The Plastic Problem. Some Culprits:Bisphenols and Phthalates

 In this  and subsequent blogs I  will lay out some of the major classes of chemical compounds in involved in  manufacture and production, distribution, utilization, disposal and recycling of plastics. It is by no means inclusive, just the primary players that we have data points on. More than 350,000 chemical compounds have been made in the past 70 years.  Only about 20% were ever tested in any fashion. There are about 80,000 registered chemicals in the US of whom less than a dozen have been  regulated.(source Linda Birnbaum,podcast with Nate Hagens Jan 21, 2025, The Great simplification.

 Some of these chemicals used in plastics will be familiar to you and others probably not.  The most widely used are bisphenols,  and phthalates . Bisphenols and Phthalates are plasticizers which are added to plastics to increase flexibility, durability, transparency and longevity. They are similar in their effects on biologic systems. They are especially toxic to mollusks, invertebrates. and fish when they show up in bodies of water because they leach out  so readily. They are similar in uses and effects so in a sense talking about them separately can be misleading. Lets start with BPA, Bisphenol A being the poster child.You will likely know it from the baby bottle and sippy cup controversy within the past 15 years. It has long been known as an EDC(endocrine disrupting chemical) and despite hundreds of studies  over decades the FDA responding to the Chemical companies lobbying allowed it to be used in Baby bottles, water bottles and food packaging. But retailers in 2011 and many states did voluntarily remove it from shelves in 2011 responding to consumer pressure and not FDA regulation.. The FDA did nothing for years but finally did ban it from baby food/formula containers in 2013. At this point I feel the need to add a big culprit to my list: The FDA!  It reads: FOOD and DRUGS which is ridiculous on the surface. . It is like having the FAA combined with EPA under one roof. The FDA IMO has failed dismally at regulation of both food and drugs. At the very least it should be broken into two agencies. Another important fact is the the FDA has concerned itself with ACUTE and not chronic toxicity of both food and drugs.  This has been pointed out by many scientists. This applies to both acute and chronic disease and the FDA has ignored chronic disease caused by certain “ foods”. An example is that the FDA has stated there is no risk to high sugar consumption acutely when it has long been known to be  one of the dominant causes of the Metabolic syndrome when consumed  heavily chronically. I have addressed this in a previous blog and will do so in the future. It is also well known that chemicals and additives banned in Europe and Asia are not banned in the US by the FDA. Sorry about that rant. Let us return to our EDC’s………….

      BPA was discovered by Alexandr Dianin in 1891.  An interesting factoid about phthalates  and Bisphenolwas  was their discovery in the 1930’s that they had estrogenic effects  like Bisphenol, when the search was on  worldwide for a synthetic estrogen. We knew 90 years ago  of their potential for endrocrine effects! But these two classes lost out to diethylstilbesterol(DES) being developed about the same time. More on that later. BPA really entered industrial production in the 1950’s with the development of epoxy adhesives and polycarbonate. BPA was mixed with phosgene(YES! one of poison gasses of the first World war!)  and  it made a hard plastic: polycarbonate. Polycarbonate was a durable plastic so hard that it was bulletproof. It was easily formed into cheap food and liquid containers  when it was licensed in 1963 without any published safety information(!). Bisphenol found its way into other plastics such as polyacrylate,polyethylamide,polyester, polyester-styrene, polysulphone.  Also polyethylene(as in water bottles), polyethylene terphthalate(a pthalate) and pvc as a hardening agent, antioxidant and stabilizer. It is still with us and is ubiquitous. It is found in free form on  some thermal printing papers, cosmetics, medical equipment, sports equipment, many toys, clothing, food and drink containers  and other goods.

