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The Case of Plastics: Health Interest Group

ROLES
GOALS
CASE STUDY
RESOURCES

You are concerned about the health risks of plastics. Plastic additives are increasingly present in human bodies, and studies suggest that these additives pose a threat. Though more research is needed, you believe the existing evidence mandates action. The government should regulate plastics and plastic additives until they are proven safe.

Read the Original Regulation and your group’s Goals and Recommendations for the final regulation, and use them to prepare answers to the following questions, which the Regulators will ask during the Hearing:

  • Recycling in the United States is currently a function of municipal governments. Who should be responsible for plastic waste? Should the producers of plastics bear more of a burden than the consumers? What is the role of individual responsibility in addressing the matter of plastic waste?
  • Only a small percentage of plastic waste in the United States is recovered for recycling, meaning most plastic trash goes into landfills. What is the best way to reduce the amount of plastic entering the waste stream? Is curbside recycling the best option? Do we need to develop new methods of recycling and fuel recovery? Or is reducing plastic production and consumption the best way to reduce waste?
  • The goal of this hearing is to create a federal regulation that will effectively address concerns about plastics. What issues would governmental regulation of plastics most effectively address? What can be accomplished without governmental regulation that would improve the way we use and dispose of plastics? What new problems might result from these regulations?
  • What historical cases, examples, or evidence provide useful lessons about the successes or failures of addressing the impact and implications of our uses of plastics?
  • Do the problems caused by our use of plastics outweigh the benefits that they provide?

Health Interest Group Roles

Researcher & Antitoxicity Advocate

You are an expert on environmental toxins and environmental law with a particular interest in the effect of chemical toxins on children.

Researcher of Endocrine Disrupters

You are a research scientist concerned about the poorly understood but potentially devastating effects of endocrine disruptors on human and animal populations.

Science, Technology, and Society Academic Researcher

You are a professor and scientist who studies the intersection between molecular science and public policy and harbors deep concerns about the potential toxic effects of plastics.

Senatorial Aid

You are a legislative aide to a Senator who is a strong proponent of the “Non-Toxic Child Act,” and is interested in seeing elements of that law in the new regulations.

Antitoxicity Activist

You are a marine biologist and director of NOAA’s Marine Debris Program who is concerned about the toxic effects of plastic trash in the oceans.

Goals & Recommendations

Recommendations for the Regulation of Plastic Waste

Prepared in Advance of the Environmental Protection Agency Hearing

Main Concerns of the Health Interest Group:

  • Plastics must be proven safe before use. They should not be assumed safe until proven otherwise, and the public has the right to know as much as possible about the potential toxicity of plastics.
  • Plastic trash and waste from plastic production in the environment are major toxicity concerns for human and animals.
  • The government should create and enforce laws that hold producers of plastics accountable for the safety of their products for consumers and in the environment.

Recommendations Based on Health Interest Group Concerns:

  • All plastics must be proven safe through scientific study rather than assumed safe. Plastics not proven safe must carry a warning label notifying consumers of potential toxicity.
  • Producers are responsible for proving the safety of plastics, plasticizers, and additives. All studies must be approved, verified, and assessed by a third-party evaluator.
  • Producers are responsible for the clear and accurate labeling of their products to reflect their safety status.
  • Plastics, plasticizers, and other additives determined to be unsafe will be banned and must be immediately removed from all consumer products at producer expense.
  • Producers will provide the Environmental Protection Agency with up-to-date information for an online consumer database of potentially toxic products, including the status of safety studies along with safety information and guidelines for consumers.
  • Producers must educate consumers about the potential health risks of plastics.
  • Producers must study the effects of plastic debris and waste products from plastic production on environmental and human health, and comply with stricter environmental controls for production and recycling facilities.

Case Study: Plastics and the Human Body

Without plastics, modern medicine simply would not exist as we know it. Plastic is a vital part of almost everything that happens today in hospitals, operating rooms, and doctor’s offices. However, even as plastics help make us healthier, there is increasingly widespread concern that the abundance of plastic in our lives is also making us sicker. The plastics that provide us with medical marvels may also be slowly and almost imperceptibly poisoning us.

