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The Human Health Impacts of Plastic

by Alexis McGivern

January 21, 2019

For a long time, plastic pollution has been defined as an oceans issue, with many players referring only to the issues as 'marine litter' or 'ocean plastics'. In fact, the impacts of plastic are far more wide-reaching, affecting populations far from the coasts. Human health is affected by plastic at each stage of the life cycle, from extraction of raw materials, through production, during use and after disposal.

During production

In order to make plastic, fossil fuels like oil and natural gas are extracted and refined into different fractions, meaning the different hydrocarbons contained within these fossil fuels are separated out into individual monomers.

The ´cracking` of these hydrocarbons is done in petrochemical factories, affecting nearby communities through contamination of the air with pollutants and carcinogens. St. James Parish, Louisiana, one of the hubs of the American petrochemical industry, is also known as “Cancer Alley”, so-called due to its disproportionately high rates of cancer as compared with the rest of the United States. Residents attribute to this to the high concentration of petrochemical factories, and, in recent weeks, have been organising against a proposed $9.4 billion chemical plant proposed by the Formosa Petrochemical Corporation, citing the irreversible human health impacts as a key concern.

It is, of course, no coincidence that the majority of these petrochemical factories are located in communities predominantly populated by people of colour, thereby adding an additional layer of environmental injustice onto this issue.

Monomers are linked up through a process known as polymerisation in order to make plastic polymers, which are the basis for all plastic products. Then, the product-specific properties of different plastic items, such as malleability, durability and colour, are generated through the inclusion of additives. These affect health through exposure during the use phase of plastic.

During use

Plastic affects human health through the multi-pronged exposure to chemicals in plastic, with differing impacts according to the specific additives and the levels of exposure. Chemicals from plastic migrate from food packaging into food through heat, long-term storage and small surface-area ratios (i.e., small packaging sizes). The additives included during the production process affect our health through disruption of our delicately-balanced endocrine systems, the glands and organs and that produce, store and secret hormones.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals in plastic disrupt mimic hormone receptors and disrupt other important hormonal functions.

Our ability to effectively regulate and minimise the negative impacts of additives in plastic is severely hampered by a lack of transparency from industry on what additives are even included in plastic products. The majority of these additives have not been tested, and therefore cannot be meaningfully assessed for their potential dangers or restricted from the market. In many places, regulatory bodies, like the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, cannot keep up with the proliferation of new chemicals entering the market each year and therefore many enter the market without a full understanding of how they might impact our health and environment.

Phthalates and Bisphenol A (BPA) are two additives used in plastic that have been widely tested, and have been collectively linked to early onset puberty in girls, increased obesity prevalence in adult men, breast and prostate cancer and reproductive abnormalities.

In response to the growing controversy over BPA, many plastic producers in the United States, Canada and Western Europe self-regulated and phased out most of BPA from food grade plastics. However, BPA was largely replaced with BPS and BPF, two additives which, while chemically different to BPA, have been shown to have almost the exact same effects on our health.

After disposal

The impacts of plastic after its disposal depend largely on what pathway it takes after consumption. Organisations like GAIA, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, have highlighted the human health impacts of incineration plants, citing both the occupational health impacts as well as those on populations living near to incinerators. Exposure to dioxins, heavy metals and biomarkers have been linked to lung, larynx and liver cancers, respiratory effects and congenital abnormalities, among other impacts.

Open landfilling outside of sealed engineered landfills and open burning, two techniques commonly employed in areas without waste management infrastructure, affect nearby populations through contamination of groundwater sources and through chemicals released through burning plastic.

When plastic ends up in the ocean, it can end up back on our dinner plates through fish or even salt, making us at risk for ingesting not only the plastic pieces themselves but also all of the associated toxic chemicals that it has been exposed to in the water, including many persistent organic pollutants POPs. It is, however, still unclear how pieces of plastic that have not been exposed to any additional chemicals affect human health during ingestion.