Bisphenol production(2022) was said to be 10 billion kg/yr. It cannot be usefully and economically recycled (like almost all plastics!!!), and ends up in landfills leaching out into groundwater, dust, dirt and air. The USGS has seen concentrations as high as 6 mg/ltr and Japan has estimated that 84% of all EDC estrogenic activity in their country is due to just to Bisphenol. BPA  can be measured in 93% of all US citizens and it is a cumulative poison. The good news is that its half life is only in days to hours  unlike another class of chemicals we will visit, the “forever chemicals”, PFAS. You would think that Food and drink companies would have removed it decades ago but you would be wrong. Most of the  International soft drink companies like Coca-Cola, Monster energy drinks and General mills still use it because Bisphenol products are part of the business and profit model of  BIG  Processed Food and Big Fast food companies. They continue to use it for food safety considerations and long shelf life which to an extent is true, But it poses other more hidden and delayed food safety risks which they are happy to ignore. These companies and the production companies like Dow, Dupont and their Trade group the American Chemical Council use the well thumbed playbook of the tobacco companies of denial, obfuscation and delay.. I would not accuse them of criminality or evil because it is useful  and fair to look at both sides of an issue. If the FDA says they can use these poisons then they are off the hook when they do. There is a huge database of medical conditions related to just this chemical and its relatives and I will only hit upon some of the more proven established conditions but the potential list is very large. I will also explain the exact biophysiological mechanisms altered and how and why they work to do their nefarious effects.  I realize I may lose a few of you. Sorry!

                                                                                                                                             There has been a steady rise in  population “excess deaths”beginning to rise above baseline in the past several decades and there is no doubt in my mind that this is largely due to  chemical environmental and dietary substances. It is almost guaranteed to be multicausal with a HUGE amount of factors, most of which will be difficult to tease out individually. It will be difficult to remove chemicals like Bisphenol by legislative action but we as individuals can do a lot to reduce their impact on our lives. If we don’t use it, they wont(may not?) make it. I will humbly offer my suggestions  in a future blog.

     Let us look at the mechanism of EDC’s of which BPA  is a big player. BPA looks to the human body like an estrogen or an androgen hormone. It mimics their action on both short and long term metabolism. BY binding to various receptors it can block the action of hormones  even at very low concentrations. For example we know the BPA is an antagonist of the thyroid hormone precursor. It interferes with thyroid synthesis, secretion and signaling.

        We  also hear almost daily about the drop in sperm cell levels and production worldwide, worse in certain regions. BPA  decreases sperm cell motility, and spermatogenesis. That hits both the quantity and quality of sperm. But wait! There’s more. Men exposed to daily elevated levels of BPA show reduced sexual desire and libido, reduced erectile function and orgasms. These effects have been found not only in humans but in mice,cattle, chickens and even fish!!! The signal paper was   a meta study of over 7500 abstracts and papers in 2017 byLevine, Swan, at al., in “Human Reproductive update”.

They said that sperm concentration in the developed world  from 1973 to 2011 had fallen from 99 units to just 47, a compound rate of almost 2%/yr. This has continued since then and even has accelerated in some regions. It is believed that the etiology is chemical toxicity which almost certainly starts early in fetal development and comprises epigenetic factors.(I will address the fascinating  phenomenon of epigenetics in a future blog). This was not good news to the chemical companies and they of course are fighting back. The American Chemical council used the old legal argument:”Correlation is not causation.” This despite a large raft of studies showing exactly that using in vivo and in vitro studies of humans and mammals.       

       As a sidebar I  would like to insert the work of Jeremy Grantham, who authored a paper https://www.gmo.com/americas/research-library/chemical-toxicity-and-the-baby-bust_viewpoints/which created quite a stir about this sperm depletion issue.

                  Jeremy Grantham is a  British investor and philanthropist  who considers this phenomenon of sperm  and  birth decline and deferred childbirth the” greatest threat to the human race”. He focused on this in an excellent paper in 2020 in the publication GMO.com.  entitled “Chemical Toxicity and the Baby Bust.” He posts graphs from the WHO and the US National center for Health Statistics  also showing large jumps in auto immune diseases   such as Type 1 DM, MS, Asthma, Celiac disease and autism. I commend readers to read his excellent paper. Jeremy was influenced by a well known book”Empty Planet: The shock of global Population Decline” published in 2019. I am not persuaded that this is due solely to chemical toxicity . There are other drivers of acute and chronic  disease. The list is not short.

