Commentary: Plastics companies are doing a fine job for themselves
Every playgroup my kids attend and every grocery checkout line I’m stuck in with another mother subjects me to another discussion about the dangers of plastic.
Not credit cards, but the ubiquitous array of products to which our kids are exposed.
But I’m not believing the hype. We were all raised with plastic in our mouths. Well, actually, when I was a toddler milk bottles were made of glass, and my school sandwiches were wrapped in foil, and I drank water from a tap right until college, when I started drinking beer from one. Our house didn’t even have Tupperware until the 1980s, and it was 10 more years before we had a microwave, so we never heated it.
But today, plastic is everywhere in my kitchen — from the Brita that I “purify” water in, to the spatula that I flip my free-range eggs with, to the ice cube tray in my freezer.
It couldn’t all be bad, right? This is America!
Our government and the nice capitalists at the plastics companies wouldn’t purposely harm people. This isn’t like lead paint or tainted beef or aluminum in deodorant or fluoride in toothpaste or mercury in fish or carcinogens in mattresses or gases in carpeting.
No. Besides, I see the plastic companies went so far as to label plastic products from 1 to 7! Everything that touches my mouth or body has a 7 on it, so that must be the high end.
Oh, wait now. While sitting at Starbucks drinking a coffee-free iced beverage — in plastic — I’m Googling “number 7 plastic.” It does not sound so lucky. No. 7 denotes “polycarbonate, which can leach the hormone-disrupter bisphenol A especially when heated or chilled.”
What does leach mean? When I think “leach,” I imagine the blood-sucking thing in the swamps of Mississippi. Is someone making a verb out of this noun and merely changing a vowel in an attempt to hide the fact that plastic can suck the good stuff out of foods or beverages and spit out cancer? That seems like a storyline from a Transformers movie. But Transformers are made of plastic, right? As are rubber duckies? Which often go in my kids’ warm bath and then in their mouths?
I don’t want to get hysterical. No. 7 plastic must be the kind used on my toilet seat or trash can. I’m sure the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and maybe even the Bureaur of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have looked into this potential disaster in our homes and made sure this composite is no where near my dairy/soy/gluten-free turkey bacon.
Yet I could swear that’s a 7 on my water jug and another on the reusable water bottle I fill up from the jug. It couldn’t be another 7 on the “microwave safe” container I put my husband’s lunch in every day? Or on my infant’s bottle, which I put in boiling water to warm the milk inside and sterilize in the microwave in another plastic container daily?
Now I’m stapled, not glued, to the TV (because we all know horses are fed from plastic buckets before they become glue), waiting for a news channel to tell me the truth about everything I’ve ever bought from Target, Costco and Walmart. While here, I’m rubbing diaper cream on my child from another plastic container. Could it be true that perfumes provoke plastic, causing it to leach more cancer into products? And does plastic have actual feelings that get hurt and then retaliate by leaching?
I’m feeling really unsafe. In my own kitchen. I decide to load my kids into my carbon-producing SUV — into their recalled and then un-recalled car seats — to head over to McDonald’s and get them some food from the dollar menu. Because it comes in cardboard, thank goodness.
Actress DIANE FARR writes for Tribune Media Service.