Tag: plastics

Living Without Plastic

  • Cheryl Lohrman victorious after finding a specialty deli that would sell her cheese and put it, plastic free, in her steel tin. (Photo courtesy of Sadie Babits)

We use a lot of plastic. Every year some 30 million tons of plastic in the U.S. from diapers to bottles get tossed in landfills. One woman wants to change those numbers. She’s trying to live her life without plastic. Sadie Babits caught up with her to find out if that’s really possible.

Transcript

We use a lot of plastic. Every year some 30 million tons of plastic in the U.S. from diapers to bottles get tossed in landfills. One woman wants to change those numbers. She’s trying to live her life without plastic. Sadie Babits caught up with her to find out if that’s really possible.

When Cheryl Lohrmann comes to the grocery store all she sees is plastic. Plastic yogurt containers, cheese wrapped in plastic shrink-wrap, juice bottles, plastic bags. She doesn’t want this stuff in her life. So Lohrmann decided she’d vote with her wallet by refusing to buy anything with plastic.

“We’re at cherry sprouts grocery store in Portland, OR where I’m going to purchase some cheese and some eggs.”

Eggs are no problem. She just puts them in her used egg carton. But cheese is a different story. She has a small steel tin that looks like it belongs with her camping gear – not the grocery store. And Lohrmann has a special request for the guy behind the counter.

“And that is if I get the cheese not wrapped up in plastic but just in this container or maybe you could put this on paper.”

“Aahhh. I don’t think we can do that because it needs to be wrapped up.”

Lohrmann gets that reaction a lot. So she won’t buy cheese here. It means a trip to another shop – this time a high-end specialty deli.

LouAnne Schooler owns this store. She explains to Lohrmann why they use plastic.

“Plastic, it’s the unfortunately simplest choice because we wrap and re-wrap continuously throughout the day and it can’t be left unwrapped and people need to see the cheese so that precludes it from being wrapped in most papers.”

But Schooler says she’s only too happy to help people like Lohrmann who don’t want their cheese shrink- wraped. So she drops the cheese –plastic free – into Lohrmann’s tin.

“That’s a good chunk of cheese. Magical moment here–thanks for letting me do that”

“Sure.”

Lohrmann started going plastic free a couple of years ago after reading Elizabeth Royte’s book Garbageland. The author tracked her trash to find out where it ended up. The chapter on plastic struck a nerve with Lohrmann.

“I think it’s been taken too far when you have toothpicks individually wrapped in plastic. You know you just start to think is that really necessary given the fact that this is such a toxic material that doesn’t have high enough recycling rights to really justify having it.”

Lohrmann also gets miffed that you end up paying for plastic three times. You pay for it at the grocery store and again to have it hauled to the landfill. Finally, she says we pay for it environmentally – plastic doesn’t disappear. So you might think it’s a little nuts to even think about living a life free of plastic. Lohrmann gets that.

“It is hard right now to feel like you can maneuver to get whatever you want without plastic.”

“Ok, so on a scale of one to ten–ten being plastic free–where are you?”

“I would say probably a nine.”

That’s a nine when it comes to buying groceries. Because let’s face it. Plastic is everywhere even in Lohrmann’s home. There’s her computer, picture frames, even the parts on her bike. She realizes going plastic free is nearly impossible but she’s willing to try to send a message especially to businesses that we need to reduce the amount of plastic in our lives.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.

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More Oceanic Garbage Patches Found

  • Marine researcher Marcus Eriksen says the plastic packaging that wraps nearly all consumer products is killing some marine animals.(Photo courtesy of the NOAA Marine Debris Program)

A giant field of plastic debris is floating in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean. Now researchers are finding more of these garbage patches in other Oceans. Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

A giant field of plastic debris is floating in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean. Now researchers are finding more of these garbage patches in other Oceans. Mark Brush has more:

Researchers say there are ocean currents that sort of swirl around like water in a toilet bowl. There called oceanic gyres.

The Algalita Marine Research Foundation was one of the groups that documented the problem in the North Pacific Ocean. This year they sailed to the gyres in the North Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean.

