Plastic oceans, bisphenol A, phthalates... What goes around, comes around

Here is an excellent article about the appalling problematic of plastic.

In a nutshell, our society is addicted to plastic - by the way plastic derives from oil which leads us to the addiction, waste and depletion of worldwide oil resources, anyway -, almost everything we buy is made partly or entirely of plastic. The problem is plastic goods are not biodegradable and barely 3 to 5% of them are recycled. The 97 to 95% remaining is either buried in the soil, burnt or thrown in the sea. For the record, the annual worldwide plastic production is above 260 millions tons.

Once in the sea, the plastic starts a trip following the oceanic streams (depending on which ocean we are talking about, see here), sailing clockwise from coast to coast, such as the hawaiian's where birds are dying from ingesting plastic or fishes who have previously ingested plastic themselves...



... up to garbage patches also called trash islands.



Once there we are not talking about bottles or big pieces of plastic but literally tiny grains of plastic, grains that are easily swallowed by the whole food chain... Up to human beings.



Plastic is made of chemicals components such as bisphenol A and phthalates. Allegedly, the concentration of those components, taken one by one, is too weak to induce any health disfunction. The problem is that 1) those components are mixed up together, 2) we are litterally surrounded by them in our everyday life and 3) we are eventually ingesting them.

Scientists have just started few years ago to study the effects of those components, and especially their endocrine disruptive effects. It has been proven on frogs and snails that those chemicals components have serious effects on their endocrine system. To sum up briefly, scientists have put snails in a regular plastic bottle of water, and after several months, a "superfeminization" has been observed (additional female organs, enlarged accessory sex glands etc). Even more concerning, this "superfeminization" has also been observed on wild frogs in Florida (meaning not in a lab but in the wildlife!). Doctors have also studied pregnant woman with various bisphenol A concentration in the blood (again, as we are surrounded by them, we all have bisphenol A and phthalates in our organism) and they found out that the higher the concentration was, the bigger the risks for genital malformations were.

Some scientists even suggest that the worldwide decrease of fertility rate they have been observing for decades, could be linked with those endocrine disruptors.