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  • From: Linda Ray <lindaray@att.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] More Good News- Third Town In Maine Passes Food Freedom Law
  • Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2011 12:23:44 -0700 (PDT)

Sent: Thu, April 21, 2011 9:44:02 AM
Subject: Fw: More Good News- Third Town In Maine Passes Food Freedom Law

I *really* want to see this trend go viral. EVERYONE would benefit by
introducing this legislation to your localities, including local family
farms.
That means much better food security for you and your family.

Please request your local legislators to take up this torch as well.
 
Does anyone know who in the local or state legislature this request or
proposal
should be presented to, here in the USA?  
 
I think we should get a copy of the text of these laws and get them pushed
onto
the table as proposed legislation, I am asking how best to proceed and who to
approach to best guarantee success- Does anyone know?
 
Thank you for taking action, all who do...
 
Stay well,
 
Linda :-)
PS: For more information on what has been happening with food sovereignty,
and
why we need this legislation:
http://www.naturalnews.com/food_freedom.html
 
---------------------------------------------------
Sent: Thu, April 21, 2011 9:31:31 AM
Subject: Third Town In Maine Passes Food Freedom Law


From:
http://www.naturalnews.com/032142_food_freedom_Maine.html

Blue Hill becomes third town in Maine to pass food freedom law
Wednesday, April 20, 2011 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
 
(NaturalNews) Within the past several months, numerous towns in Maine, and
one
in Vermont, have proposed or enacted food sovereignty laws that declare,
plainly, that the federal government has no business telling citizens what
food
products they can and cannot buy or sell locally. Representing the third town
to
successfully pass such an ordinance, Blue Hill, Maine, recently adopted a
local
food and self-governance bill that asserts the freedom of local citizens to
choose their own food.

In a near-unanimous vote, Blue Hill residents successfully voted to pass the
food freedom ordinance on April 2. Besides declaring sovereignty from
government
intrusion on local food policy, the bill exempts all direct sales of food
from
having to comply with state and federal license and inspection requirement.
In
other words, local residents who grow and sell produce, for instance, will
not
be subjected to the tedious and expensive bureaucratic red tape that
rightfully
applies to factory farm operations.

"[It] is a huge milestone in the struggle to protect the rights, not only of
farmers to sell their products, but also of all citizens to eat the food of
their choice," John Gandy, a local resident of Blue Hill and Master for the
Halcyon Grange, is quoted as saying in the Activist Post. "It is time
citizens
start defending our rights against big government and big business."

In early March, two other towns in Maine, Sedgwick and Penobscot, both passed
their own food sovereignty laws. And the town of Barre, Vt., will vote on its
own food freedom resolution sometime in May
(http://www.naturalnews.com/031833_f...).

Based on the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution, the federal government
has
absolutely no authority to interfere with state and local food affairs. The
Amendment specifically prohibits the federal government from exerting any
power
not specifically granted to it by the Constitution, and a group called the
Tenth
Amendment Center is working hard to help states break free from the chains of
unlawful federal intrusion (http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/).

You can also keep track of the status of food freedom legislation at the
following links:
http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com...
http://growninthecity.com/interacti...

Sources for this story include:

http://www.activistpost.com/2011/04...

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Subject: [permaculture] Our 'Toxic' Love-Hate Relationship With Plastics
/Fresh Air NPR/NEW book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story
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hi
here is a great story of plastic, the dangers
and toxic effects of plastics but the ways in
which they have enriched the lives of a lot of
Americans. A waste product from the refining of
oil that during the second world war was used to
replace valuable resources and suddenly plastic
entered the market, the rest is history The
transcript of interview is included
wes

Fresh Air NPR/
NEW Book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

April 19, 2011
http://www.npr.org/2011/04/19/135245835/our-toxic-love-hate-relationship-with-plastics

We all know that plastics are common in modern
life, but science journalist Susan Freinkel says
they are really literally everywhere - in our
toothbrushes, hair dryers, cell phones,
computers, door knobs, car parts - and of course
in those ubiquitous plastic bags we get it seems
every time we buy anything.

The bags are made from polyethylene, the most
common type of plastic in use today. By one
estimate, Freinkel says, the amount of
polyethylene produced in America every year is
nearly equal to the combined mass of every man,
woman and child in the country.

Freinkel's new book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story
chronicles the rise of plastic in consumer
culture, and its effects on the environment and
our health. She notes that plastics have had
enormously beneficial impacts - like making blood
transfusions safe and common. But scientists are
now also finding that phthalate chemicals from IV
bags and other plastics are leaching into the
fluids we take into our bodies, and the effects
of that are just now being understood.


Plastic: A Toxic Love Story
By Susan Freinkel
Hardcover, 336 pages
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
List price: $27
Read An Excerpt

"These chemicals act in a more convoluted and
complicated way," Freinkel says. "They interfere
with our hormones, and they interfere with the
endocrine system, which is the network of glands
that orchestrate growth and development. And
there's some research showing that DEHP, this
chemical that's in vinyl [used in IV bags], has
this property. It interferes with testosterone."