They found miles and miles of plastic fishing line, milk crates, spoons and forks, and bits of plastic bags.

Marcus Eriksen is with the group:

Eriksen: I challenge you to walk into Wal-Mart or a K-Mart and find a product that’s not made from plastic, packaged or labeled with plastic. And we’re finding more and more of this debris being lost onto the ground washing down rivers and streams out to sea.

Eriksen says the plastic is killing some marine animals. Fish, birds, turtles, and whales get tangled up in the mess – or they mistake it for food.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Personal Care Products and ADHD

  • Engel says the phthalates found in many cosmetic products can be toxic to the nervous system.(Photo courtesy of Steven Depolo CC-2.0)

There’s been a rise in reports of behavioral disorders in kids over the past decade or so. Some researchers say genetics, lack of sleep, and chaotic households all contribute to things like ADHD. Now researchers say another cause could be personal care products. Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

There’s been a rise in reports of behavioral disorders in kids over the past decade or so. Some researchers say genetics, lack of sleep, and chaotic households all contribute to things like ADHD. Now researchers say another cause could be personal care products. Julie Grant reports.

Researcher Stephanie Engel at Mount Sinai College of Medicine says we’re all exposed to a group of chemicals called phthalates all the time. Heavier ones are used in plastics. Lower weight phthalates are used in fragrances, shampoos, cosmetics and nail polishes, to make them work better and last longer.

Some studies have looked at the relationships between phthalates and problems in reproduction. But Engel says phthalates are can be toxic to the nervous system. So she and her colleagues wanted to see if exposure to phthalates in the womb affected children’s brain development.

“WE ENROLLED A GROUP OF WOMEN WHO WERE PREGNANT AND RECEIVING PRENATAL CARE AT MT. SINAI. AND WHEN THEY WERE PREGNANT, WE COLLECTED A URINE SAMPLE FROM THEM. AND WE CONTINUED TO FOLLOW THE WOMEN AND THEIR CHILDREN FOR THE NEXT TEN YEARS.”

Engel says researchers tested the urine of the pregnant women in the study.

That’s because when we rub on lotion or use shampoo, phthalates are absorbed into our bodies, processed and eliminated.

She says the women who had higher levels of the pthalates during pregnancy reported more behavioral problems as their children got older:

“THEIR PARENTS, THEIR MOTHERS, REPORTED THEIR BEHAVIOR AS MORE DISRUPTIVE AND MORE PROBLEMATIC. SO THEY TENDED TO BE MORE AGGRESSIVE, HAVE MORE ATTENTION PROBLEMS, HAVE MORE CONDUCT PROBLEMS AND ALSO EXHIBIT MORE SYMPTOMS OF DEPRESSION.”

Engel says the problems looked like the types of problems found in children with ADHD: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

She says no behavior effects were found for the phthalates used in vinyl toys and other soft plastics. But the higher the mother’s exposure to phthalates found in personal care products, the more the symptoms were manifested by their children. The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal – Environmental Health Perspectives.

“I CANNOT SEE HOW THE CONCLUSIONS THAT ARE REACHED ARE SUPPORTED BY THE WAY THE STUDY IS DONE.”

John Bailey is chief scientist for the Personal Care Products Council. That’s the trade association for the companies that make things like cosmetics, shampoo and nail polish.

He says in any study that correlates a behavior to an outcome – there needs to be a control for outside influences.

“IN THIS CASE THOSE CONTROLS, AND AGAIN THESE ARE EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, NO MATTER WHAT TYPE OF STUDY YOU’RE DOING, ARE NOT THERE. THEY’RE NOT CONTROLLING FOR THE GENETICS OF THE CHILDREN, THEIR HOME ENVIRONMENT, THEIR DIETS.”

Without those kinds of controls, Bailey says there’s no way to draw a conclusion from the study.

Other scientists who’ve looked at phthalates say the Mount Sinai study shows a new area of concern about these chemicals. But it needs to be replicated by other research.

Still, this isn’t the first time this type of correlation has been made. In a study published last year, Korean researchers linked childhood exposure to phthalates to ADHD.

