Let's not fall all over ourselves defending the manufacture of plastics.. it's a self-justifying dinosaur industry. We can go a lot farther with cellulose and chitin and friends, polymers made in factories aren't particularly special from a chemical structure/function standpoint-- unlike PFAS type stuff, their bioincompatibility is just due to our laziness. The big advantage with plastics is that we're good at making/shaping/customizing them quickly and cheaply. It can very much all be done with biocompatible/harmless chemicals. That it isn't, is an accident of history: the early Chemistry research that produced the synthetic polymers used today made no attempt whatsoever to be biocompatible.. everything since has built on that, and not enough collective fuck has been given to dismantle and rebuild that infrastructure.

And just to get out ahead of it-- can we also not blame plastic consumers, who after all are just trying to eat, and probably don't want to poison themselves.

This makes me wonder how many deaths the widespread use of plastics in packaging has saved over the years from improvements in nutrition (reduced spoilage lowers net food costs and increases food availability) and reductions in food-borne illnesses.

The death rate from food-borne illness is pretty low now (with advances in processing, transportation, packaging, phase-change refrigeration, and surveillance of outbreaks).

We might be able to have our cake and eat it to with better/different packaging, of course.

I remember doing some consulting work for a medical device a couple of years back (embedded software) where they were really really struggling to design flexible tubing that would pass a bio-toxicity test.

In practice it seems plastic flexible tubing uses a lot of plasticizers (BPA included) to make them flexible.

My point being that, even if you avoid the packaging and the relabeled cosmetic 'perfumes', it still seems that the flexible tubing you would find in most coffee vending machines and water filtration systems (and many other consumer applications that do not require medical regulation) is probably choke-full of plasticizers.

> The evidence is undeniably clear that limiting exposure to toxic phthalates can help safeguard Americans’ physical and financial wellbeing.

It's kind of sad that "this could kill you" is followed by "and think of the hospital bills"

Wait until you hear how much Benzene (& similar chemicals Toluene and Xylene) are in gasoline. A little off gasing from plastics is tiny compared to exhaust in traffic or fumes while refueling.

Pthalates are added to many lotions, shampoos, and cosmetics. The FDA allows companies to list phthalate additives as 'fragrance'.

Plastics are terrible for there planet and for us as humans. However, they’re cheap, made everywhere and easy to make, can be made into whatever shape you want for an endless set of use cases, and weigh little.

At least for humans, it’d be great if we could somehow remove all the chemicals or find magic ones that are totally non-toxic, cheap, and easy to produce. Seems unlikely. We’re also not going to a world filled with wood and metal for all the reasons listed in the first paragraph. Seems like an untenable path unless someone invents something that is way better on the points that matter, or it’s regulated out of existence at great pain.

I’m pessimistic about the future of plastic.

"may play role" is such a vague phrase, it makes the rest of the sentence meaningless.

Most packaging are an abomination, all the junk food you can buy in supermarket (ie 70% of food products) are wrapped in 2, 3 or even more layers of plastic and ink soaked paper, all of it being toxic to some level and environmentally detrimental.

Some products don't even need plastic packaging but are wrapped in plastic to avoid ink migration from their outer marketing shell.

I'd like to see a globalised effort to standardise packaging, either at national or continental level, imagine a standard set of containers manufactured by state sponsored companies, all of it being 100% recycled or reused, sellers get to chose between a few colors/fonts and a few types of packaging (frozen, liquid, solid, fresh food, &c.).

Correlation... no causation was mentioned in abstract.

From a nature paper: “Individuals are primarily exposed to HMW phthalates via ingestion of food contaminated through processing or packaging [19], as well as via inhalation in buildings containing PVC flooring or other materials [20,21,22].” — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-021-00305-9

From abstract of paper reference by The Guardian: “Multivariable models identified increased mortality in relation to high-molecular weight (HMW) phthalate metabolites”.

> Phthalates, also found in consumer goods, may contribute to loss of life among older Americans costing US $40-47bn a year

Just in case your only concern about deaths is their economic impact...

Relevant John Oliver coverage on the PFAS topic: https://youtu.be/9W74aeuqsiU

The guradian was obviously alwayst filled with assholes who were only interessted in scaring the shit out of people.[1][2]

[1] https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Ne...

[2] https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20...

US "environmentalism" is utterly baffling when it comes to packaging. Case in point: I can no longer get plastic bags (which, by the way, have been biodegradable for the past 15 years or so), yet much of the stuff one buys in a typical US grocery store is _already_ enclosed in non-biodegradable plastic. Sometimes in 2-3 layers of it. What the fuck is the point of not providing the _biodegradable_ plastic bags? Wouldn't it be better to require from the manufacturers that stuff they supply is not wrapped in three layers of plastic to begin with, instead of inconveniencing the shoppers for no benefit whatsoever?

The guardian is trash. Only a fool reads it