Five Before Chaos

I’ve always been somewhat disturbed at the inability to get away from plastics (yes, it’s somewhat possible but extraordinarily difficult). Our clothing has polyester. The coatings on our walls. The insides of our cars, our upholstery, our food containers, health and beauty containers, you name it… much of the world is saturated with plastic. There’s even a Texas-sized patch of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean now. And non-plastic alternatives are often much more expensive.

I think there’s this great unsaid assumption by many Americans that if the use of something is widespread and generally available, it must be safe. I mean, corporations would never knowingly produce something harmful, right? And so we go on with plastic everything and most of us don’t give it a moment’s thought, right?

So plastic brings us a multitude of problems; its safety/toxicity, the problem of its disposal, and the fact that it uses a lot of petroleum. I’ve done a lot in the past few years to minimize my plastic consumption/exposure, but it hasn’t been easy. Europe seems to take the lead on a lot of these types of things, such as the EU Packaging Directive, which sets strict guidelines regarding packaging and recycling, much more stringent than the U.S. And the EU has banned the use of pthalates, a common component in plastics that can leach out, and have been known to cause birth defects. They are considered endocrine disruptors, which can mess with the body’s hormone production. Many believe that endocrine disruptors are why children are staring puberty much earlier than they did decades ago.

Well, it seems that there’ll be yet another thing for the free-market fundamentalists to whine and crap their pants over. The Washington Independent is reporting that the US Senate is considering a ban on pthalates (which are used in many, many children’s toys as well as drinking bottles):

On Thursday, with at least eight states contemplating a phthalate ban similar to one California passed last year, the U.S. Senate, while overhauling the Consumer Products Safety Commission, included an amendment to ban phthalates from all children’s toys and products. Hundreds of thousands of tons of phthalates are produced each year and put in plastics used for everything from shower curtains to baby bottle nipples, to make them soft and pliable.

If the amendment, added by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), survives conference committee and is signed by President George W. Bush, Americans will have the same protection that citizens of the European Union have had since 1999, when the EU parliament responded to studies that suggested phthalates might cause harm to baby boys. Since Europe banned the substances from toys, they’ve been joined by countries like China, Romania and Mexico—not usually regarded as ground breakers in public health. How is it that the United States, which used to set the gold standard for public health regulation, has fallen so far behind?

How? Well, when you have former industry hacks running the departments regulating the industries, these things tend to happen quite often. Of course, the industry is just outraged, and does their typical foot-stomping mixed with accusations of junk science and the like (wow- they even quote a scientist from the Hoover Institute- how mind-numbingly predictable). No surprises, there. But there’s a golden egg n all of this, in how it could actually gain support from the crybaby right wing:

Research done in the 1990s showed that female rats fed phthalates gave birth to male pups with defective genitals. It was such a reproducible effect in the laboratory that scientists started calling it “phthalate syndrome.” Babies and toddlers suck on plastic toys all the time, so there was concern that ingesting too many phthalates could affect testosterone or other male hormones.

Now, you know the one thing that wingers fear as much, if not more than the terrorist brown menace, is ‘the gay’. With a bit of message tweaking (such as leaving out big, scientific sounding words), we just might be able to convince them that the plastics industry is working in part with the ‘radical homosexual agenda’, and that they need to stop ‘em dead in their tracks. Might work considering how much other bullshit they believe on a consistent basis. More on Feinstein’s amendment here.

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