Researcher Stephanie Engel says environmental toxicants, like phthalates, clearly play a role in child neurodevelopment.

“THERE’S NOTHING ELSE THAT COULD EXPLAIN THE RESULTS THAT WE’VE OBSERVED. WE SPENT OVER A YEAR PROCESSING THIS DATA AND LOOKING AT IT IN MANY DIFFERENT WAYS. IT IS WHAT IT IS. THESE ARE THE RELATIONSHIPS.”

Engel says more study needs to be done. In the meantime, she says pregnant women might want to avoid phthalates in personal care products. They’re not listed on the label – but she says anything that has “fragrance” on the ingredients list probably contains phthalates.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Waiting for the FDA to Rule on BPA

  • The chemical Bisphenol-A, or BPA, is found in some plastic food packaging and the inside of most tin-cans. (Photo courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)

The government missed a deadline to
declare whether a chemical in food
packaging is safe. Shawn Allee reports critics are growing
tired of the delay:

Transcript

The government missed a deadline to
declare whether a chemical in food
packaging is safe. Shawn Allee reports critics are growing
tired of the delay:

The chemical is Bisphenol-A, or BPA. It’s found in some plastic food packaging and the inside of most tin-cans.

The US Food and Drug Administration is reviewing whether BPA causes developmental diseases and some cancers. The agency missed a deadline of November 30th, and some groups are getting impatient.

Sarah Jennsen is with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She says while the Food and Drug Administration deliberates, more studies are coming out against BPA.

“We’ve had studies now published that show toddlers exposed to BPA behave diffrently from toddlers who are not exposed, and so this human research which is being published is very concerning because it’s replicating what we’ve already seen in the animal studies.

The Food and Drug Administration won’t say which studies it’s including in its scientific review of BPA or when it will finish.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Should We Recycle Everything?

  • Right now, San Francisco is at 72% recycling. They also just passed legislation to make composting mandatory. (Photo source: Tewy at Wikimedia Commons)

Recycling has become the law in
San Francisco. Residents who fail
to recycle and compost will face
warnings and, eventually, a fine.
It’s part of the city’s goal to
eliminate waste altogether. But,
as Amy Standen reports, recycling
and composting can only take us
so far:

Transcript

Recycling has become the law in
San Francisco. Residents who fail
to recycle and compost will face
warnings and, eventually, a fine.
It’s part of the city’s goal to
eliminate waste altogether. But,
as Amy Standen reports, recycling
and composting can only take us
so far:

(conversation in Chinese)

Janis Peng is a foot soldier in San Francisco’s war against garbage. Today, she’s going door to door in a San Francisco Chinatown apartment complex, trying to convince the mostly elderly residents to make better use of their city-provided compost bin.

In fact, Peng is part of a city-wide effort to eliminate waste altogether. In 1989, California passed a law, which was considered radically ambitious at the time. They wanted to divert away from landfills 50% of the state’s garbage by the year 2000.

For San Francisco, that wasn’t enough.

“We got to 50%, and we said, ‘well we’re here now, what are we going to do next?’”

That’s Jared Blumenthal. He’s head of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment. Today, he’s in the backseat of a Toyota Prius. He’s on his way to a recycling press conference.

“So in 2003, we set the goal of 75% by 2010 and to zero waste by 2020.”

Right now, San Francisco’s at 72% recycling. City officials say that mandatory recycling will bring that number up even higher. But can any city ever get to zero waste?

(sound of trucks and machinery)

“It’s almost 9:45 in the morning and some of the trucks that went out this morning are coming in with their first loads.”

Robert Reed is a spokesman for Sunset Scavenger Company, in San Francisco. Here at Pier 96, dozens of workers stand by conveyor belts, sorting out the contents of an entire city’s worth of blue bins.

“All these materials go to different places, the glass goes to a glass plant, the paper goes to a paper mill.”

Sunset Scavenger sells these commodities to buyers here and in Asia. That generates revenue that helps fund the program. But recycling is expensive, in part because some products – like many plastics – cost far more to recycle than they’re worth.