    Let me end this blog. There are more chemical culprits every bit as terrifying as Bisphenol and phthalates. We will visit them in the next blog.

 

 

The Plastic Problem: overview of the industry

 

       My blogs dealing with the health problems of plastics would be incomplete without looking at the scope of size and importance of the Fossil Fuel and petrochemical industry to the world economy. These are dull but significant statistics but we need to know them to gauge the size of   plastic production now and going forward. You have to include all the  sectors of Oil and gas production. In the US alone Oil and gas employment in the US was 10.3 million people accounting for 8% of US GDP(source:EIA) Worldwide there is said to be more than 65 million people in the energy sector(IEA 2019). Another important factor is that petrochemical feedstock currently accounts for 12% of global oil demand. This slated to increase to 30% by 2030 in only 5 years. As I mentioned in my blog 5 years ago the bulk of petrochemicals is in plastics by weight and volume. 63% of global petrochemicals by weight is plastics.  The remainder excluding fertilizers is non plastic chemicals like paints and adhesives, phrmaceuticals and pesticides,, detergents and cleaners etc ad infinitum.The sectors of plastics are packaging(36%) construction(16%), textiles(15%) vehicles(14%), consumer products(11%) as well as a variety of others in declining parentage  including clothing, electronics etc. A recent paper (Iluminem.com 7/25/2024) said that plastics production will TRIPLE by 2060!!!!  In 2022 it was 400 Million metric tons with an increase to 1231 MILLION metric tons in only 35 years! I give these terrifying numbers as what we are up against if we want to mitigate the disease disaster we will be facing if these increases occur.

       I would invite the reader to look at Google Earth to see the size, impact and location of these companies and I guess I should mention who and where they are just in the US and Europe . Dow Chemical is the gorilla in the room and has plants worldwide with an enormous one at the “Freeport Complex”  south of Houston Texas.  There are many petrochemical plants all along the Gulf Coast as far as Louisiana run by oil companies like Exxon, Occidental, Chevron etc. One of the Europe’s largest is in Ludwigshavn Germany with BASF. The Port Of Antwerp, Belgium has seven of the biggest ten companies on a sprawling site. I am not even including the new plants in the Middle East and China and Asia or South America. But I digress…..

         Returning to the plastic production numbers…... Currently(2022) the world production is 400 MILLION MT. I   have been discussing how serious the plastic problem is now with ONLY 400 million MT. The problem if the world TRIPLES production in the next 3 decades is unimaginable and simply must not happen. To get any faint hope of dealing with this problem we will need to at least flatten the curve and perhaps Cap plastic production. This clearly a global issue requiring global policy initiatives, the most recent being  the  Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee  meeting in Busan South Korea  in late November last year which has been described as a dismal failure to rein in  plastic production. I will try to point out  what leverage we  might have as individual consumers to try to enact policies to limit the health and pollution damage going forward but until we can educate the world population on the extent of the health problem,  the situation is unlikely to change. It is said that when a problem cannot go on it will stop. A nuclear world war or an asteroid impact comparable to the Chicxlub meteor strike 65 million years ago would stop the plastic juggernaut and a worldwide recession might slow it. Ultimately since oil and gas resources are finite,when they terminally deplete plastic production will as well. But humans are also finite and if they deplete, so will the need for plastics. The world will certainly be OK in the long run but the human experiment may not be. We may only have a generation or two left to have even a small hope to arrest this looming crisis. We are of course in the midst of a series of intersecting crises like loss of biodiversity, the climate emergency and pollution. I would include the health disaster of the metabolic syndrome which includes the obesity epidemic, hypertension, diabetes, dementia, cancers and CV disease. I will attempt to show how they are related in a systems analysis. To say this is all very very complex is an understatement. In my next blog I will focus on the types of plastics, their source and probable  toxicity. Down the line I will offer some suggestions on individual strategies to try to save our health and the health of our unborn citizens.

