Should I Really Be Worried About Plastics?
There has been quite a bit of press lately regarding plastics and their potential health risks. Some are good, some are bad. Make sure you avoid some while others are perfectly fine. Quite frankly I find the whole mess rather confusing and I’m starting to wonder if this something that really needs to be worried about. Is plastic really the evil material that it is being made out to be? Could this be the cause of health issues like diabetes, heart disease and hormone imbalances? I want to clear this up for me and my family once and for all!
When it comes to health hazards and concerns I always try to find as much information as possible from reputable sources before I make my decision whether or not to avoid said hazards. With the constant flow of information from anyone with a blog (including myself 
) I think I really need to go straight to reliable sources before I get myself all worked up.
I first start at Wikipedia.com. It’s entry for Bisphenol A gives a compelling argument not to use certain plastics not only because of the personal health risks but because they pose an environmental risk as well. Canada has all but actually banned it, Wal-Mart no longer sells it in Canada and Nalgene has stopped using the chemicals in its products. The U.S. introduced legislation last month to ban it completely. While at the same time France and New Zealand have said that it doesn’t pose a great threat and has no policies regarding it.
Following some of the reference links on the Wikipedia page I came to very thorough articles from reputable sources such as Environmental Health Perspectives, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (PDF) and The Journal of the American Medical Association all of which come to the same basic conclusion that BPA is something that probably should not be consumed by people. The JAMA article even goes as far as to say:
Based on this background information, the study by Lang et al,1 while preliminary with regard to these diseases in humans, should spur US regulatory agencies to follow the recent action taken by Canadian regulatory agencies, which have declared BPA a "toxic chemical" requiring aggressive action to limit human and environmental exposures.4 Alternatively, Congressional action could follow the precedent set with the recent passage of federal legislation designed to limit exposures to another family of compounds, phthalates, also used in plastic. Like BPA,5 phthalates are detectable in virtually everyone in the United States.6 This bill moves US policy closer to the European model, in which industry must provide data on the safety of a chemical before it can be used in products.
For a while now I have been almost ignoring the hype behind all of the BPA commotion since it seems to be just another thing I have to worry about like organic (anything here), sunscreen, swimming pools, pesticides, scary monsters, WWIII, robots taking over,etc. I’m trying to filter out the ones that don’t really need to be considered as heavily as others and I now feel like this really does need to be taken more seriously. I will be more instep with my wife on this and try to phase out more plastics and replace them with smarter alternatives.
If you have more to add about this please let me know. I’d love to gather more information, it’s a very interesting topic. Also, I’ve added a link at the bottom of the post to a chart that helps you identify which plastic products are safe and which are not.
b
Link to a chart that describes what plastics are safe and which ones aren’t – via Strollerderby
| Print article | This entry was posted by b on April 7, 2009 at 3:41 pm, and is filed under Parenting, Ramblings. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