What now?

As plastic pollution becomes more widely understood as a human issue, as well as an environmental one, the pressure on manufacturers of plastic will hopefully increase and therefore encourage different product distribution models, fewer greenwashed solutions and options that are safer for our health and for the planet.

On an individual level, minimising or eliminating your own consumption of plastic, where possible, can help limit your exposure to the wide range of chemicals included in everyday items. You can limit the chemical migration between your food packaging products and your food by following guidance from the Food Packaging Forum, namely heating your food in inert containers like glass rather than plastic, limiting the storage time of foods in plastic and avoiding small portion sizes to limit the exposure through a high surface-to-volume ratio.

Finally, and most importantly, transparency from industry players is vital in order to assess the wide range of additives used in plastic for their potential health and environmental impacts.

The precautionary principle is of utmost importance, allowing regulators the time and capacity to assess the wide range of chemicals that we are exposed to on a daily basis and regulate as necessary.

Reflections on Money

by Kianga Daverington

September 1, 2020

This essay, written by Kianga Daverington of Daverington PLLC , was originally published in January 2020. The piece as been condensed for clarity.

Money is not a physical object like a coin, a bar of gold or a dollar bill. Money is at its core, a technology. It is a human invention designed to solve a specific set of human problems. Consider money, perhaps, in a new way. Think of money as a system for capturing time.

Time is the one thing we each have that is absolutely finite. We are born, we die, and the dash in between is all the time we have.

Think of production. We can usually produce more of some good by adding people to a task (also known as “WORK”). But we are still constrained by time. Whatever we produce is still limited by the amount of humans that can be organized to go into that production. Each of us possesses a limited amount of time available to us individually, so we need to convince or coerce others to add their time to ours if we want to achieve more than we can alone.

Out of this imperative, nations are born.

The most important quality of any particular form of money is how well it preserves the value of time over time. Can you buy the same amount of stuff or more in the future than you can buy today? If yes, congratulations - your money is accumulating time for you and future generations while you relax on the beach. If it takes more and more of a unit of money to buy the same amount of time in the future, well then I’m sorry, but that unit of money is getting weaker and weaker. It’s losing value or said another way – it’s losing purchasing power. The longer you hold it, the less it buys.

In a way, by purchasing goods and services, you are purchasing time. Every product and every service requires time to make and time to deliver - your time and/or someone else’s. The price therefore reflects the collective value of all the time put in. Money is a way we exchange time and move it around from where it is valued less to where it is valued more.

This is where prosperity comes from. It comes out of how well a society, collectively and each person, spends its time. How much time is spent creating and making? How much time is spent consuming? If we make more than we consume, we have something left over called wealth. If we consume more than we make, we are left with debt. You can’t consume what you don’t have, unless someone extends credit. Where does this “credit” come from? Basically –it’s made up.

Too much credit or debt eventually collapses and everyone is mixed up in the collapse.

If we understand that a unit of money represents a unit of time, and we understand time is limited, then a unit in a system of money with unlimited supply cannot have any value. This is the problem we are facing today with the world’s money supply. The supply of money in the world is increasing exponentially as central banks create money by giving loans to national governments, which is where our money comes from.

Our entire world financial system is a powder keg of debt.

National currencies today are known as fiat money, a currency without intrinsic value that has been given its power to be used as money by a government that says it is money by regulation. Wikipedia says, “Fiat money does not have use value, and has value only because a government maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value.” Well said, Wiki.

A government’s job of maintaining the value of its national money boils down to a confidence game. On what basis do the people who use that government’s money believe it has value?

What happens to the money and those who hold it when the foundation of that belief begins to crumble?

The Four Courses of the Apocalypse

by Joyce E. Chaplin

May 3, 2020

Joyce E. Chaplin (PhD and MA Johns Hopkins, BA Northwestern) is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. You can find her on Twitter here.

