We're Each Carrying Our Own Internal Toxins

Friday, March 16, 2012 by Maine Morning Sentinel
by Denis Thoet




Dinosaurs: small brains, big bodies. Extinct.

Humans: Large brains, small bodies. Not extinct. Not yet, anyway.

Our large brains, however, have created a world bathed in chemicals, engineered foods, plastic environments with poisons that surround us and invade all parts of the natural world -- and our own bodies.

We are bringing in those poisons through our mouths (food and contaminated liquids), our noses ("fragrances" and polluted air) and our skin (cosmetics, scented shampoos and moisturizers).

It took a meteor strike 65 million years ago to wipe out the dinosaurs, after they had a pretty successful run for about 250 million years. Humans, on the other hand, have been around for only 4 million to 5 million years, and our meager evolutionary run is now meeting a big obstacle: We are not able to metabolize the last 100-plus years of petroleum-based chemical pollution of the earth and of ourselves:

• Nitrates, chemical fertilizers and herbicides used in industrial farming overflow into our waterways and oceans.
• Oil-based chemicals saturate our food, the containers that hold that food, our furniture and carpeting, our cleaning agents, our "lawn care" products, our kids' toys, our cooking utensils and pans.
• Manufacturing, particularly paper making, pours millions of toxics into the air and water yearly.
• Unused medicines get dumped into our waterways and reappear in our drinking water.

Dinosaurs didn't have the luxury of observing their demise. We do.

We are participating in it with every purchase of plastic-coated junk, every bite of industrially produced "food," every application of lawn products that poison the ground, the insects and the birds that feed on the insects -- and ourselves. No one is forcing us to buy this stuff.

I'm not overstating our situation. Read What's Gotten into Us? Staying Healthy in a Toxic World, by McKay Jenkins (2011). Shortly into the book, Jenkins writes about a 2006 study of 13 Maine people and the toxins in their bodies.

The study tested for a handful of toxic chemicals: phthalates (softening plasticizers added to baby toys, shower curtains, drinking water bottles); flame retardants (applied to electronic devices, furniture, draperies, carpeting); perfluorinated chemicals (called Teflon, and used to coat cookware and in food packaging for things such as microwave popcorn), and bisphenol A (a hardening plastic additive in baby bottles and the lining of canned food). It also tested for dangerous metals such as lead, mercury and arsenic.

All of the participants had lived in relatively rural environments all their lives. Some were high profile, such as Russell Libby, executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA), former state Sen. Dana Dow, and Hannah Pingree, then-majority leader of the Maine House of Representatives.

Surprisingly, Libby was at the top of the list. Of the 71 chemicals tested for, he had 41 in his body. Despite his rural and organic lifestyle, he had the highest number of flame retardants.

Dana Dow, a furniture dealer who applied flame retardants to the furniture he sold, had the highest levels of perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) and Teflon compounds. And Pingree, of North Haven Island, had high levels of mercury in her body.

Another surprise was the results of tests on a mother and daughter, Violet and Laura Lee Raymond. Laura Lee, then 28, was confident she would have a much lower rate of toxins than her mother. She was raised in Fort Kent -- about as rural as you can get in Maine.

"Laura Lee Raymond had higher levels of toxins than her 51-year-old mother," Jenkins wrote. "She had high levels of mercury and arsenic." Arsenic does occur naturally in parts of the groundwater in Maine, and Raymond thought possibly the mercury in her body came from her liking for sushi.

She is both puzzled, and angry, about the results, however, since she has always followed a healthy lifestyle.

"You kind of go through these phases. You're in denial, then you get freaked out. Then you go through a hypervigilant phase," Raymond said. "I got rid of my microwave, got rid of my nonstick pans. I was really hypersensitive about what was going into my body." And she was surprised by people's reactions.

"People come up to me and say, 'Oh my God! I read about you! You're toxic!'"

Her reaction: "If I'm toxic, you're toxic, too!"

That's the key to all of this. We are all toxic, regardless of whether we get tested.

Since I was born in 1944, I could probably add toxins such as Strontium-90 from the above-ground nuclear testing that went on until 1962, or the pesticide DDT, which didn't get banned until the '70s.

And these toxins that we all have are not going away. Not until we stop producing them, and even then we're stuck with what we've got.

Plastic Particles Circulating Endlessly in World's Oceans

Thursday, March 24, 2011 by Inter Press Service
by Stephen Leahy

HONOLULU, Hawaii - That plastic bottle or plastic take-away coffee lid that has 20 minutes of use can spend decades killing countless seabirds, marine animals and fish, experts reported here this week.

