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Scientists have compiled a list of over 16,000 chemicals present in plastic products and found that more than 4,000 of these were hazardous to human health and the environment.
The research review, known as the PlastChem report, was released on Thursday and comes ahead of the next round of negotiations for a UN treaty on global plastic pollution.
Researchers, who spent a year combing through research reports, sorted chemicals used in plastics based on their environmental and health effects – information the team hopes will inform governmental regulations and international negotiations to curb plastic use.
The review found that there are more plastic chemicals than previously known, and 4,200 (26 per cent) of these compounds, including those used as raw ingredients, stabilisers and colourants, are of concern due to their "persistent, bioaccumulative, mobile and/or toxic" nature.
[...] More than 400 of the chemicals identified in the report are in every major commonly used plastic product such as food packaging, and all the tested plastics leached hazardous chemicals into the environment, researchers noted.
[...] While about 1,000 plastic chemicals are regulated by global treaties such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, thousands more are not.
[...] "The PlastChem report is a wake-up call to policymakers and industry. We need more transparency and better management of chemicals of concern in plastic," Hans Peter Arp, a co-author of the report from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), said.
"The future of innovation in plastic should focus on safety, sustainability, and necessity, rather than just functionality," Dr Arp said.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 22 2024, @04:13PM (12 children)
>We need more transparency
Yes, down with opaque plastics!
>banned plastic grocery bags
But did they, really? What are the replacement bags made of? I'll wager it's not 100% cotton.
My problem with the thin plastic bag dilemma is: the alternative bags get dirty, need washing, eventually replacing, and when you look at a realistic total life cycle of one of these "reusable" bags, is the total environmental impact really any less?
I would very much like for grocery bags (thin and disposable or thick and reusable) to start being made of much more quickly biodegradable material, like 7 days in the sun turns them to dust. 12 hours in ordinary rainwater dissolves them. And the residual material is bio-available for (safe) digestion by common fungi, insects, birds, whatever.
Meanwhile: "Scientists have compiled a list of over 16,000 chemicals present in plastic products and found that more than 4,000 of these were hazardous" - well, you pump up millions of years old bio-waste material that has been isolated from the active biome all that time, process it with high energy / pressure / temperature, occasionally throwing in toxic elements for various desired effects, and you end up with: weird stuff that the biome didn't evolve to deal with... of course a significant amount of that is going to be toxic. Hell, a lot of what they process in Houston from crude left-overs after making various fuels gets turned into pesticides...
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday March 22 2024, @04:57PM (3 children)
The square reuseable bags i use are used often. According to 'below', i've used my bags enough to re-coupe(sp?) the plastic i used to use.
Net profit? I think so... I'm STILL using them.
We see less plastic bags floating around, or getting caught in bushes.
I see this as a plus.
"For a durable polypropylene bag to have the same climate impact as one thin, single-use plastic bag, it needs to be used an estimated 10 to 20 times, according to a 2020 report from the United Nations Environment Programme."
--- https://canadianbusiness.com/design/reusable-grocery-bag-single-use-plastic-bag-ban-canada/ [canadianbusiness.com]
Yes. Yes, please.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 3, Funny) by hendrikboom on Friday March 22 2024, @05:51PM (1 child)
grocery bag should not decompose before I get my groceries home.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 22 2024, @10:16PM
>grocery bag should not decompose before I get my groceries home.
Absolutely agree... do you walk 12 hours in the rain while carrying your groceries? Seven days in the sun?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 22 2024, @10:10PM
>We see less plastic bags floating around, or getting caught in bushes.
I see this as the most significant plus.
>For a durable polypropylene bag to have the same climate impact as one thin, single-use plastic bag, it needs to be used an estimated 10 to 20 times
With, or without washing? What is the environmental impact of washing those bags? Labor cost? Associated costs when the bags aren't washed sufficiently?
I'm not a fan of the thin baggies, but since COVID I have been a fan of home delivery of groceries, and there's argument to be made that having groceries delivered is much better for the environment overall - it's like carpooling for your food. Unfortunately Instacart drivers are more than a little random - some pack all your groceries in the (reused) spare cardboard, some buy (too many) paper bags, some buy premium plastic reusable bags for you... Maybe we'll get 'em trained, someday, but I expect this lack of control feeling is just like what the "bag overlords" feel when they try to convince shoppers to change their habits.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by mcgrew on Friday March 22 2024, @05:59PM
I'm pretty sure they're banning single-use plastic bags.