“We’re dealing with clear plastic and opaque plastic and medium plastics. And many of these containers have three types of plastics.”

Aluminum and glass can be yanked off the conveyor belts with magnets and other machinery. But plastic has to be hand sorted.

Mark Murray is executive director of Californians Against Waste, a Sacramento non-profit group.

“We have seven different types of plastic resins and manufacturers invent new ones every day. And I know it might make us feel good to put those number sevens into the recycling bin, the scrap value is insufficient. It’s not sustainable recycling.”

Murray says he hears all the time from residents who want to eliminate waste all together.

“They recycle everything, but they can’t get their city to take a certain type of number 6 or 7 plastic in their program. And they’re mad at the city. But it’s not just about recycling everything we get. That’s not gonna solve the problem.”

That’s because some things may never make sense to recycle. Like ballpoint pens and plastic razors.

Murray say that maybe if the costs for those items included what cities pay to take them apart for recycling or to dump them in the landfill, maybe people would use less of them, bringing us a little closer to the holy grail of zero waste.

For The Environment Report, I’m Amy Standen.

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BPA Making Little Girls Aggressive?

  • The researcher plans to follow the children to see if the aggressive behavior is lasting. (Photo courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)

A study has found links between a chemical used in some plastics and aggressive behavior in girls. Lester Graham reports on the latest research on BPA:

Transcript

A study has found links between a chemical used in some plastics and aggressive behavior in girls. Lester Graham reports on the latest research on BPA:

BPA, Bisphenol-A, is used in a lot of plastic products including plastic dental fillings, carbon-less paper receipts and most canned food linings.

Researchers tested 249 pregnant women for their exposure to BPA and then followed-up after they gave birth.

Joe Braun is one of the researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Braun says the mothers were given a lengthy questionnaire on the children’s behavior when they turned two.

“And what we found is that the exposure to BPA, or bisphenol-A, in pregnancy was associated with behaviors like aggression or hyperactivity. And this association was strongest in girls and we really didn’t even observe an association in boys.”

The study was published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

Braun says they’ll continue to follow the children to see if the aggressive behavior is lasting.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Interview: From the Pacific Garbage Patch

  • Researchers with Project Kaisei are studying a swirling vortex of trash that has accumulated out in the Pacific Ocean. (Photo by Annie Crawley, courtesy of Project Kaisei)

A huge current rotates in the Pacific Ocean, causing floating plastic trash to gather in a giant vortex of garbage in the middle of the ocean – it’s become the world’s biggest dump. Project Kaisei has sent two ships to the area to study the problem. Doug Woodring is on the New Horizon. He talked with Lester Graham by satellite phone:

Transcript

A huge current rotates in the Pacific Ocean, causing floating plastic trash to gather in a giant vortex of garbage in the middle of the ocean – it’s become the world’s biggest dump. Project Kaisei has sent two ships to the area to study the problem. Doug Woodring is on the New Horizon. He talked with Lester Graham by satellite phone:

Lester Graham: You’re in the middle of the Pacific right now, looking for the Great Pacific Garbage patch. How much luck have you had in locating some of this plastic debris?

Doug Woodring: Unfortunately, too much luck. (laughs) It hasn’t been very difficult. In fact, I’m running into, ah, I can look out the window and see a big floating piece, right now, as we’re going by. But we’ve been, the last 5-6 days, we’ve been in it consistently. It’s not as many big pieces as the world might think, but it’s way many more small pieces than people know. And the reason is, with the UV dedrigation in the plastics, it get very brittle when it’s broken down by the sun, so after some time in the water, when the wave action, it’s very easy for everything to break down and sort of crack. So what we’re getting is what they call ‘confetti’, and it’s just literally in some places many, many pieces per square meter of this stuff. And we are really looking mostly at the surface, so it’s not known yet how deep this is either. So, there’s a lot of stuff out here.

Graham: Why’s this bad for the environment?

