The single-use plastics are accumulating in the ocean gyres, including the micro-beads in some household chemical products like tooth-paste, facial scrubs, body wash, etc.
Lenard Lopate Show: Microplastics in our Water]
“Industrial hygienist and chemist Monona Rossol discusses a study showing that rich people and poor people have different toxic substances in their bodies. She’s the author of Pick Your Poison: How Our Mad Dash to Chemical Utopia Is Making Lab Rats of Us All.”
[8:30] “We are the lab rats… because right now you can’t possibly know what these chemicals … and at these levels… and in combination… with other chemicals are doing. The only place to do that is in the human population.”
Lenard Lopate Show: Toxins in Our Bodies]
Why buy all those synthetic chemicals, if you can find natural products that are good quality then why not buy them? Of course the synthetics are cheaper, that’s because they were designed to BE cheaper from the start.
As serious a problem as climate change is, these plastics may be what ultimately kills us off. They are everywhere, and they do not break down chemically. They’ll work their way back up the food chain and poison what we eat, and eventually poison everyone on the planet.
What do you people think of Charleston, VA, USA’s contaminated water, the gov’t announcements about its safety, or the duration of the issue?
ABC: West Virginia Sen. Rockefeller Won’t OK Charleston Water a Month After Spill; Feb 8, 2014 2:18pm]
I talked with my cousin’s husband at a reception Sat. night (they live in Charleston) and he said that their water had just been fully cleared to drink and that the licorice smell had finally dissipated. A couple of weeks before that they had to move out of their house and come up here to live with my aunt because the smell from the contaimanemt was too strong to breathe. This happened twice BTW due to lax state regulations. My cousin is an attorney as is her husband and they said that so far there were mega class action suits building. Needless to say, the State ordered the plant to shut down and dismantle. They promptly created another company, placed the same CEO at the head and it’s business as usual until the next disaster.
Cap’t Jack
I talked with my cousin's husband at a reception Sat. night (they live in Charleston) and he said that their water had just been fully cleared to drink and that the licorice smell had finally dissipated. A couple of weeks before that they had to move out of their house and come up here to live with my aunt because the smell from the contaimanemt was too strong to breathe. This happened twice BTW due to lax state regulations. My cousin is an attorney as is her husband and they said that so far there were mega class action suits building. Needless to say, the State ordered the plant to shut down and dismantle. They promptly created another company, placed the same CEO at the head and it's business as usual until the next disaster. Cap't JackProbably gave the CEO a nice fat bonus, too. Lois
Oh, I’m sure that was part of the package! That and a tax break. >:(
Cap’t Jack
As serious a problem as climate change is, these plastics may be what ultimately kills us off. They are everywhere, and they do not break down chemically. They'll work their way back up the food chain and poison what we eat, and eventually poison everyone on the planet.Is this a contradiction. If they do not break down chemically what harm can they do unless they accumulate and clog things. Do they only break down very slowly or only under certain conditions? The income/chemical distribution is very curious. psik
They do break down eventually, but were talking about hundreds, if not thousands of years here. Plastics are designed to be resistant to natural degradation and the problem it causes with our bodies is that human biochemistry is not equipped to break down plastic molecules. So, they find there way into our systems and cause havoc. For example, BPA’s cause damage because they resemble somewhat the building blocks for dna and on rare occasions, our cells mistake them for one of those DNA particles.
Anyway I know that scientists have found some forms of bacteria that are able to eat certain plastics so that might be a future pathway for getting rid of all that plastic that we don’t know what to do with.
Oh yea baby, the beat goes on. The sins of the fathers shall be passed on to the children.The single-use plastics are accumulating in the ocean gyres, including the micro-beads in some household chemical products like tooth-paste, facial scrubs, body wash, etc.
How Plastic In The Ocean Is Contaminating Your Seafood by ELIZA BARCLAY | December 13, 2013 http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/12/12/250438904/how-plastic-in-the-ocean-is-contaminating-your-seafood We've long known that the fish we eat are exposed to toxic chemicals in the rivers, bays and oceans they inhabit. The substance that's gotten the most attention — because it has shown up at disturbingly high levels in some fish — is mercury. But mercury is just one of a slew of synthetic and organic pollutants that fish can ingest and absorb into their tissue. Sometimes it's because we're dumping chemicals right into the ocean. But as a study published recently in Nature, Scientific Reports helps illuminate, sometimes fish get chemicals from the plastic debris they ingest. "The ocean is basically a toilet bowl for all of our chemical pollutants and waste in general," says Chelsea Rochman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, who authored the study. "Eventually, we start to see those contaminants high up in the food chain, in seafood and wildlife."
http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/131121/srep03263/full/srep03263.html Ingested plastic transfers hazardous chemicals to fish and induces hepatic stress Chelsea M. Rochman, Eunha Hoh, Tomofumi Kurobe & Swee J. The Plastic debris litters aquatic habitats globally, the majority of which is microscopic (< 1 mm), and is ingested by a large range of species. Risks associated with such small fragments come from the material itself and from chemical pollutants that sorb to it from surrounding water. Hazards associated with the complex mixture of plastic and accumulated pollutants are largely unknown. Here, we show that fish, exposed to a mixture of polyethylene with chemical pollutants sorbed from the marine environment, bioaccumulate these chemical pollutants and suffer liver toxicity and pathology. Fish fed virgin polyethylene fragments also show signs of stress, although less severe than fish fed marine polyethylene fragments. We provide baseline information regarding the bioaccumulation of chemicals and associated health effects from plastic ingestion in fish and demonstrate that future assessments should consider the complex mixture of the plastic material and their associated chemical pollutants. ...