You may have noticed that I haven’t updated the blog for a few days now.  Exams and end of term papers have kept me pretty busy (in addition to my already hectic schedule) and I had been feeling generally burnt out with writing.  Needless to say, I ‘m back.

Last week my wife got into… a heated discussion about plastic with her mother.  While still awaiting my daughter’s arrival my wife and I made the decision to exclude plastics as much as possible from our lives, specifically where my daughter is concerned.  We had both read why not to use plastic water bottles or plastic bags (500 billion to a trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year).  Primarily to do with waste (bottled water creates 1.5 million tons of plastic waste a year, and burns 47 million gallons of oil to produce) there was also some mention of plastic having gender bending properties.  We learned enough then (about a year ago now) that we decided to try and rid ourselves of plastic altogether.  Easier said than done.

 

Plastic is pretty much everywhere.  It is as insidious as it is ubiquitous.  Once our initial fervor wore down, my wife and I grudgingly accepted that plastic would play a role in our lives.  So it is perhaps understandable that my mother in law saw no problem buying a fisher price walker for my daughter.  She had seen us compromise, returning to the fold of the cult of plastic.  For her generation plastic was a miracle material, which had made the consumer dreams of millions come true.  Except, there is a problem.  A number of them actually.  Plastic is a derivative of oil (something which is immediately problematic for me), and can be very toxic.  Ever throw plastic in a fire?  Hint: the thick, black, acrid smoke is not a good thing.  The chemicals that make that smoke so nauseating are not only released during combustion.  Overtime those toxins leech out of plastic, a process that is sped up by heating it.  Think of the warped tupperware container you pull out of the microwave after nuking it too long.  Think of the transfer of chemicals into your food.  Those same chemicals are in the clear hard plastic sports bottle you take to the gym contaminating your water.  Thanks to landfills and litter, the chemicals in plastic are also leaching out into the groundwater, spreading throughout the environment.  It’s not the worst of our problems, but it still sucks hard.

The risks involved?  Toxins contained in plastic have been shown to interfere with more than 200 genes.  They affect breast and prostate tissue and are linked to the development of cancers.  They are linked to neurological disorders like down-syndrome, and have been shown to interfere with the reception of insulin leading to diabetes.  As I suggested earlier, there are also indications that these toxins could have serious effects on hormones, both in our species and others. 

Children are far more susceptible to the toxic chemicals that leach out of plastic than adults are.  Their tiny, developing systems react to minor doses with frightening effects.  As anyone who has ever seen a child should know, they pretty much have everything in their mouths all the time, meaning the chance that they are exposed to a dose is higher.  So it was not without due consideration that my wife looked at the fisher price walker with a bad taste in her mouth.

Yesterday, a few days after the incident, Health Canada has released its report that BPA is not really great for human consumption.  Retailers have pulled plastic baby bottles from the shelves.  Karma has excellent timing. 

 

Although I’m glad to see that the government is stepping up and doing something about the problem, I can’t help noticing that their doing it in a typically timid beaurocratic fashion.  If they have evidence that would lead them to classify BPA, whcih is the largest commercially produced plastic in North America, then why not ban it outright?  Why? because it is the largest commercially produced plastic.  And that means cancelling it would hurt the profit margins of big business interests.  So we will continue to be exposed through canned foods (many of which are lined with BPA), through paper milk cartons (also lined with BPA), and a myriad other consumer products (ubiquitos and insidous).

It occurs to me that a lot of this stems from the pace of our society.   By which I mean that, if we slowed down and allowed really adequate time for testing before unleashing products onto the public, then we might avoid this catastrophic learning curve.  It is not coincidence that cancer and heart disease, and all sorts of bad shit have multiplied since the advent of our technologically driven emachine age.  Maybe I sound like a neo-luddite here.  Who knows, maybe I am a luddite trying to smash the machine out of fear and loathing.  But it doesn’t feel to me like the end of the world to slow down a little.  In fact, you might say it feels like the beginning.  

“I realize that something that was growing inside of me for some time… has matured: and it is the hate of civilization, the absurd image of people moving like locos to the rhythm of that tremendous noise that seems to me like the hateful antithesis of peace.” – Ernesto “Che” Guevara.