Woodring: When you get small pieces, you’ve got mistaken potential food source for animals. So, the marine life can be eating this. It is possible that it gets in the food chain. There are toxins, heavy metals, and persistent organic pollutants that attach themselves to plastics when they float. So, it’s not just a piece of plastic that a marine life eats, it’s a polluted piece of plastic. It’s also a little island, or a little flotation for species that can float around the ocean – and invasive species can go to different parts of the waters or land that wouldn’t have traveled that way otherwise. So, there’s a lot of implications that this science is only just now starting to help us figure out what’s going on.

Graham: Does anybody have any idea what we can do to reduce the impact of this huge garbage patch or to clean it up?

Woodring: Well, this is what we’re out here for. That’s the main part of our mission is to find solutions. And we can’t find solutions until we have some of the answers, and some of the data. So what we’re out here is with two vessels now, over a 30 day period, really looking for that data – water depth, leadings and temperatures and flows and salinity – to see how the plastics and the material, the debris might move around in the ocean. We will, later, be doing some analysis on the material, science of the plastics, to see if it’s recognizable by satellite. Because, obviously, without satellite imagery, it’s impossible to know exactly where the bigger masses are. You know, ‘how to clean it up,’ is going to be a very tricky thing, because the oceans are so big and these particles are not big. It’s all going to come back to what we’re doing on land, really, and the land policies for different ways to bring in better recycling and rebate programs to get a lot of the plastic that is out there today to be reused instead of simply thrown away, and so it doesn’t get into the rivers or the oceans in the first place.

Doug Woodring is a co-founder of Project Kaisei. He spoke with The Environment Report’s Lester Graham.

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Sending a City’s Garbage Up in Flames

  • Michigan Waste Energy Chief Engineer Brad Laesser checks the cameras and emissions data at Detroit's incinerator. (Photo by Sarah Hulett)

Back in the 1980s and 90s,
dozens of communities across
the US built incinerators to
get rid of their trash. Many
of them financed the massive
furnaces with bonds they’re just
now paying off. And now that
those debts are off their books,
some cities are re-thinking whether
burning trash makes environmental
and economic sense. Sarah Hulett reports:

Transcript

Back in the 1980s and 90s,
dozens of communities across
the US built incinerators to
get rid of their trash. Many
of them financed the massive
furnaces with bonds they’re just
now paying off. And now that
those debts are off their books,
some cities are re-thinking whether
burning trash makes environmental
and economic sense. Sarah Hulett reports:

About 300 garbage trucks dump their loads each day at the nation’s biggest
municipal incinerator.

“You see the conveyor house going across, that’s conveying the fuel to the
boilers.”

That’s Brad Laesser. He’s the chief engineer at the Michigan Waste Energy
facility in Detroit.

The “fuel” he’s talking about is shredded-up trash.

And he says that’s the beauty of facilities like this. They produce electricity.

“So right now we’re putting out about 50 megawatts. But we can go to
here.”

Laesser points to 70 on the output gauge. That’s enough electricity to power
about half the homes in Detroit. And the leftover steam is used to heat and
cool more than 200 buildings downtown.

Sounds great, right?

Well, Brad Van Guilder of the Ecology Center says not so much.

“Be wary of people coming and talking to you about large, expensive magic
machines that are going to dispose of your waste for you.”

Van Guilder says municipal waste incinerators are major contributors to
smog, and spew dangerous pollutants like dioxin, lead and mercury.

And he says huge furnaces like Detroit’s make it nearly impossible to get
viable recycling efforts off the ground.

“Think about what’s in the trash that you throw out every day. One of the
most important components is paper and plastic.”

Both can be recycled. But Detroit has not had a curbside recycling program
for the past 20 years. That’s because the contract with the incinerator
required that all trash picked up at the curb be used to keep the furnaces
burning.

That changed this summer, though – when the contract expired. Now about
30,000 households are part of a curbside recycling pilot project. And there
are drop-off sites where people can take their recyclables.

(sound of recycling center)

Matthew Naimi heads an organization that runs several drop-off sites, and –
maybe surprisingly – he’s okay with the incinerator. Naimi says he sees
trash disposal and recycling as two separate industries.