But the million dollar question yet to be solved,
says Freinkel, is whether prolonged exposure to
DEHP and other chemicals alters our bodily
systems.

"It's difficult to say what the effects [of
exposure] are," she says. "There are animal
studies that show, at very high doses, it can be
quite hazardous. It is literally toxic to the
testicles and can create malformations and damage
sperm and create fertility problems later in
life. But most people aren't exposed to those
kinds of levels - even in hospital settings where
you are being transfused for a long time. It's
not approaching those levels. It is more subtle,
probably."

Problems In Rats

Only a few studies have directly looked at the
effects of DEHP exposure in humans. Dr. Shanna
Swan at the University of Rochester in Rochester,
N.Y., has published several articles on prenatal
exposure to phthalates. In one study, she found
that newborn baby boys born to mothers with more
phthalates in their bodies had a subtle
difference in their genitals. That genital
abnormality could indicate a disruption in
testosterone levels, Freinkel says.

"In rats, that [physical] marker has been
associated with a bunch of problems," Freinkel
says. "But we don't actually know what it means
in humans. ... What it suggests is that these
chemicals that we've used for 50 years and
assumed to be completely benign may have an
impact on health of some people, particularly
people who get exposed at critical phases of
development."



Susan Freinkel is a science writer whose work has
appeared in The New York Times, Discover
Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine and other
publications. She is also the author of American
Chestnut, a social history of one of America's
most common trees.
What The Plastics Industry Says

The plastics industry, Freinkel says, has
maintained that vinyl and phthalates are safe.
Both the vinyl industry and the American
Chemistry Council conduct their own research on
the materials they use and have their own trade
associations. Freinkel says they're quick to
rebut any studies that come out suggesting a
correlation between exposure to synthetic
chemicals and possible health issues.

"[They say] they've been in use for 50 years,
there's no evidence of widespread human problems,
and therefore [they ask], 'What's the issue?' "
she says. "And they are right - the science on
this is still uncertain."

Interview Highlights

On government regulation of plastics

"Unlike pesticides or drugs, there's no real
explicit government regulation on plastics. We
have a very fragmented and fairly ineffective
patchwork of laws to regulate synthetic
chemicals. The central regulation there is
something called the Toxic Substances Control
Act, which was passed in 1976. People's criticism
of that law is that it has tended to treat
chemicals as safe until proven to be dangerous.
But the way that the law is written is very
difficult to establish that a chemical is
dangerous because manufacturers do not have to
volunteer information about that, and the
Environmental Protection Agency is fairly
hamstrung in its ability to collect information.
When that law was passed, the 60,000 or so
chemicals that were then in commerce were simply
grandfathered in under the law. Since that time,
there have been another 20,000 to 30,000
chemicals that have come onto the market. The EPA
has only been able to require reviews of a couple
of hundred [types of synthetic chemicals], and
it's only been able to actually establish that
there were significant hazards that [required]
banning in five."



"There are a lot of plastics out there. Plastics
are not created equal, and I think there are a
lot of plastics that we don't have to worry
about. I'm not so worried about polyethylene [the
stuff of plastic baggies]. I'm not particularly
worried about polypropylene, which is the stuff
that's used in yogurt containers or margarine
tubs. But we know that hazardous chemicals are
used in plastics, and some of those plastics will
leach chemicals that may be harmful to our
health, and we don't know the full extent of
that. I'll give you an example, which is PET -
polyethylene terephthalate. It's the plastic
that's used in soda bottles and water bottles.
It's another plastic that we have for decades
considered an inert plastic. In recent years,
there have been several studies showing that PET
can leach some kind of compound that seems to
have estrogenic activity - that seems to act like
an estrogen. We don't know what that compound is.
We don't know whether it's being leached in
sufficient quantities to have any impact on human
health. The fact that we're suddenly discovering
it is a little disconcerting. That said, I think
those kinds of findings are why we need to have
stronger laws that require manufacturers to
demonstrate the safety of chemicals that they put
into commerce."

On plastics leaching from baby bottles

"The plastic that used to be used to make baby
bottles is a polycarbonate. It's a hard, clear,
glasslike plastic, and one of the main
ingredients in that is a chemical called
bisphenol A (BPA), which is an estrogen mimic. If
you look at a diagram of that molecule, it looks
just like an estrogen molecule. And bisphenol A
has been associated with a bunch of health
problems, including obesity, breast cancer, heart
disease and others. And when research about
bisphenol A started coming out, parents
especially were understandably horrified at the
thought that the bottles that they were using to
feed their babies could potentially be leaching
this chemical into their babies. You'd be
hard-pressed to buy a baby bottle now that
contains bisphenol A. This is one of those
instances where the government didn't step in but
Walmart did. The big-box stores won't carry BPA
bottles. ... Manufacturers are still free to use
bisphenol A, but it has acquired such a bad rep
that not many do. There are some states and other
countries that have outlawed bisphenol A. The
problem, of course, is that you end up with this
patchwork of regulations and no consistency or
guarantee."