In our state of emergency, most Americans want to taste deliverance when they eat. Their wish is important. Humans mask their bare need to eat with culture: customs about when food can be taken, manners for how to consume it, equipment to prepare and serve it correctly, and shibboleths to restrict what can be eaten in the first place. Stockpiling, ordering take-out, gardening, pickling, cooking, baking—by expressing food preferences in a pandemic, US citizens demonstrate what they hope for and fear. What follows is a four-course menu based on popular quarantine options, all of them revealing that Americans hanker after normality. But what is normal? Life before COVID-19 had serious problems. #AloneTogether is a hopeful tag for social distancing. When we’re all, by definition, stress eating in various states of aloneness, are we also sustaining a United States that must, now and in the future, somehow hang together?

4 G 30 10A

We’ll start our meal with sourdough. On Twitter, ongoing convo about bubbly mothers is not about extroverted female parents. Mothers (or starters) are thick, fermented cultures of lactobacilli that, instead of baker’s yeast, leaven sourdough. Carefully cultivated, in jar or crock or Tupperware, starters look like loose, frothy dough. You measure some out for a bake, then tenderly feed the remainder some flour and water. True sourdough is vegan and is one of the world’s oldest foods, with each lactobacillus strain native to a specific place on Earth.

Sourdough is undeniably American. It was the sturdy fare of many a young man (or woman) who followed the call to go west, to wherever the urban supply line of brewer’s yeast gave out, whenever baking powder wasn’t yet commercially available. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, sourdough biscuits are the daily bread. Gold miners ate those biscuits, too, also sourdough flapjacks, fixed from treasured starters. Boudin Bakery claims (credibly) to be the longest continuously operating business in San Francisco. It was founded in 1849, when a Frenchman opened a commercial bakery, using a Forty-Niner’s sourdough mother, which the company says it’s tended ever since. (Bite into Boudin and you’re chewing on something roughly 170 years old.) Onward the bubbly mothers went, to the Klondike, site of the next gold rush. The “Sourdoughs,” as Alaska miners were called, are commemorated in Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush (1925). This is the movie in which the Little Tramp and his cabin mate, snowbound together (sound familiar?), get so hungry that Chaplin’s character boils and dines on his boot, and then his roomie seeks to dine on him.

Alas, it’s this vignette, with one starved Sourdough hallucinating that the other is a tasty chicken and chasing him with an axe, that I cannot forget amid the pleasant twittering about rustic boules. What do people think they’re doing when they bake bread at home, one loaf at a time, or even two by two, as if handily adapting ancient divine advice for surviving an impending disaster? Historically, people didn’t do that. Baking whole loaves of bread consumes lots of fuel. The ancient Near East, ancestral land of small-grains like wheat and bread baked from them, lost most of its trees in ancient times—Lebanon and Egypt once had forests of cedar and pine. As timber dwindled, firing an oven got expensive. Quick-cooking flatbreads were what people made at home. In the tree-depleted old world, commercial bakers had to figure the cost of fuel into baking multiple loaves of bread in a large oven. For a fee, a baker might make room for household loaves, or even other cooking, for people who couldn’t afford much fuel. One way or another, it could take a village to bake a loaf of bread. In North America, however, settlers found plentiful wood—great for baking—until they cleared the woodlands nearest the settlements. At that point, they needed a Monsieur Boudin to bake them something other than quick pancakes.

I don’t think most of social media’s sourdough bakers know that their re-enactment of American pioneer autonomy defies a bigger history in which daily bread evoked connection to others, if not dependence on them.

Frankly, American sourdough smells like settler-colonialism, a fragrance of biscuits and flapjacks rising above the log cabins and mining camps that steadily eroded Indigenous land rights while cutting down trees on those lands.

It’s a myth that pioneering individuals or families settled the West—the federal government did that, through policies that favored the spread of white population. The ability to own and maintain a freestanding household (with an oven) is still a legacy of US racial and class privileges.