Sheesh. Corollary to Poe's Law: Is it a troll, or a dumbass that really doesn't know any better? People like you make pedants necessary.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday March 22 2024, @06:32PM (3 children)
Bring your old laundry basket and toss it in the cart, or the old Aldi standby of empty cardboard shipping boxes the food arrived in.
I live in a deep red civilized area far from the coasts and we technically do have bags but its usually for the people buying a couple items. For weekly shopping its all about the laundry basket or box.
I find it convenient to have one bucket for all my food. I suppose people who buy more than a basket-full at a time would be annoyed.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 23 2024, @03:13AM (2 children)
Walmart noted that in some area where "single-use" grocery bags were banned, they were suddenly selling a lot more of the small plastic garbage bags.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 24 2024, @04:33PM (1 child)
Thats a good point I almost forgot about, there's a "Standard kitchen 13 gallon size" I've been using since I got married decades ago, but back in the bachelor pad era I had the smaller "supposedly bathroom size" trash can in my kitchen and I always used plastic grocery store bags for that smaller trash can. I suppose all apartment dwellers will have to spend more money on single use only trash bags when plastic grocery bags are banned...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 24 2024, @04:54PM
Sometimes a person wonders who's actually goosing the bans....
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 22 2024, @07:45PM (1 child)
> the alternative bags get dirty, need washing, eventually replacing,
The single-use plastic bag ban came here in 2020 but was encouraged long before that. For the first year or two we washed the reusable bags, but haven't bothered since. If some onion skin or other fluff collects I turn them inside out and shake outdoors. We're still using the same bags, most were free trade show swag. They are a mix of different materials, some approaching 10 years old, a big savings in plastic. They live in the car and it's now second nature to grab them when walking into the store.
Oddly enough, relatives in another state with no ban accumulate a large number of single use plastic grocery bags. We take some off their hands when we visit (a few times/year) to use for our trash (we don't buy plastic trash bags). Our trash is approximately thirds - compost, recycling & landfill.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 22 2024, @10:19PM
Where I live, we already have cockroaches in the paper bags before you ever put food in them.
Leaving bits of any kind of food in the bags invites ants, roaches, and other things to visit on a regular basis.
If they happen to stay damp on an unfortunate evening when the mold spores are abundant, then you get nice black patches wherever spore-meets-water.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 23 2024, @03:47AM
Actually the degrading is often why I have to dispose of plastic stuff.
I still have plastic stuff from the 1970s (which probably wasn't designed to degrade).
I'm also still re-using a fair bit of those single-use plastic bags. But some of them depolymerize after some time and it becomes very annoyingly messy.
The real problem with single use plastic is littering and improper waste disposal. If the plastic was landfilled or incinerated for energy how is it a problem? Also if biodegradable plastic is landfilled does it degrade that much? And do you really want it to degrade in a landfill? Remember if it's landfilled and not degrading it's locked up carbon (yes some of you will argue some of it eventually leaches out and gets into the oceans etc but in the big picture that's like complaining about a speck when you have a plank in your eye). And if you landfill stuff in a somewhat organized way, maybe future generations/species might be able to mine the stuff more easily (just like coal deposits are mined today).
Also it's ironic that the ones trying to do all these mostly pointless stuff aren't the main sources of plastic bags/straws in the ocean. It's the other countries: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic-waste-pollution-by-country [visualcapitalist.com]
https://www.reusethisbag.com/articles/countries-that-pollute-most-ocean-plastics [reusethisbag.com]
So maybe if you really wanted to do something you could pressure those top countries to handle their plastic waste better.
After all when Philippines is generating 36% of the ocean plastic trash, getting them to cut down to 10% or lower would do magnitudes more for the environment than say Sweden 100% switching from plastic straws to metal (Sweden incinerates plastic waste to generate electricity - so if they are not a nation full of litterbugs, few of those straws are ending up in the ocean).
The other source of plastics are car tyres: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-tiny-plastic-particles-tyres-clogging.html [phys.org]
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/14/car-tyres-are-major-source-of-ocean-microplastics-study [theguardian.com]
If you see the bars in the first link for North America and Europe the microplastic waste generated is similar if not more compared to the bigger stuff.
But I doubt there's much of a solution for that, other than not driving as much and having the tyres last longer. There are many good reasons why tyres are using synthetic stuff instead of rubber. And why you don't want them to degrade fast in the environment. In fact it's very likely that the longer lasting tyres generate lower plastic waste per year than the ones that don't last long.