On remote Pacific island atolls, diligent albatross parents unknowingly fill their chicks' bellies with bits of plastic that resemble food. The chicks die of malnutrition, and when their bodies decay all those plastic bottle tops, disposable lighters, and the ubiquitous bits of plastic detritus get back into the environment in a cruel perversion of 'recycling'.

There is now so much plastic in the oceans it is likely that virtually every seabird has plastic in its belly if its feeding habits mean it mistakes plastic bits for food. The same is true for sea turtles, marine animals or fish, experts say.

Northern fulmars, a common seabird numbering in the millions, have a collective 45 tonnes worth of plastic bits in their bellies, estimates Jan Andries van Franeker, a biologist with the Institute for Marine Resources and Ecosystem Studies at the University of Wageningen in Holland.

At least 95 percent of fulmars in the North Sea where van Franeker has been working for three decades have one to several dozen bits of plastic in their stomachs. The same is true for related species like the tiny Wilson's storm petrels, which unknowingly transport an estimated 35 tonnes of plastic from their wintering grounds in the North Atlantic to breeding grounds in the Antarctic, he says.

"If a seabird's feeding habits mean it could mistake plastic for food, then it will likely have plastic in its stomach," he said in an interview at the week-long Fifth International Marine Debris Conference, which ends Friday in Honolulu, Hawaii.

It has been 10 years since the last international marine debris conference and the hope is that industry, civil society, researchers and policy makers will find common ground on the strategies and best practices to assess, reduce, and prevent the impacts of marine debris.

"I sometimes have this kind of dream or nightmare where those fulmars drop all of that plastic on an audience in big conference room like this," van Franeker told IPS. "It would make a very clear statement."

It is a statement that needs to be made with the escalating problem of the world's oceans being filled a staggering amount of plastic, fishing gear, and all other kinds of debris. There is no accurate accounting of exactly how much but it appears to be in the tens of millions of tonnes each year and is mostly from land-based sources.

A 2006 United Nations Environment Program estimate suggested every square kilometer of world's ocean has an average of 13,000 pieces of plastic litter floating on the surface. A walk on an ocean shoreline anywhere in the world will provide ample evidence of the scale of the problem - unless it was recently cleaned up.

The Ocean Conservancy, a U.S.-based NGO, has been leading beach and shoreline cleanups around the world for 25 years. Over that time, nearly nine million volunteers in 152 countries have cleaned up and cataloged 66 million kilograms of trash, according a new report released here in Honolulu.

The top three trash items collected by number of items found were cigarette butts, food packaging and bottle caps or lids. Plastic bags, bottles and straws or stirrers also made the top 10.

"People don't realize that the cumulative impact of marine debris is a major issue for the oceans," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

UNEP and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are conference co-sponsors. (Full disclosure: UNEP provided travel funding for IPS to attend the conference).

Steiner said marine debris is an "out of sight, out of mind" type of problem but noted there was new science showing that tiny plastic particles called microplastics may be leaching endocrine disruptor chemicals affecting the health of marine species and possibly humans.

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"We need to become less reliant on plastics," he told conference participants in a video statement.

About 260 million tonnes of new plastic is made each year. Plastic does not really biodegrade, it only breaks down into smaller pieces until it is microscopic - microplastic particles - that can remain in the environment for hundreds of years.

In 1950, just five million tonnes of plastic was manufactured globally. Today each person in developed countries uses about 100 kgs of plastic annually while less developed use 20 kgs and that number is growing rapidly.

Steiner said policies like South Korea's mandatory Extended Producer Responsibility System (EPR) are not only part of the solution but a new source of jobs and income. The EPR system requires manufacturers and importers to recycle a certain amount of their products. In the five years since the program's launch in Korea, six million tonnes of waste has been recycled, including 70,000 tonnes of plastic, producing a financial benefit of over 1.6 billion dollars.

Keeping plastic trash out of the ocean is as simple as setting up a mandatory deposit system with a high enough value on anything plastic to ensure it is too valuable to throw away, says van Franeker. Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries all have deposit systems for plastic bottles and recycling rates are better than 95 percent as a result.

"Degradable or compostable plastic should be banned. The bio-plastics have as much plastic as those made from oil," he said.

The so-called degradable bio-plastics simply break down into microplastic particles faster than traditional plastics. "We might not be able to see them with our eyes but the plastic is still there," he added.

The industry pushes degradable and compostable plastics so that one-time short term use of plastic can continue, he said. "One time use of plastic is simply unsustainable."

Van Franeker is not anti-plastic. "It is a wonderful material. Real plastic is valuable. It can be made to be safe and reusable."