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Photo credit: Jenna Spevack With the recent roll bag vote and the expanded TerraCycle collections happening at the Coop, plastic has had increased visibility among Coop members.  However, there’s one area where plastic chemicals are ubiquitously present yet mostly unseen within the walls of 782 Union. Where? Actually inside our food and then ultimately in our bodies.  To understand how plastic chemicals end up food and then in people, a basic lesson in polymer chemistry is needed.  Simplified, plastics are made up of long chains of plasticizer chemicals (a monomer is a plastic compound, which when strung together make up polymers that form the building blocks of plastic.)  Plastics of course have a wide variety of uses.  From hard, colored plastic to flexible, transparent cling film and other types of food packaging, plastics have brought a certain ease to many us living a modern life. Unfortunately popular plastic chemicals share two characteristics that’s a pr...

Sometimes you just need a cup of coffee or iced tea while out and about. But you can do it in a more sustainable way by using a reusable coffee cup. Fact: Americans throw away about 25 billion foam coffee cups a year. Many places will pour your coffee or ice drink into a reusable container if you ask. Smartplanet , Reusit and Starbucks make reusable coffee containers. Many of these products are BPA-free and therefore healthier to use. You can have your coffee on the go and be sustainable too!

Bisphenol-A (BPA) is an estrogenic-like chemical used in many plastic products. BPA can can interfere with hormones and normal development in children and has been linked to everything from infertility to diabetes to heart disease. Some products—such as sippy cups for toddlers—advertise themselves as being "BPA-free". The presence of BPA in the linings of many canned products has been less publicized. Several manufacturers , such as Eden Organics , have voluntarily stopped lining their cans with BPA. Weruva is one of the few pet food companies to have canned food with BPA-free linings. Four Swedish reporters decided to do some informal research about BPA in canned foods. They ate nothing but canned food for two days and doctors found that their BPA levels rose between 2,800 and 4,600 percent. These levels are below what the Swedish government estimates to be safe, though what is a safe level of BPA is still being debated. Since April 2012, the Swedish government outla...

Most people have heard of BPA-free plastic, but a recent study has found that nearly all plastic , even that which claims to be BPA-free, releases chemicals that have estrogenic activity (EA) and cause hormone distruption. Their results found that: "Almost all commercially available plastic products we sampled—independent of the type of resin, product, or retail source—leached chemicals having reliably detectable EA, including those advertised as BPA free. In some cases, BPA-free products released chemicals having more EA than did BPA-containing products." They noted that: "Chemicals having estrogenic activity (EA) reportedly cause many adverse health effects, especially at low (picomolar to nanomolar) doses in fetal and juvenile mammals." Their conclusion indicates that the industry does have access to additives that have no detectable EA and have similar costs. If these were used by the plastics industry, we could: "eliminate a potential health risk po...