People have been wary of plastics since their earliest invention. After John Wesley Hyatt invented celluloid, the first synthetic polymer, in 1869, consumers purchased brushes, combs, shirt collars, billiard balls, and toothbrushes made from this new substance. As celluloid grew in popularity, so did concerns about its flammability. Dramatic stories, spurred perhaps by a natural human distrust of new, unfamiliar things, fanned celluloid’s reputation as a dangerous explosive, making it difficult to tell truth from fiction.

Though stories of danger were often exaggerated, some plastics did prove genuinely harmful. In 1959 dry cleaners began wrapping clothes in thin, clingy plastic bags. A storm of terrible news reports soon followed: in just a few months 80 young children suffocated while playing with the bags. Cries to ban the bags led the plastics manufacturing industry to launch a national education campaign about how to dispose of the bags properly and to change the manufacturing specifications to make the bags less dangerous.

Bu plastic quickly proved its value to human health. In the 1940s Harvard Medical School professor Carl Walter used plastic to revolutionize blood collection. Traditional glass and rubber systems for blood collection and storage were heavy, fragile, and difficult to sterilize between uses. Walter experimented with a replacement—plasticized polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a polymer that is made flexible by the addition of DEHP, a phthalate. Plasticized PVC was durable, inexpensive, lightweight, and disposable, and its use greatly enhanced the sterility and security of blood collection and storage. It also allowed doctors to separate blood into red blood cells, plasma, and platelets, and thereby use a single unit of blood to treat three people. This system rapidly became a success. After being tried and proven by military doctors in the Korean War, PVC blood storage became the norm in American hospitals by the 1960s. Plastic also quickly replaced glass and metal in other medical equipment where its versatility solved numerous problems caused by other materials.

While PVC provided lifesaving medical advances, it also sparked serious health concerns. In 1974, at the B.F. Goodrich Company’s PVC plant, four workers died of the same rare liver cancer. An investigation implicated exposure to the chlorine gas that is added to PVC to give the plastic its strength, flexibility, and fire resistance. The federal government acted to resolve the problem, enforcing strict regulations on worker safety conditions to prevent future exposure.

The crisis at the Goodrich plant raised public concern about the safety of plastics and the additives used to produce them. Research suggested that what went into plastics during the manufacturing process didn’t always stay there. In 1969 Johns Hopkins University toxicologists Robert Rubin and Rudolph Jaeger found that DEHP was leaching from plastic and into human tissues. A 1972 Washington Post article reported that phthalates like DEHP had been found in blood samples from people who had been exposed only through everyday contact with plastic, noting that “humans are just a little plastic now.” [1]

The foundational principle of toxicology is that virtually any chemical can be poisonous if too much is consumed. Even water, necessary for all life, can be fatal if you drink too much. Paracelsus, the 16th-century founder of toxicology put it succinctly: “The poison is in the dose.” But the chemicals leaching from plastics into human bodies and the environment may be a different kind of toxin. A prominent toxicology researcher, Theo Colburn, argues that when it comes to phthalates and other plastic additives, it might not be the amount of the dose but the timing that matters most. Colburn and other researchers say that plastic additives can disrupt human endocrine, or hormonal, systems and that for children and babies exposure, even in small doses, can have an outsized effect on development.

The plastics industry responds aggressively to the reports of researchers like Colburn, arguing that no study has conclusively proven plastics unsafe. The industry criticizes research reports that connect plastics with endocrine disruption, questioning research methods and results and noting that endocrine disruption that occurs in the presence of plastic does not prove that plastics cause endocrine disruption. But because endocrine disruptors do not work like traditional toxins, it is difficult for researchers to prove their effects in the way the industry demands.

Some public-health advocates argue that it’s best to prove any potentially toxic substance safe rather than to assume it’s safe until proven otherwise. Such activists point to the European Union’s adoption of REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals), which requires that safety information on all chemicals be provided to consumers. Unlike Europe, the United States has no overarching or effective laws to regulate the safety of chemicals, so consumers have no way of knowing what’s in a certain plastic. John Wargo of Yale University has proposed a Plastics Control Act that would mandate safety testing, require the labeling of contents, and prohibit dangerous chemicals. However, lawmakers in the United States have not shown any movement toward advancing such a measure into law.

A new experimental procedure to grow human tissue and organs on a framework of microplastic threads is just one of the amazing medical advances in the works today made possible by plastic. But unanswered questions about the safety of plastic create an uncertain future for human and environmental health. Plastics are now a part of our bodies and our environment, and the long-term consequences are still unknown.

[1] Quoted in Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), p. 89.

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