Excerpt: 'Plastic: A Toxic Love Story'
by SUSAN FREINKEL


Trawling the site on various occasions, I've seen
dozens of combs made of the early plastic called
celluloid - combs so beautiful they belonged in a
museum, so beguiling I coveted them for my own.
I've seen combs that looked as if they were
carved from ivory or amber, and some that were
flecked with mica so they shone as if made of
hammered gold. I've seen huge, lacy decorative
combs of faux tortoiseshell that might have
crowned the piled-high up-twist of a Gilded Age
debu°©tante, and tiara-like combs twinkling with
sapphire or emerald or jet "brilliants," as
rhinestones once were called. One of my favorites
was a delicate 1925 art deco comb with a curved
handle and its own carry ing case; together, they
looked like an elegant purse made of tortoise
shell and secured with a rhinestone clasp. Just
four inches long, it was surely designed for the
short hair of a Jazz Age beauty. Looking at the
comb, I could imagine its first owner, a bright
spirit in a dropped-waist dress and Louise Brooks
bob, reveling in her liberation from corsets,
long gowns, and heavy hair buns.

Surprisingly, these gorgeous antiques are quite
affordable. Cellu loid plastic made it possible,
for the first time, to produce combs in real
abundance - keeping prices low even for today's
collector who doesn't have a lot to spend but
wants to own something fabulous. For people at
the dawn of the plastic age, celluloid offered
what one writer called "a forgery of many of the
necessities and luxuries of civilized life," a
foretoken of the new material culture's aesthetic
and abundance.

Combs are one of our oldest tools, used by humans
across cultures and ages for decoration,
detangling, and delousing. They derive from the
most fundamental human tool of all - the hand.
And from the time that humans began using combs
instead of their fingers, comb design has
scarcely changed, prompting the satirical paper
the Onion to publish a piece titled "Comb
Technology: Why Is It So Far Behind the Razor and
Toothbrush Fields?" The Stone Age craftsman who
made the oldest known comb - a small four-toothed
number carved from animal bone some eight
thousand years ago - would have no trouble
knowing what to do with the bright blue plastic
version sit ting on my bathroom counter.

For most of history, combs were made of almost
any material hu mans had at hand, including bone,
tortoiseshell, ivory, rubber, iron, tin, gold,
silver, lead, reeds, wood, glass, porcelain,
papier-mâché. But in the late nineteenth century,
that panoply of possibilities began to fall away
with the arrival of a totally new kind of
material - celluloid, the first man-made plastic.
Combs were among the first and most popular
objects made of celluloid. And having crossed
that material Rubicon, comb makers never went
back. Ever since, combs generally have been made
of one kind of plastic or another.

The story of the humble comb's makeover is part
of the much larger story of how we ourselves have
been transformed by plastics. Plastics freed us
from the confines of the natural world, from the
material constraints and limited supplies that
had long bounded hu man activity. That new
elasticity unfixed social boundaries as well. The
arrival of these malleable and versatile
materials gave producers the ability to create a
treasure trove of new products while expand ing
opportunities for people of modest means to
become consumers.

Reprinted with permission from Plastic: A Toxic
Love Story, by Susan Freinkel, published by
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Copyright 2011 Susan
Freinkel. All rights reserved.

TRANSCRIPT

Heard on Fresh Air from WHYY
April 19, 2011 - TERRY GROSS, host:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.
We all know that plastics are common in modern
life, but our guest, Susan Freinkel, says they're
really everywhere: in our toothbrushes,
hairdryers, cell phones, computers, door knobs,
car parts and, of course, in those ubiquitous
plastic bags we get just about every time we buy
anything.
They're made from polyethylene, the most common
type of plastic in use today. By one estimate,
the amount of polyethylene produced in America
every year is nearly equal to the combined mass
of every man, woman and child in the country.

Freinkel's new book, "Plastic: A Toxic Love
Story," chronicles the rise of plastics in
consumer culture and its effects on the
environment and our health. For example, she
notes that plastics have had enormously
beneficial effects, like making blood
transfusions safe and common, but scientists are
also finding that chemicals from blood and IV
bags are leaching into the fluids we take into
our bodies.
Susan Freinkel is a science writer whose work has
appeared in the New York Times, Discover,
Smithsonian and other publications. She spoke
with FRESH AIR contributor

Dave Davies.
DAVE DAVIES, host:
Well, Susan Freinkel, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let's
begin with a little experiment that you describe
at the beginning of your book. You were going to
spend a day without touching plastic. What
happened?