Maybe, at this point, you’d like a drink with your meal? Lots of other people are having one, or three. The marketing research firm Nielsen found that, compared to a year ago, March 2020 showed a 75 perecent increase in spirits sold, a 66 percent increase in wine sales, 42 percent for beer, and a spike of 243 percent in online alcohol sales generally. (March 2020 cannabis sales also soared in states where it’s legal to buy.)

That’s self-medicating to the point of disaster. An editorial in the Boston Globe pleaded for a ban on alcohol sales during the emergency shutdown, pointing out booze’s role in rising rates of domestic abuse. Under quarantine, vulnerable individuals are miserably close to abusers and distanced from helpers. The nuclear family was supposed to have been cleansed of the worst residues of ancient patriarchal rights. We’re now engaged in a painful test of how much of that work was done. Post-quarantine rates of divorce, (re)marriage, and births will reveal collective confidence, or not, in the American nuclear family, temporarily returned, as it has been, to a state of snowbound homesteading.

Take cheer, for the moment, in our second course, crab rangoon. Aggregate Uber Eats data about early-April deliveries identified this as the nation’s third most popular dish, trailing french fries and pad thai. What is it? Bits of crab (or imitation crab) and seasonings are blended into cream cheese. Dollops of the tangy mass are wrapped in wonton pastry, then deep fried. The crisp bundles are typically served with a sweet dipping sauce. If you think this sounds like bar food, you’re right. Crab Rangoon seems to have been invented at Trader Vic’s, the post-World-War II tiki bar that also claims to have invented the mai tai. Crab rangoon has no connection to Yangon in Myanmar. The fried parcels belong to the chop-suey canon of Chinese-American foods, the knowingly false concoctions that mingle something authentically Asian (like wonton pastry) with some kind of Americana (“Philadelphia” cream cheese), often featuring an expensive treat, like crab.

Is this cultural appropriation? Maybe. Though it was Chinese immigrants themselves who shrewdly sold chop suey to white customers to ensure their grandchildren would never have to work in restaurants. Are crab rangoons culinary abominations? Well, what isn’t? It’s not as if ballpark beer and hotdogs greatly resemble the lager and wurst homesick German immigrants tried to recreate in the United States. Let’s give chop suey and crab rangoon the benefit of the doubt, regarding them as gateway dishes for the timid Euro-American palate. Without those dubious chimeras, would pad thai have become the second most ordered thing on Uber Eats in 2020?

The Uber data proves another of crab rangoon’s essential qualities: it’s not home-cooking; food service workers make it. When it arrives with its jewel-tone dipping sauce, it’s proof that you didn’t have to cook. Even if you buy frozen crab rangoon, somebody else got it ready for you to heat up. For this second course in our pandemic dinner, it still takes a village. One commentator on the Uber Eats data wondered (with studied innocence) what chicken tikka masala and “crag [sic] Rangoon” could possibly be? Sadly, some Americans don’t enjoy any Asian cuisine. (Perhaps they also call COVID-19 the “kung flu.”) The “crag” for crab was probably just a typo, b and g are neighbors on the keyboard, after all. But that mistake conceals the dish’s inherent sociability. No one orders crab rangoon from a distant crag where they can’t get a phone signal. Just remember: if you order anything, add a tip. Everyone in food service is tired, underpaid, and risking infection.

I hope you’re not full, because here comes the main course and it’s Spam. This is neither home-made nor ordered from a restaurant. Each can of Spam yields a dense, pink, rounded-edge oblong that can be sliced or diced, then baked, fried, or microwaved. It predates the microwave, invented in 1937 by the Hormel Company to sell pork shoulder during the Great Depresssion. “Spam” vaguely promised shoppers some nice spiced ham. Spam hit the big-time during World War II, when the US government bought it in bulk to feed servicemen. It remains popular on Pacific islands, including Hawai’i, that have had large US military bases.

