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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, Insightful) by VLM on Friday March 22 2024, @06:39PM (1 child)
That's how you know it's propaganda. An impressive headline with no data. See also recent reports that intermittent fasting will kill you, LOL. That one was hilarious.
As a refined product, a sufficiently large pile will contain at least one molecule found in any sample of crude oil to ever exist and we do have the tech to detect that. Does it mean anything at those low concentrations? Naw probably not.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 23 2024, @03:33AM
Yeah, my first thought was, "At what dose??"
Our local envirofruits distributed a flyer warning of the evils of the under-construction natural gas power plant. Their message was "OMG Umpteen Tons of These Terrible Pollutants every year!!" Except they were hoping no one noticed the negative exponents. So I roughed out their totals and it came to....
14.7 pounds per year. Total. About a third of a 5 gallon bucket. Less than blows around in our everyday wind.
Except then a friend with an accounting streak said no, you slipped a digit, it's 1.47 pounds per year.
Yes, we should all be in a flaming panic over a power plant that will produce a fraction of the toxins a single woodstove does.
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Intermittent fasting: Point 1: a lot of people struggling to lose or maintain weight are actually hypothyroid (that's why they gained weight in the first place); some of them will use intermittent fasting. Point 2: I ran across a paper by a cardiac pathologist going ballistic (since this is entirely treatable, but not ethically researchable) because his data was that half of all fatal cardiac events were in fact "flabby heart syndrome" which is directly caused by low T3 (the active form of thyroid hormone). Does anyone else notice the connection here??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.