Ms. SUSAN FREINKEL (Author, "Plastic: A Toxic
Love Story"): Right. I didn't think through the
idea very hard, which is why I walked into the
bathroom that morning and looked down, and there
is my plastic toilet seat. So I had to change my
plan, and instead of spending the day not
touching anything plastic, I decided I would
spend the day writing down everything I touched
that was plastic.
And by the end of the day, my notebook was filled
with pages and pages of plastic things - things
that I went into the experiment knowing were
plastic, you know, like the sandwich bags, but
then things I never imagined were plastic like
the doorknob of my front door, which I thought
was brass but when I looked closely I realized
was plastic.
I didn't really understand how my life had become
so permeated by plastic, and I realized I didn't
know the first thing about this stuff. I didn't
know what plastic was, where it came from or
whether there were reasons to be concerned about
it. And I figured if I was asking those
questions, probably other people were, too.

DAVIES: Give us a layman's understanding of what plastic is, chemically.
Ms. FREINKEL: Well, you know, we talk about
plastic like it's one thing, but plastic is
really - plastics are a huge family of materials.
There are thousands of different plastics. And in
many ways, they're as different from one another
as paper can be from glass.
So in plastic, I call them daisy chains. They're
giant molecules that are hooked together like
daisy chains. And another way to imagine them is
like a string of beads. And how those beads are
arranged, what the beads actually are, how
they're strung on that string, how the strings
are arranged with one another can affect what a
plastic looks like, how it behaves, how it feels.
What these all have in common, though, is that
they're polymers. They're these gigantic
molecules, these long daisy chains. And as I
said, you can get them having very different
properties.
So take for instance something like nylon. You
know, nylon can be stretchy like in pantyhose. It
can be silky like a parachute. It can be bristly
like the end of your toothbrush. Or it can be a
solid, smooth material like the wheels of a
roller skate, or bushy like Velcro.
You know, plastic has this kind of pejorative
connotation, but it's pretty amazing that we've
managed to make this family of materials that has
so many different properties and that we can
engineer, kind of, to do and be exactly what we
want them to be.

DAVIES: Now, why was the development of plastics
driven, in part, by the oil industry?
Ms. FREINKEL: Well, plastics come from the
byproducts that are produced in the refining of
oil or the processing of natural gas. Actually,
in this country, most plastics come from natural
gas.
And those processes throw off these byproducts
which, you know, could just be wasted. But
really, since the early 20th century, the
petroleum and chemical industries got very good
at taking these byproducts and reprocessing them,
in a sense, to create new products like raw
plastics.

DAVIES: Can you give us an example of a byproduct
of, you know, of oil refining that led to a
plastic?

Ms. FREINKEL: Sure. You know, I'll give you the
example of ethylene, which is a byproduct of oil
refining. There is a sort of legend that Nelson
Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, was looking
out over his, you know, vast refinery complex and
saw flares burning off some gas.
And he said, you know: What is that? What is that
that we're burning off? And somebody said: Well,
that's ethane. And he said: ethane - which is a
precursor to ethylene - well, I don't want to
waste that. I don't want to waste anything. And,
you know, the - well, let's figure out something
to do with it. And that something turned out to
be ethylene, which is now used to make
polyethylene.

DAVIES: And so what did they do? You have a gas
that's being vented from the stack of a refinery.
Is it captured and then cooled so that it becomes
a liquid, and then, what, turned into a plastic
resin or something?
Ms. FREINKEL: Well, that makes it sounds like a
really simple process. And, you know, when I went
to go visit Dow Chemical's polyethylene plant in
Freeport, Texas, that very simple process that
you just described takes place over miles and
miles of pipes, stretching out over acres.
And basically what happens is the ethylene is
piped in a series of pipes and subjected to
different ranges of pressures and temperatures,
and different other gases are fed in with it. And
eventually they all go into this thing called the
reactor, which I had envisioned was going to be
like some lab with, you know, bubbling flasks and
vats, but actually was this huge, two-story room
with these gigantic pipes - looping up and down,
floor to ceiling.
And at the start of that room, where the gases
first go in, they go in at the start of the room,
and then other chemicals are fed in to trigger a
chemical reaction that will cause the gases to
hook together into these daisy chains and become
liquid. And out the other end comes polyethylene.
I couldn't see any of that, but I was walking
along the outside of the reactor chamber, and all
of a sudden, I realized I smelled plastic. It was
like sticking my nose in the - you know, in an
empty bottle of milk, or jug of milk.
And then I looked around on the floor, and
suddenly I could see these little clumps of this
waxy, white stuff that was raw polyethylene.

DAVIES: So just to simplify to the beginning and
the end, this gas that's being thrown off by a
refinery is turned into what? What is it used for?
Ms. FREINKEL: The gas is turned into,
essentially, liquid plastic that then is extruded
into tiny little pellets that look like rice
grains. And those are sort of the raw material
from which plastic products are made.

DAVIES: And which plastic products come from - is it polyethylene?
Ms. FREINKEL: In this case I was looking at
polyethylene, but this is more or less the
process for all kinds of plastics. They start
with gases, chemical reactions that take place
that turn them into these polymers, these giant
molecules that are liquid, and what comes out are
pellets or powders that are sent out from Dow and
other companies that make - they call them
resins, raw plastics. And those are shipped out
to, you know, manufacturers and processors around
the world, really, who then turn them into
plastic stuff.