The Plastic Problem: It's much worse than you think

Five years ago last month I posted a blog on a global environmental problem just beginning to peek over the horizon:https://cal48koho.wordpress.com/2020/01/07/the-plastic-problem/. In this series of blogs I want to review and expand on that post. I will address the current and looming heal risks to plastics. These health risks are coming about from direct exposure to plastic and its chemicals and from plastic waste accumulating in the environment and even contributing mightily to climate change.. Five years ago the media's environmental focus was on global warming/climate change and the emergence of a strange disease in Wuhan China. My blog has long had an emphasis on energy and sustainability issues, and by energy I specifically mean fossil fuel energy . Most other energy forms derive from fossil energy. What piqued my interest in plastics more than five years ago was an interview with a former oil executive in which he responded to the question of why some existing refineries were being shut down and no new ones being built. I have forgotten his exact phraseology but the gist of his response was that the oil and gas companies were profit driven enterprises and the profit in petrochemical manufacturing exceeded and extended the profit in simply refining the oil into gasoline and diesel. Petrochemicals are of course chemicals derived from oil and gas and he felt it was petrochemicals that would be a dominant profit driver for the oil companies going forward. The most important petrochemical product in terms of tonnage and variety is plastics. The point I need to mention again is how confusing it can be to calculate energy content and cost of energy because as a global commodity they are measured in metric and English units AND in volumetric and mass units. For example a metric ton(2204 lb or 1000kg) of oil or natural gas have similar btus, a bit over 43 million btus. A barrel(bbl) of oil will set you back today $77(2/2025). For that bbl you will get 5.8 million btus. To get the same 5.8 million btus in nat gas you will only have to pay $20. This is about the same spread in cost and btus as it has been for decades and my point is nat gas on a btu basis is a bargain compared to crude oil which is an important issue if you are wanting to produce plastics in your petrochemical complex using  natural gas and refinery fractions. If natural gas and oil were priced in energy content they would both be $77. Natural gas and NGLs(natural gas liquids) or hydrocarbon liquids are the main inputs for plastics production. Natural gas is basically a byproduct of oil drilling and for decades the low value of nat gas meant that the companies just flared the gas to get rid of it. It is still done today worldwide. Because it so cheap, it is a very low cost feed stock to make petrochemicals or plastics which is why oil producing companies and countries are building petrochemical plants instead of oil refineries. Follow the money as my wife Karlene says. Petrochemical plants are sprouting up around the world like mushrooms after the rain with everyone getting into the act, not only in the Gulf Coast but in the Middle East especially. Natural gas production has been increasing worldwide which is increasing Ethane production(C2H6), the most important natural gas fraction for plastic production. In the US we even have dedicated Ethane tankers for export. If you are following along with my drift you may be starting to worry about this Ethane juggernaut. I was worrying 5 years ago.!!! My opinion is that we need to curb Ethane OVERPRODUCTION because it leads to plastics overproduction and over utilization. Later in this blog or subsequent ones I will propose possible strategies to curb and regulate plastics. Because I am a Medical Doctor(retired) I will emphasize what a health disaster plastic and chemical exposure is posing to world health and the environment. You may already be aware of how bad this situation is but it is much worse than you think. If the plastic/chemical contamination of the population and the environment continues on its current trajectory , human and animal life will imperiled, perhaps severely. In future blogs I will  address health risks from plastics and their embedded chemicals, how and where the pollution emanates from extraction, production, utilization and disposal. For the scientifically inclined I will try to show how and where these chemicals act to destroy human and animal health. I will also describe how absolutely enormous the  chemical corporations and countries are to the world's  economies and practical difficulties in trying to curb their influence. I will also try to offer practical actions we can take individually to mitigate or eliminate these harms. The climate environmentalists and alarmists had 10 years of a spokesperson like Gretta Thunberg to draw attention to the climate emergency. We could use someone with that stature right now to confront chemical/plastic toxicity. There are many practical mitigating actions to adapt to  the risks of a warming world. Our warming world is a slow moving crisis on many levels. It is small potatoes to the risks of chemical plastic pollution which has the potential to destroy the health of humans  and animals in  this century by sickening and crashing populations.