Also see one writer's account of the dozens of plastic objects she encounters every day—all before lunch.
Years ago, I profiled a theater designer who had just created 200 sumptuous costumes from garbage bags. Green, rose, black, white, sky blue, and see-through—the plastic was pliable and it pleated, flounced, puffed, fluffed, and glowed with reflected light. The title of that long-ago theater production was 33 Scenes on thePossibility of Human Happiness. From trash to the sublime, plastic was cheap, durable, endlessly protean, and astonishingly beautiful. Christo would agree.
How could that loveliness be linked to what seems its ugly opposite: the contortions and distortions that chemicals in plastic may have bequeathed us? The stunted testicles in fish and alligators; girls blooming breasts and pubic hair at an eerily young age; the steadily rising numbers of human males born with abnormal urethras; climbing rates of testicular and breast cancer; declining sperm counts. Not to mention the death of wildlife, particularly seabirds that mistakenly feast on discarded plastic. Those garbage-bag ball gowns are now married in my mind with a photo of a Laysan albatross whose belly, slashed open by biologists, was jammed with 306 pieces of plastic flotsam—a surreal bird version of a junkyard.
The most pressing question about plastic, though, may be whether daily exposure alters the health and fertility of our children and perhaps even our children’s children. It turns out that the hormonelike chemicals in plastic may remodel our cells and tissue during key stages of development, both in the womb and in early childhood. When pregnant mice are exposed to chemicals in plastic, the mammary and prostate tissue of their developing embryos proliferates abnormally, and sensitivity to hormones is forever turned up. Perhaps most disturbing is the significant increase in chromosomal abnormalities in the eggs forming in those embryos. Those are the eggs that will make the next generation. Thus, if the worst-case scenario proves true, early exposure to plastic can reshape not just our children but their children, too.
Present in everyday items like panty hose and perfume, computers and catheters, baby rattles and billiard balls, plastics are so ubiquitous we seldom give them a second thought. Yet they pose problems both familiar and unfamiliar. Some of the public health issues are as familiar as those posed by tobacco, lead, DDT, and asbestos—all hazards that were understood, monitored, and regulated only after decades of research and advocacy. Plastic presents new kinds of concerns because it requires a radically different paradigm of toxicity. Whereas lead exposure can be quantified by the drop in a child’s IQ and asbestos exposure can eventually be tallied by mesothelioma incidence, the typical standards of toxicology do not apply to the chemicals in plastic. If plastic harms, it does so by stealth: by mimicking our own hormones, by scrambling signals during development, by stimulating our own pathways excessively. And it may have that power at astonishingly low exposure levels, amounts that by typical toxicological measures look just fine. With plastic, less may be more, and a little may be a lot.