DAVIES: You say the dawn of the age of plastics was 1941. Why?
Ms. FREINKEL: What happened in 1941 is that the
guy who was in charge of provisioning the U.S.
military at the outset of World War II started
requisitioning plastic to replace strategic
metals that were really needed.
And that led to a huge ramping-up of plastics
production. A lot of plastics had been discovered
and invented in the '20s and '30s but hadn't
really made their way into major production. And
it was kind of the military needs of the war that
got those plastics going strong.
DAVIES: And what military supplies were they used to make?

Ms. FREINKEL: Oh, a wide range, I mean, from, you
know, the basic, standard-issue combs that GIs
got, which up until that time had been made from
rubber, to, you know, mortar fuses to the acrylic
turrets that were used on planes for gunners.
They were throughout the military - plastic
bugles.

DAVIES: And then after the war, you had this more
developed plastics industry, and it, what, it
needed a market, right?

Ms. FREINKEL: Exactly. You know, imagine all of
these manufacturers with these huge, built-up
supplies of plastic and huge capacity, and they
needed to do something with it.

DAVIES: Now one of the things that I like about
your book is that it isn't just about, you know,
the dangers and toxic effects of plastics but the
ways in which they have enriched the lives of a
lot of Americans. Describe ways in which plastics
in effect democratized - had a democratizing
impact on American life.

Ms. FREINKEL: Well, that was something that
started really early on with plastics. And I tell
this story of the comb as an example of that.
Now, combs in the mid-19th century were often
made from things like tortoiseshell or ivory. But
by the mid-19th century, people were beginning to
get worried that both ivory and tortoiseshell
were becoming in short supply because the animals
were being sort of hunted into extinction.
And that actually was a goad to the development
of early plastics. One of the big uses of ivory
was for billiard balls, and a billiard-ball
manufacturer in the 1860s put an ad offering
$10,000 for anybody who could come up with a
viable substitute for ivory.
That ad caught the eye of an inventor in New York
named John Wesley Hyatt, who was kind of an
amateur inventor, and he started looking at ways
to develop an adequate substitute. And what he
actually ended up coming up with was the early
plastic celluloid, which was made from cellulose
- actually from cotton.
And one of the first uses - or common uses - for
celluloid was combs because you could take
celluloid and make it look like any kind of
valuable material. It was really good - it was
very easy to make it look like tortoiseshell or
to make it look like ivory, and indeed that was
what was done.
And so you had sort of these exquisite combs that
looked like they'd come, you know, from
tortoiseshell or ivory, it looked like they cost
a fortune, but actually, you know, you could get
them for quite cheap, and anybody could have one.

DAVIES: And then, you know, once plastics became
much more ubiquitous, you had consumers that
suddenly, now, they could get cheap combs. They
could get a cheap toothbrush. They could buy a
suitcase that was light and strong. They could
have clear packaging that could wrap food and
allow them to see whether or not it was fresh.
There was fishing line - all this stuff. How did
we feel about plastic? Did we embrace this
artificial stuff, or were we suspicious of it at
first?

Ms. FREINKEL: In the early days, people were
enthralled. I mean, imagine something like
cellophane, this clear material. People loved
cellophane so much that in the '40s, it was - the
word itself was considered the
third-most-beautiful in the English language,
after mother and memory.
I think, you know, people continued to love it
until they started seeing it being increasingly
used for schlocky kinds of things, you know, like
lawn flamingos.
There was a fiasco in the early '60s when DuPont
tried to develop a synthetic leather, Corfam,
and, you know, touted it as good as leather, but,
you know, it really didn't work very well.
And so, you know, by the time I was coming,
growing up in the '70s, plastic had pretty much
become a cultural joke. It was the punch line to
the movie "The Graduate."
You know, when I was writing this book, almost
every single person who I told I was working on a
book about plastic invariably mentioned that
line. You know, 40 years later, it still
resonates.

DAVIES: We're speaking with Susan Freinkel. Her
new book is called "Plastic: A Toxic Love Story."
We'll talk more after a short break. This is
FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)

DAVIES: If you're just joining us, our guest is
writer Susan Freinkel. She's written a new book
about the ubiquitous presence of plastics in our
lives and some of the effects thereof. It's
called "Plastic: A Toxic Love Story."
You take us through some commonly manufactured
plastic items like the single-form chair, of
which there are probably billions made and sold
cheaply. The Frisbee is another one you write
about.
But I wanted to talk about some of the uses in
medicine. And it was interesting that it had a
powerful effect on modern medicine, right? I
mean, it really allowed scientists to do things
that they couldn't do before.