“I realized that if we shut the incinerator down before we got a good
established recycling program running, we’d be burying our recyclables
instead of burning them.”

And officials with Covanta – which runs the Detroit incinerator – agree that
recycling and incineration can work together.

Paul Gilman is the chief sustainability officer for Covanta. He says landfills
are the problem – not recycling.

“Landfills and energy-from-waste facilities, that’s where the competition is.
It isn’t at the upper step of recycling.”

He says cheap landfill space makes the economics of incineration difficult.

But he’s hoping that could change with the passage of a climate change bill
in Washington. Gilman says in Europe and Asia, trash incinerators like
Detroit’s don’t get treated the same way as power plants fueled with coal or
natural gas.

“So in Asia, under the Kyoto protocols, a facility like this actually generates
what are called greenhouse gas credits. They’re reducing greenhouse gasses
by the act of processing solid waste and keeping it from going to a landfill.”

Where trash produces methane – a potent greenhouse gas.

But the people who want the incinerator shut down say they don’t believe
burning trash is the greener way to go. They want the city to landfill its
waste while it builds an aggressive recycling program.

So far, they’re not getting what they want from city leaders.

The board that oversees how Detroit handles its trash recently voted to go
with incineration for at least the next year.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sarah Hulett.

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Bpa in Your Body

  • BPA is not only found in plastic bottles, it is also found in the lining of most canned foods (Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)

A chemical found in plastic might be present in people’s bodies more than previously thought. A number of previous studies suggest that even at very low levels bisphenol-A, or BPA, could be linked to health problems. They range from prostate and breast cancer to early puberty in kids. Rebecca Williams reports:

Transcript

A chemical found in plastic might be present in people’s bodies more than previously thought. A number of previous studies suggest that even at very low levels bisphenol-A, or BPA, could be linked to health problems. They range from prostate and breast cancer to early puberty in kids. Rebecca Williams reports:

Scientists thought our main exposure to BPA was through food because of plastic linings in cans and other containers. They also thought BPA didn’t stay in our bodies very long.

But in this new study, researchers found that people who fasted for 24 hours still had levels of BPA close to the same as people who’d just eaten.

So they think we might be exposed to BPA some other way. Maybe water – some plastic water pipes contain BPA. Or, BPA is staying in our bodies for longer than people thought. Or both.

Dr. Rick Stahlhut is the lead author of the study in Environmental Health Perspectives. He says there are some ways to reduce your exposure from food.

“You’d probably have to get food that was mostly fresh and cook it yourself and try not to use polycarbonate plastic to store food.”

And he says use containers and bottles that don’t contain BPA.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Banned: Bpa Baby Bottles

  • BPA is found in things such as plastic water bottles, canned goods, and baby bottles (Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)

Canada has become the first country to
begin the process of banning plastic baby bottles
containing the chemical Bisphenol-A. Environmental
activists are praising the move, but want Ottawa
to go further. Dan Karpenchuk reports:

Transcript

Canada has become the first country to
begin the process of banning plastic baby bottles
containing the chemical Bisphenol-A. Environmental
activists are praising the move, but want Ottawa
to go further. Dan Karpenchuk reports:

Bisphenol-A, or BPA, is just about everywhere – one of most commonly manufactured
chemicals in the world. It’s main use is to make plastics hard and shatterproof.

It’s found in consumer products such as plastic baby bottles, water bottles, C-D cases,
eyeglasses and the lining of tin cans.

Rick Smith is with the group, Environmental Defense. Smith says particularly at risk are
infants.

“So there’s very good evidence that kids that are exposed to it earlier on in life are
more prone to breast cancer, prostate cancer later on in life.”

Research has also linked BPA to heart disease, diabetes, and liver problems. Smith says
BPA is in virtually every tin can in people’s cupboards, and evidence has shown that it
can leach into the food or beverage, even at room temperature.

Health Canada says the levels of BPA most adults are exposed to are not harmful.

But Smith and other environmentalists are calling for a complete ban in consumer
products.

For The Environment Report, I’m Dan Karpenchuk.

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