The thesis of the book 'Countdown' is that this is largely due to widespread plastic and other endocrine disrupting chemicals. I believe this is one of the most important risks to humanity, after climate change, and global war. So far, I've taken some lifestyle changes to combat this:
1) Threw out all of my teflon cooking pans
2) Refuse to consume food in heated plastics
3) Throw out teabags (they have plastics). Use loose leaf tea
4) Will soon be throwing out liquid body wash and moisturizers, and replace with simpler oils
This is an emergency, which would probably require we do a revolution on use commercial packaging and plastic. But I don't have much faith, given how entrenched this industry is. Right now, industry is pushing BPA-free packaging, but I strongly suspect BPA-free plastics have similar endocrine effects, we just haven't studied them long enough.
> I strongly suspect BPA-free plastics have similar endocrine effects
Based on what? BPA is the monomer which makes up polycarbonate plastic, and it's a simple molecule which has been known to be an estrogen analogue for nearly 100 years. Other kinds of plastics besides polycarbonate are made from much different kinds of monomers which have no structural similarity to BPA, so why should we assume that the risk carries over? The mechanism that makes BPA dangerous has nothing to do with the fact that it can be turned into a plastic.
This exact thing is discussed in detail in the book OP referenced, it's excellent BTW.
The group of chemicals known as phthalates are added to a huge range of plastics we use at home every day and there is a ton of evidence suggesting that these chemicals are endocrine disruptors. They seem to all have very similar effects WRT endocrine disruption, often substituted for one another when one is found to be bad. This leads to the whack-a-mole effect described by a sibling comment.
Products can be listed as "BPA free" but still have these endocrine disrupting chemicals in them.
Just use glass. I never understood plastic containers. Basically just use shit that existed 50 years ago for food.
Iron pans, store in glass, butter, lard. If you spill stuff on a couch just live with it. Buy leather. Too many things are made because people are lazy. If you have kids don't have nice stuff, it's very easy.
> If you have kids don't have nice stuff, it's very easy.
An unexpected upshot is that in a functional household you can let them
play like actual children, without the cloying anxiety and constant
shrieks of "For Gods sake Tristan and Tarquin, not on the Louis
Vuitton !!"
Yea, I just laugh when my friends have all this nice stuff then they start having kids. I have a modest house with basic stuff. Walls were drawn all over, I just paint them. Furniture has paint, markers, things get spilt on it. Daughter thought it was cool to use permanent marker from a drawer on hardwood floors. Didn't come off, will probably have to resurface eventually, but literally who cares. Who am I trying impress? I look at these things as memories and try to fix what I can.
I would like to share that plain original Windex will take permanent marker out of many upholstery fabrics (and some carpets) if applied with a scrub brush and plenty of elbow grease, followed by a washcloth. I would try it on the floors, too, possibly also a Magic Eraser sponge.
Wouldn't wearing a mask while cleaning, and not drinking the stuff avoid that being a problem? Don't have to give kids a bottle of it to sniff while they're making the mess in the first place!
Which is also a disincentive (however small) for having kids - just as you finally start being able to afford something nice, you have to wait until your kids are ~15+ years old. Only then, you have a small window of opportunity, some 10 years maybe, before your offspring spawns children of their own...
(Myself I prefer the approach of "have nice stuff, just don't sweat it when kids damage it - it's still just stuff".)
Also, your point doesn't work in context of GP's comment taken as whole, i.e. of reverting back to products used 50 years ago: a big value plastics bring as a material family is safety - when you replace your plastics with glass and metals, your home doesn't turn into a "functional household you can let them play like actual children" - it turns into a hazardous environment where children can maim themselves with every other object they touch.
Like, the other day my 14 m.o. accidentally dropped the bottle she was drinking from straight onto her foot, and cried for a minute. If that bottle was made of glass, we'd have to take her to a hospital for an x-ray.
Glass is expensive to make (and recycle!), heavy, physically larger (since your container is, now, say, 0.250" thick instead of 0.025"), and much more likely to break during shipping, and presents an injury risk when broken.
But the paper the butter/lard is packaged in contains PFAS/plastics, or you can use something else... packaged in plastic! The entire supply chain is polluted in the name of efficiency/cost (reduction of spoilage, less weight etc) and most people live in the most populated places where it's not possible to source diary directly from the animal in to a glass receptacle. A personal change to use glass is something I'm doing and many might want to consider, but so much of the problem is systematic. "Just use glass" is good, but insufficient.
Regarding tea bags, sometimes I see plastic tea bags which are crazy, as they must have a weak structure/large surface and the hot water surely washes out a lot of plastic. I am assuming the normal paper tea bags I get in Germany with a metal clip should be plastic free though, or am I missing something?