Ms. FREINKEL: Oh, absolutely. I mean, plastic,
you couldn't have modern medicine without
plastic, you know, going back to the in the '40s,
when Willem Kolff invented the first kidney
dialysis machine, using cellophane, in fact, and
said: What God didn't grow, man can make.
I was reminded of that recently when my mother
broke her hip, and I was looking at the hospital
and looking all around at all the plastics in her
room from, you know, the machinery monitoring her
oxygen levels to the actual replacement hip in
her body.

DAVIES: Explain the effect of plastic on the
ability to transfuse blood and store blood.

Ms. FREINKEL: Okay, I tell the story of the blood
bag, and I chose that object because it's made
out of vinyl, and it was something that I think
perfectly kind of illustrates the benefits and
problems of plastic in medicine.
Blood, up until the '50s, really, to the extent
that blood collection took place, it was in glass
bottles. If you went to get blood drawn, up until
the 1950s, you know, they would use a steel
needle, and the blood would be taken out through
that needle, through rubber tubing, into a glass
bottle with a rubber stopper.
It didn't work very well. The blood cells were
damaged in the process. And of course, those
glass bottles were breakable. It wasn't a great
system.
And in the 1950s, a Boston surgeon named Carl
Walter started looking for a better way. And he
came up with the idea of using one of the new
plastics that was out, vinyl, as a way to collect
and store blood. And he invented the vinyl blood
bag.
And, in fact, you know, to prove its advantages
to colleagues, he took it with him to a meeting
filled with blood and stepped on it to show them,
you know, this is really unbreakable.
And it was a huge technical advantage. You know,
you had bottles not only that wouldn't break, but
they made it possible to store blood more safely,
to collect it more safely and to separate out the
components in a sort of sterile, secure fashion
so that a single unit of blood could go - instead
of just going to one patient could go to three.
So it was a great, great development.

DAVIES: And the final tubing that was used for
IVs and all kinds of other procedures, that was
better than rubber?

Ms. FREINKEL: That was better than rubber, and it
was seen at the time as not only, you know - it
was considered better than rubber, and it was
considered inert. People assumed that this was
stuff that wasn't going to cause any problem to
human health.

DAVIES: Now, what are some of the issues that
have arisen with the use of vinyl blood bags and
IV tubes?

Ms. FREINKEL: Well, vinyl, the plastic vinyl, is
made from a plastic called PVC. And on its own,
PVC is a pretty rigid and brittle plastic. The
way that you make it into something soft and
pliable that you can use for, say, a blood bag or
an IV bag is by adding in sort of oily chemicals
called phthalates and, in particular, one called
DEHP.
The problem is that DEHP doesn't really bond with
the plastic. And it's -remember I compared
earlier a polymer to a long strand, well, imagine
those long strands, and then the DEHP is like
little snips of spaghetti, say. It comes out
really easily, and it leaches out easily. It
leaches into the blood that's contained in the
blood bag. It particularly will leach out if
there's a fatty liquid present.
But we've known since the early '70s that DEHP
leaches out of vinyl, and the way that we know is
that there were a pair of scientists at that time
who were doing some experiments with rat livers.
It doesn't really matter what they were trying to
do.
But they kept finding this weird, strange
compound that was fouling up their experiments,
and when they set out to figure out what it was,
they discovered it was DEHP. And they were very
surprised because everybody had assumed that this
is, you know, an inert material.
They then did a bunch of research, and, you know,
they came to the conclusion that this was not
harmful, that this was fine for human health
except under some very, very particular and rare
circumstances.
Fast-forward about 20 year, in the late '90s, our
understanding about sort of toxicology has
changed, and a couple of things had happened. One
is that there was sort of a new science
discovering that some chemicals don't work like
traditional toxins.
They - instead of sort of there being kind of a
straight line of exposure to something like, you
know, birth defects or cancer, these chemicals
act in a sort of more convoluted and complicated
way.
They interfere with our hormones, and they
interfere with the endocrine system, which is the
network of glands that orchestrate growth and
development. And there's some research done
showing that DEHP, this chemical that's in vinyl,
has this property. It interferes with
testosterone.
Most people aren't exposed to those kinds of
levels, even in hospital settings where you are,
you know, being transfused for a long time, or a
little baby is being transfused for a long time.
It's not approaching those levels. It is more
subtle, probably. But we don't
know what the safe level is.

DAVIES: All right, so then these materials that
we've been using, you know, everywhere for blood
bags and for IV solutions and for tubes, there
might be some concerns about them. Are there
alternatives that people are exploring?

Ms. FREINKEL: There are alternatives. There's
kind of - actually, it's a huge and growing area.
And that's the irony and frustrating thing to me,
to be honest.
Vinyl, polyvinyl chloride, there are alternatives
for that in medicine, and there are actually
companies who are using them. B. Braun, for
instance, went into the market with the
deliberate mission of finding alternative
materials. So they make IV bags and tubes out of
things like polyethylene and polypropylene or
silicon tubes.
The problem is these are more expensive, and so
for cash-strapped hospitals, you can understand
why they may be reluctant to go with an
alternative when they don't even completely know
whether it's okay.