Spam is newly coveted because it’s shelf stable, a prepper protein the Greatest Generation bequeathed to us. It joins several related revivals. Backyard gardening and home canning are also on the rise, just as victory gardens and adaptation to food rationing supported war efforts in the early twentieth century. It must be said, however, that today’s prepping also descends from the bleaker survivalism of the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, Spam-stocked bomb shelters were not so much parts of a collective program to defeat the enemy as they were ways to outsurvive one’s neighbors. Nicely browned, Spam has a crisp keep-calm-and-carry on quality. But also a Dr. Strangelove sizzle.

Spam sales are part of pandemic enthusiasm for animal products, even those produced from factory farms—even though we should know better. Spam is a branded product. People have heard of it even if they’ve never eaten it. It’s the antithesis of farm-to-table, also of vegetarianism or veganism. It’s not just processed food, but highly processed—and cruelly so. Spam is extracted from hogs, a highly sentient and social species. They are bred in metal cages with concrete floors and slaughtered on an industrial scale. Producing protein this way is inhumane and environmentally unsustainable. And yet meat is a high priority for many Americans. On April 28^th, President Trump signed an executive order to declare meat processing plants “critical infrastructure.” He is indifferent to the hogs, and to the meat-industry workers who now cannot practice social distancing. Who cares about them? Recent analysis of the most-Googled recipes in each US state showed that iterations of hamburger or ground beef were the top choice in twelve states, chicken in five, pork in three more—twenty of our fifty states seek animal flesh. But whatever industrial meat’s current merits as comfort-food, we cannot plan to subsist on it in the decades to come.

Time for dessert? Maybe you’re trying to avoid “the COVID 15,” the fifteen extra pounds stress-eating is packing around some self quarantiners. How about a healthy orange? Fruit isn’t a bad choice. Even grapes or apples, which are little more than bags of fructose and water, with trace vitamins, are better than actual candy.

But, first, give thanks to the people who pick your fruit and to the natural world that makes all food possible. Agricultural piece workers have unenviable jobs that poorly match the attractive pyramids of bounty in the produce section. This isn’t one of those (vanishingly rare) problems that the pandemic has made better. Most US farm workers are undocumented migrants, to whom many labor regulations never apply. They are now, in the pandemic, categorized as “essential workers,” out of concern to maintain the food supply. But this means the workers can’t stay home, either to recuperate if they’re sick or avoid people they know are infected—and those two factors feed on each other, even out in the fresh air of a field of antioxidant-rich strawberries. If we want to continue to enjoy berries or oranges, we’ll need to reconsider the compromised labor conditions for agricultural workers in an increasingly exclusionist United States.

Also, whether we want to think about it right now or not, climate change is threatening most crops, including those, like citrus, that are Goldilocks-picky about their temperature and rainfall.

Now, back to those antioxidants. Many fruits (and vegetables) have super-nutritional qualities. These are critical for maintaining health. Your body will disintegrate from scurvy if you cease to ingest Vitamin C; the known range of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and micro-nutrients have similar prophylactic functions. Together, they boost the immune system’s defense against infections, including COVID-19.

But fruit alone doesn’t ward off contagious diseases. We also need immunizations, which shield individuals from horrors like smallpox while giving populations the herd immunity that prevents outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, and the like. Anti-vaxxers, the people who think inoculating children creates autism, preach instead the efficacy of diet. In parallel, right-wing survivalists are peddling pandemic decoctions of colloidal silver. Silver has antibacterial properties; these have no effect on viruses like COVID-19, however. Nor will an orange a day truly keep the doctor away. If anti-vaxxing survives the pandemic, can anything kill it? More to the point, if civic intelligence about science could also be described in terms of herd immunity, at what point might we be collectively doomed by the ignorance of a minority?

I offer a fortune cookie at meal’s end. And the fortune reads:

Eat wisely—#AloneTogether is forever.

frank news is dedicated to storytelling across all mediums. A space for debate, discussion, and connection between experts and a curious readership. Topics are presented monthly with content delivered daily.

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