2. Our Plastic Kitchen
Take
a look around any room in your home and you’ll easily spot dozens of
items that contain plastic: carpet fiber, clothing, even the paint on
your walls. In less than a century this man-made material has become an
indispensable part of our daily lives.
However, it also has the potential to compromise our health.
I’ve
certainly given plastic—and its environmental impact—plenty of thought
in the past fifteen years. After all, I run a company that packages
most of its products in some form of plastic. The safety and quality of
our finished product is our top priority, but we also strive to follow
sustainable practices and actively seek viable alternatives to plastic
packaging. Yet it was the birth of my son that made my professional
interest in plastic become a much more personal concern.
Recent
news stories have called attention to Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical
found in certain hard plastic products—including some baby bottles—that
are linked to neural and behavioral problems in infants. The idea that
I might feed my son with a bottle that could hurt him was disturbing,
to say the least. So I set out to learn as much as I could about
plastic:
• How it’s made
• What types are safest for my family
• Where I could easily reduce our risks in the home
I
found that it was in the kitchen—where plastic is used to store,
prepare, and serve the food and liquids we consume each day—that I
could most easily make a positive impact.
What Is Plastic?
Plastic
is a common term for a huge range of synthetic and semisynthetic
solids, including nylon, PVC, polystyrene (Styrofoam), and
polycarbonate. The most common raw materials used to manufacture
plastic are crude oil and natural gas, from which compounds are
extracted and eventually linked into flexible chains (polymers). In
final processing, plastics often are modified with chemical additives
to help create specific textures, colors, heat or light resistance, and
flexibility.
Handle with Care
Despite the well-known durability of most plastic products, they will always
have a small quantity of chemicals that are free to leach out under the
right conditions. This is a problem because many of the building blocks
used in plastics are highly toxic.
What’s
more, there are other dangerous chemical additives—including
stabilizers, plasticizers, and colorants—that aren’t part of the
original polymer and can also leach out of the plastic and into our
food, water, and soil.
Most of us learn when
we’re young that we’re not allowed to throw a plastic bottle into the
campfire even though it’s cool to watch the plastic shrivel up and melt
into liquid. If we do so, toxic gases—dioxins—are released and are
extremely dangerous, especially if inhaled. Unfortunately, it’s not
very difficult to degrade your kitchen plasticware in the same way,
whether or not you can see it or smell it happening.
Toxic Communication
Many of the chemicals in plastic products
have structural similarities to the hormones that provide communication
throughout the human body, or they can bind to the steroid receptors on
cell membranes and disrupt hormone actions. The same additives that
provide flexibility, color, and flame retardant characteristics to
plastic containers, for example, can migrate into food or water and
have unintended effects on humans and animals.
“Environmental signaling” refers to the
biological effects caused by chemicals in our environment that mimic
natural hormones, and it’s a rapidly developing hypothesis for how
certain toxic elements in the environment are causing adverse health
effects. Called endocrine disruptors, these chemicals can alter
the body’s hormone system and produce adverse developmental,
reproductive, neurological, and immunological effects. If this
hypothesis is correct, then the victims are ourselves and our pets.
Developing fetuses and infants, whose neural and
reproductive systems are still being formed, run the greatest risk of
damage from endocrine disruptors. In laboratory studies, adverse
consequences such as low fertility, premature sexual development, and
cancer have been linked to early exposure to these hormone mimics.
These synthetic compounds are sending messages
to us, but when our cells receive the information, they are confused
and, as a result, cellular function is distorted.
Heating and microwaving, repeated washing
with harsh detergents in dishwashers, scratching or cracking, and
prolonged contact with fatty foods and oils will damage plastic enough
to allow dangerous chemicals to leach out.
Wait, let’s read that list again.
• Cleaning in the dishwasher
• Microwaving
• Storing with fatty or acidic foods
Heating
and microwaving, repeated washing with harsh detergents in dishwashers,
scratching or cracking, and prolonged contact with fatty foods and oils
will damage plastic enough to allow dangerous chemicals to leach out.
Those conveniences are what most people
like about their plastic bowls, plates, cups, and containers! But the
alternative is to wash all of your plasticware by hand, and never use
it when warming up your food. So it’s time to ask yourself: Why bother
having it at all?
That’s why my wife and I
are methodically moving our kitchen to glass, which has none of the
health issues inherent to plastic. In the interest of our health and
the health of our child, we’ve purchased glass baby bottles, glass
storage containers, and glass measuring cups, and we’re doing away with
plastic items that can degrade and leach toxins into our food.