GROSS: Susan Freinkel's interview with FRESH AIR
contributor Dave Davies will continue in the
second half of the show. Her new book is called
"Plastic: A Toxic Love Story." I'm Terry Gross,
and this is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.
Let's get back to the interview that FRESH AIR
contributor Dave Davies recorded with science
writer Susan Freinkel about her new book
"Plastic: A Toxic Love Story." It's about how
dependent we've become on plastic - it's in
nearly everything - and the hazards some plastics
pose to the environment and the human body.
When we left off, Freinkel was talking about the
vinyl bags and tubes used for blood transfusions
in IV medicines, which scientists discovered are
actually leaching chemicals into those fluids.

DAVIES: Well, what's been the reaction of the
chemical industry to these critiques of vinyl
bags and tubes?

Ms. FREINKEL: You know, the chemical industry
basically maintains that this stuff is safe, that
the argument about phthalates, for instance, is
they've been in use for 50 years; there's no
evidence of widespread human problems and
therefore, what's the issue? And, you know, the
vinyl industry has its own trade association,
which rebuts studies. The American Chemistry
Council is very quick to rebut any negative
studies that come out. And, you know, they are
right. The science on this is still uncertain. It
is still evolving. We are looking at a whole new
world of risks.
But, you know, I talked to one researcher who
pointed out that, you know, there are
similarities between the way the chemical
industry responds to a lot of the studies that
are suggesting problems and the way the tobacco
industry defended tobacco for 50 years. You know,
it's hard to make a slam dunk showing that these
things are dangerous. You make that case through
epidemiological studies and through animal
studies and, you know, you very carefully piece
it together.
Any time you get an epidemiological study
suggesting a correlation between exposure to a
phthalate or bisphenol A, for instance, and a
health outcome, the chemical industry quickly
points out that this is just a correlation.
There's no evidence of direct cause-and-effect.
That's true. That's what epidemiological studies
do, but they are the gold standard for
determining public health hazards. And this was
the same strategy that was used by the tobacco
companies when they were trying to fight growing
evidence that tobacco causes lung cancer. It's
been called a strategy of selling doubt.

DAVIES: What's the state of government regulation
of plastics and their potential health effects?

Ms. FREINKEL: Unlike pesticides or drugs, there's
no real explicit government regulation of
plastics. We have a very fragmented and fairly
ineffective patchwork of laws to regulate
synthetic chemicals. The central regulation there
is something called the Toxic Substances Control
Act, which was passed in 1976.
People's criticisms of that law are that it has
tended to treat chemicals as safe until proven to
be dangerous. But the way that the law is written
is very difficult to establish that a chemical is
dangerous because manufacturers do not have to
volunteer information about that, and the EPA is
- the Environmental Protection Agency is fairly
hamstrung in its ability to collect information.

DAVIES: So of all the thousands of different
kinds of plastics in all of their many, many
different uses, I mean how secure should we feel
that somebody's looking out to see whether it's
hurting us?
(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. FREINKEL: I think it depends on how worried
you want to be. Look, you know, they're a lot of
plastics out there. Plastics are not created
equal and I think there are a lot of plastics
that we don't have to worry about. I'm not so
worried about polyethylene. I'm not particularly
worried about polypropylene, which is the stuff
that's used - the plastics that's used in like
yogurt containers or margarine tubs. But we
know...

DAVIES: And you mentioned polyethylene, that's what? The...
Ms. FREINKEL: Polyethylene, that's the stuff of like plastic baggies.

DAVIES: The grocery bags, right? Yeah.

Ms. FREINKEL: Grocery bags. Sort of a film, that
film plastic. But we know that hazardous
chemicals are used in plastics and we know that
some of those plastics will leach chemicals that
may be harmful to our health, and we don't know
the full extent of that.
I'll give you an example, which is PET -
polyethylene terephthalate. It's the plastic
that's used in soda bottles and water bottles,
another plastic that we have for decades
considered an inert plastic. Well, in recent
years, there have been several studies showing
that PET can leach some kind of compound that
seems to have estrogenic activity - that seems to
act like an estrogen. We don't know what that
compound is. We don't know whether it's being
leached in sufficient quantities to have any
impact on human health.
The fact that we're suddenly discovering it is a
little disconcerting. You know, that said, I
think those kinds of findings are why we need to
have stronger laws that require manufacturers to
demonstrate the safety of chemicals that they put
into commerce, because we don't want to be
finding these things out decades after the fact.

DAVIES: So the basic difference is if you want to
market a new pharmaceutical, you need to
demonstrate its safety, to test it. If you want
to put a new plastic product out you put it out
and then wait to see if somebody figures out
there might be a problem.

Ms. FREINKEL: Exactly. I mean plastics came -
when plastics came bursting onto the scene the
presumption was that these were inert materials.
And what we're finding is that they may actually
be much more biologically active in some cases
than we ever imagined.

