We need to talk about POPS
POPs, or Persistent Organic Pollutants, include some of the nastiest chemicals in our world today. And in the recent past.
So, what are they? And why the name? Persistent, because they're pesky little buggers that won't break down easily (and as anti-plastic people, we know all about that). They don't break down by chemical means, biological or photolytic (light) means. Because of this knack of hanging about, they bioaccumulate, or build up, in certain environments, including animal tissue, like our own. And often they don't just bioaccumulate; they biomagnify. They are lipophilic (attracted to fat).
Organic, in the chemistry sense, because their molecules have a carbon element in their make-up. (It sure don't mean you find them at the health food store. Although, read on...).
And why do we need to talk about them? While not plastic themselves, these blighters have a habit of "clinging on" to plastics, which makes plastics even more dangerous than they are already with their phthalates, BPA and BPS. (Or rather, plastic has a habit of clinging on to them, in a process called adsorption). So when a fish ingests plastic, it's not just ingesting all that horrible plastic badness, it's also ingesting the POPs attached to the plastic. For humans, there is a range of health risks, particularly hormone disruption.
In addition, many of the plastic items found in our households today are infused with some of these POPs already.
Old School POPs (from Pop's day)
By the '70s, some governments were already banning some of these or limiting their use. In 2001, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants created a list of the 12 most harmful - the dirty dozen - POPs. These included aldrin, chlordane, dieldrin, heptachlorobenzene (HCB), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), DDT, dioxins and polychlorinated benzofurans.
You've probably heard of some of the above chemicals. Others may sound like a character out of Star Trek. Eight of these twelve are pesticides. Made from petrochemicals. Now mostly banned in developed countries. But they're still there. They are still being made and used in some countries, and in the countries where they were used up until the '70s, they haven't all gone away. In 2008, the World Health Organisation said of them, "their persistence in the environment is remarkable – it may take them decennia or centuries to be degraded".
Meet the new POPs, same as the old POPs
In 2009, the Stockholm Convention released a further list of 12 chemicals deemed extremely hazardous. The New Pops include more organochlorine pesticides. (Many of the banned, Old School, pesticides were simply replaced with similar pesticides. As we plastivists have seen, industry will step sideways to conform with a ban (BPA to BPS). But ultimately, industry is here to make money, so if the chemical isn't banned, they'll use it. Why not?)
Also included in the new dirty dozen were brominated flame retardants. More specifically, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). Up until last year, the state of California had a heap of these in everything, due to some rather paranoid furniture flammability standards. (American women actually have the highest levels of flame retardants in their breast milk in the world).
In her entertaining, yet sobering 2013 book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, science journalist Florence Williams, writes of becoming a mother and getting her breast milk tested. She also FedXed part of her couch to a lab in Germany for testing. Brominated flame retardants were detected in both samples.In their 2009 Book, Slow Death by Rubber Duck, environmental writers Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie called these PBDE flame retardants the "new PCBs". They have a similar molecular structure and exhibit many of the same hazardous qualities as PCBs.
The authors discuss how the bromine industry has fought to keep this stuff in just about everything. And just about everything the PBDEs are bonded with, is plastic. The polyurethane stuffing of your couch or mattress, your carpet underlay, and just about every electronic gizmoid, such as TVs, laptops, iPads, etc, has these, and is plastic.
Smith and Lourie also discuss a Swedish long-term study showing the exponential growth of the presence of PBDEs in our bloodstreams since the banning of PCBs in the '70s.
Flame retardants in blood? So, who's eating couches?
Pesticides get into our blood because we eat food. Got it. But we don't eat couches and TVs. Or kids' PJs. So how on earth are those flame retardants getting into our bloodstream?
Scientists have now discovered it's via dust. As your couch perishes and crumbles, and your curtains, telly, etc... your dust is increasingly made up of these particles. Which we then inhale as they become airborne. And toddlers and kids don't even need them to get airborne. They crawl around on the floor, roll, play under the bed, etc. And then mouth toys that have been under the couch, suck their thumbs, etc.
While vacuuming helps keep the dust bunnies down, a lot of fine particles are ejected via the vacuum outlet. Health professionals recommend HEPA filters. But these are also made of plastic which is perishing each day. Are they ejecting PBDEs back out into the air? It's unclear how effective the HEPA filter is of ridding our homes of PBDEs.
Conclusion
POPs are everywhere - in our soil, our house dust, our blood and, as with plastic, in our waterways and oceans. While it's important for everyone to know about POPS, it's particularly important to know about them in order to gain a fuller understanding of the effects of plastic pollution.
Many plastic products are infused with these at production stage (PBDE flame retardants) and, in a double whammy, a range of chemicals bond with plastic in waterways, particularly in the ocean. Our oceans are full of plastic, but they are also full of all the chemicals going down drains and emptying into waterways in every other way, a large number of which are POPs.
It's hard to say how many synthetic chemicals are in use in our world today, but on many counts it's over 100,000. The vast majority of these have not been tested for their safety or effects on humans.
The onus should not be on us as individuals to discover these chemicals are dangerous many years after they've been in use. Governments need to adopt a precautionary principle, rather than wait twenty to thirty years, as they do now, to see if there might be a problem. In the European Union, the precautionary principle is adopted a lot more extensively. Industry, left to its own devices, will attempt to maximise profits. No company wants to be seen to be breaking the law. They will comply with regulations, but they will also lobby vociferously against regulation if it's going to add to operational costs. (Ironically, however, in the case of bromine, industry lobbies strongly for regulation to enforce more flame retardants in order to keep sales of bromine high!).
Many of us live with a mistaken sense of security that our governments have already tested these chemicals rigorously. They haven't. Most governments have neither the resources nor the will to do so. Additionally, most governments don't like to slow industry down with excessive regulation and costs. Yet it surely must be industry who pays for rigorous safety testing of these chemicals.
At the moment, we are the guinea pigs. Is that really acceptable? It is only with pressure from us that governments will change and force industry to prove a chemical's safety upon introduction.
Further Reading
Stockholm Convention
Blue Voice.org Fact Sheet on POPs
Wikipedia
Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History
US POPs Watch
Slow Death by Rubber Duck, Chapter 4: The New PCBs
EWG PBDE free
Bruce Lourie and Rick Smith in Conversation with Richard Fidler, ABC Radio
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