass fed beef appears to be very high in DEHP...if you get it in the plastic wrap container, but would have almost none if wrapped in wax paper (note: not the same thing as parchment paper). Similarly, a lot of restaurant to-go orders will test high for endocrine disruptors because they come in plastic containers, but would be low in these chemicals if tested at the restaurant.
I guess the question is, at what percent of the "tolerable daily intake" of DEHP do very bad side effects (like the heart issues in this post) start to occur?
They're... still a thing... https://www.google.com/search?q=polycarbonate+water+bottles
https://www.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/research/suppo...
Another article says vinyl flooring including luxury vinyl may also leach off plasticizers?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4540696/
"These recent regulatory measures reflect a growing awareness of the harmful effects of DEHP. However, it is notable that many of these regulations were not in place at the time of data acquisition for the present study and their effect is not reflected in our results." (pg 11)
We are seeing results from pre-regulation era in this data.
True but most people don't know what those are, and they also don't/can't currently cover all plastic in the household / daily life.
So basically you're blaming Obama for not managing to do something perfectly. Are you part of the "all or nothing" camp of policymaking?