SUMMARY

Plastics are nowhere near as safe as you might think. Under the 1976 Toxic Sub­stances Control Act, the US EPA only tests chemicals when it is provided evidence of harm; the EPA has essentially allowed the chemicals industry to regulate itself for the other 60,000+ chemicals on the market. Even in the food industry, federal agencies don’t strictly regulate plastics; what is declared a “safe” plastic today may change tomorrow, and “BPA-free” plastic might be made with substances that are even worse than BPA (see below). I would suggest replacing all plastic in your life when reasonably possible. Sometimes there is no reasonable alternative, but often there is.

Why should we care that so many household items are made out of plastic?

On an environmental level, plastics are often made from crude oil. Politically, reliance on crude oil leads to twisted relationships with some of the world’s worst actors. Environmentally, there are direct negative impacts from drilling for crude oil on habitats and water quality due to leaks and other issues, as well as carbon dioxide emissions. Furthermore, many plastics degrade slowly and thus persist for a very long time in the environment and in landfills. There are huge swaths of relatively high-concentration plastic patches floating around the oceans. Birds often mistake colorful plastic for food and ingest harmful quantities of plastic. For instance, over 90 percent of Midway Island’s Laysan Albatrosses have plastic in their stomachs.¹ That’s a remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, so imagine what large-continent coastal wildlife goes through! The plastics can perforate animals’ vital organs and spread harmful toxins, among other things.

On a personal level, plastics have been linked to a wide variety of ailments, ranging from relatively minor impacts like increased blood pressure to major impacts like impacting children’s cognitive development.² Sometimes you hear people reason that if plastic were so dangerous, big companies would not use it, because it would open them up to massive lawsuits.

This reasoning is faulty. First, our scientific understanding grows with time, so what was considered safe in the past might not be considered safe now.

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