Do Plastics Really Cause Cancer?

Power to the Peeples is an exclusive Earth911 series written by Bob Peeples, our resident chemical engineer and Program Manager of Earth911’s sister site Beaches911. Bob combines his extensive knowledge of the environment and how things work with an off-the-cuff sense of humor.

It’s funny how we deduce things in life. Scientists injected phthalates into rats which was linked to liver cancer; all of a sudden plastic bottles cause liver cancer in humans. By that logic, because most heroin addicts admit to eating applesauce at least once in their childhood, then applesauce is clearly a gateway drug.

Phthalates are plastic additives, designed to improve texture or durability of plastic products (including water bottles). Most plastics have additives, and phthalates are not exclusive to plastic. They have been used since the 1920s in plastics and have been almost everywhere since the ’50s.

Did you know that these same additives can be found on car windshields? In a closed environment like a car interior, these phthalates can accumulate on the inside of windows. Phthalates are the additive in vinyl upholstery that makes it more supple than PVC pipe. As it “cooks” out, the vinyl becomes more brittle, and the phthalates end up everywhere but the in vinyl – including that film on the windows. You’re worried about fumes from a frozen water bottle, when you’ve been inhaling them since the first day that you rode in a car.

The real fear with plastics should be the burning of chlorinated plastics like PVC (that “C” in PVC refers to chlorine) in burn barrels, incinerators or energy recovery disposal systems. In addition to leaching phthalates, you stand a good chance of losing some polychlorinated dibenzodioxins to the atmosphere.

Humans can avoid ingesting these awful chemicals that fall from the sky by washing produce before consumption. The trouble with that particular plan is that several animals (including cattle and fish) don’t ever wash their food. No amount of washing on your part will remove it from meat, so welcome to the top of the food chain; bon appetit. Now you’ve got a pretty good excuse for recycling PVC.

Back to the cancer in rats story, the part you probably didn’t read is that a follow-up study on primates disproved the human connection. That chain email wouldn’t be as interesting if it didn’t represent conclusive proof. Consider the following:

• Finding a chemical in our bodies does not, in itself, make a chemical harmful
• Finding it in our urine just proves that our body is doing its job and disposing of that which it finds useless
• Most importantly, an increase in sexual abnormalities in newborns combined with presence in the mother’s system of a certain chemical does not link the two

In this case, you may want to look at the millions of other endocrine disruptors in the mother’s world, like the pesticides used to protect applesauce.