DAVIES: If you're just joining us, we're speaking
with writer Susan Freinkel. She's written a new
book about the presence and effects of plastic in
our lives. It's called "Plastic: A Toxic Love
Story."
Have there been problems with plastics leaching from baby bottles?
Ms. FREINKEL: The plastic that used to be used to
make baby bottles is polycarbonate. It's a hard,
clear, glass-like plastic and one of the main
ingredients in that is a chemical called
bisphenol A, which is an estrogen mimic. If you
look at a diagram of that molecule, it looks just
like an estrogen molecule. And bisphenol A has
been associated with a bunch of health problems,
including obesity, breast cancer, heart disease
and others. And so, you know, when research about
bisphenol A started coming out, you know, people,
parents especially were understandably horrified
at the thought that the bottles that they were
using to feed their babies could potentially be
leaching this chemical into their babies.
You'd be hard-pressed to buy a baby bottle now
that contains BPA. You know, this is one of those
instances where the government didn't step in but
Walmart did and, you know, the big-box stores
won't carry BPA bottles. I actually was in San
Diego a couple of years ago and saw this display
of sports water bottles, which also used to be
made of polycarbonate, and they were, these
things that usually costs like $15 were marked
down to a dollar because they still had bisphenol
A in them.

DAVIES: So this is a case where concerns were
raised about health issues associated with
bisphenol A and it became such a publicly known
issue that retailers responded but there was no
regulatory authority that stepped in and did
anything?

Ms. FREINKEL: No. No. Bisphenol A is still -
manufacturers are still free to use bisphenol A,
although it's acquired such a bad rep that not
many do. But yeah, this is one of those cases.
Now, you know, there are other countries -there
are some states and I don't know the exact number
there are some states that have outlawed
bisphenol A and there are some countries that
have said it can't be used in products that are
being used by children. The problem, of course,
is, you know, you end up with this sort of
patchwork of regulations and no consistency or
guarantee.

DAVIES: You know, your book is called "Plastic: A
Toxic Love Story," and you maintain this metaphor
throughout it of our relationship with plastic.
And it's clear we're not going to break up. There
are just too many things that we use. But at the
end of the book there's this really troubling set
of statistics you offer that we have produced
nearly as much plastic in the last 10 years as in
all of the previous decades combined. Plastic
production is accelerating. Plastic goods are
spilling out across the landscape. A culture of
use and - use and dispose is being exported to a
developing world. You say plastic production
could reach two trillion pounds a year by 2050,
four times today's levels.
This is just kind of depressing, isn't it? I
mean, is there a way to produce and use less of
this stuff?

Ms. FREINKEL: I think there is. I think that we
are going to have to. I mean part of the reason
you're looking at two trillion pounds is that
we're exporting not just, you know, good plastic
consumer goods to the developing countries, but
also a kind of throwaway culture, and that's
really what we have to get away from. Half of the
plastics made now are for throwaway items and
that is the biggest and sort of most troubling
use of plastic, because a lot of those are just
trivial things that we don't need and which, you
know, end up in swaths of the world's oceans.
I think that the changes that are going to have
to take place in the way that we deal with
plastic are changes that are going to have to
come from everyone with a stake in the future of
plastics. So that means, you know, manufacturers
are going to have to be thinking more carefully
about the way they make plastics, the chemicals
that are used in them, the kinds of applications
they have. And we as consumers have to take
responsibility and look more carefully and
thoughtfully at the way that we use plastics.

DAVIES: Well, Susan Freinkel, it's been interesting. Thanks so much.

Ms. FREINKEL: Thank you, Dave.
GROSS: Susan Freinkel spoke with FRESH AIR
contributor Dave Davies. Her new book is called
"Plastic: A Toxic Love Story." You can read an
excerpt on our website, freshair.npr.org.
Coming up, rock historian Ed Ward reviews the new
box set "The Bristol Sessions, 1927 to '28." The
sessions gave Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter
family their commercial debuts. This is FRESH AIR.
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>From g.parlow@gmx.at Fri Apr 22 04:40:52 2011
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Subject: Re: [permaculture] Our 'Toxic' Love-Hate Relationship With Plastics
/Fresh Air NPR/NEW book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story
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The problem might be the real solution here - as I cannot see any way
to get people to refrain from producing offspring - and wthe earth is
already heavily overpopulated, I would say. So wise man invents
plastic and gets rid of fertility that way - so maybe we are looking
at a natural decline of population numbers. I by far prefer this
scenario to any catastrophic GAU or war.


> this property. It interferes with testosterone."
> ....
> that newborn baby boys born to mothers with more
> phthalates in their bodies had a subtle
> difference in their genitals. That genital
> abnormality could indicate a disruption in
> testosterone levels, Freinkel says.



Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Georg Parlow
************
g.parlow@gmx.at
1230 Wien, Wohnpark Alterlaa B1/013
+43-650-8899345







  • [permaculture] More Good News- Third Town In Maine Passes Food Freedom Law, Linda Ray, 04/21/2011

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