Yes we are down to discussing tea bag brands now but as you are saying, it's an emergency :-(
I bet $10 this is actually covered in a very thin layer of plastic because it's what seems to happen to some metal products in the food space (see e.g. "aluminum" cans).
In bulk tea is not only significantly cheaper (not as bad as the tea capsule mark-up, which is in a league oo its own), but also waste is reduced to nothing (only the tea itself, which is perfectly organic).
Rinsing a reusible tea holder doesn't take more time than it takes to dispose off the paper tied to the end separately.
Why do people wildly overstate their case, and thereby weaken it? This is obviously false: tea bags, like disposable silverware, may be harmful but they are not useless!
These days if you are against something then anything bad said about it is true, anything good said about it is false or questionable. This is a (bad) lawyer's attitude, a very easy algorithm to execute, and one that is transparent and punished by any judge worth their salt.
(I don't really drink tea fwiw; if I did I probably would be the type to get into it with loose leaves sourced from somewhere I believed to be better than anything available in bags (not even because of the plastic or whatever in bags).)
Better check your plumbing because I hate to say it, PEX is everywhere and it's yet to be shown if there are long term effects on having plastic plumbing everywhere. My kitchen water tastes like plastic all the time.
PEX is fine. Water that sat in a PEX pipe is chemically indistinguishable from water held in a test tube, unlike what happens with water in PVC piping. Another indicator of fine-ness is that PE and PP tubing is used extensively in chemical process plants where high purity is required.
I'm fascinated by this. I think the desire to make the necessary lifestyle changes is there, but I question the practicality.
I want to have my foods and beverages untouched by plastics, but how realistic is this currently?
I want to buy bread that's not wrapped in plastic. Is the alternative really to make your own? Even then, can you ensure the ingredients you're sourcing for your own bread starter for example, also not contained in plastic?
Perhaps it isn't feasible to eliminate all plastics in your life, but it begs the question what is good enough to reverse this and it probably starts with what you're consuming.
If you are lucky enough to have a local small bakery near you, then they might use paper bags (mine does), or you can take your own bag. If you only have supermarkets, you can buy things like baguettes, Italian loaves, and sourdough from the deli area inside many supermarkets, and those sometimes come in paper bags, but you have to check whether the paper bag is lined with plastic.
Plastics are so cheap and the paper industry has spent many decades learning how to make different composite blends of paper and plastic to get different characteristics. I had a friend who spent time in that industry and liked to point out how plastics could be in most paper-like products you would see every day. He also emphasized how "actual" paper can be unhealthy due to bleaching and other processing steps that leave byproducts.
I don't know if it's really solved anything, but I switched to loose leaf teas with a stainless steel "tea ball" for individual cups. Now I can instead wonder what metals the global supply chain decided to actually use in that product. ;-)
> Will soon be throwing out liquid body wash and moisturizers, and replace with simpler oils
What are you planning on doing?
I stopped using the Dr Bronner's liquid soap and switched to the their bar soap. For a while I was using the same soap for my hair and then I was doing a "rinse" (apple cider vinegar + some oils) but I got lazy and stopped. I might pick that back up again.
I've been using Aleppo Soap for about two years now. It's a bar soap that's a mix of simply olive oil, laurel oil and soda. It's actually worked wonders for skin problems on my back as well, so I swear by it now. The smell of laurel oil is a bit weird at first but I've grown to really like it. Alternative would be Castile Soap which is the same but without the laurel oil.
Along the same lines as tea-bags, is it possible k-cups have an effect? The keurig machine is already plastic, so does using a reusable cup buy you any benefit?
k-cups get quite warm when in use so I'd avoid it for daily use. Try a french press with a glass container instead. I also threw away my Aeropress for similar reasons.
I can't find the reference now but at one point they discussed why they don't offer an aeropress in stainless steel or glass, and it's basically because of safety (metal and glass transmit heat much more than plastic). Additionally with glass, even pyrex, there is a risk of breakage.
Forget teabags, what about the bazillion microplastics that we inhale/ingest every day from clothing and carpeting? Especially nice when your coworker's idea of cleaning up their dusty PC is by using canned air on it indoors...
Air filter machine? At least that's what I run a fairly robust unit - it seems to be working. Can't vouch it's grabbing all the microplastics or even that's not blowing out extra. haha. But it is getting a lot of dust out.
That may be, but that is not what TFA was about. It was about human sperm counts dropping, and that is absolutely not an emergency. Humans are in no danger of going extinct.
There are no corners to hide in. The entire planet is infested with homo sapiens.
(For the record: I don't hate humans. I just think the current supply is more than adequate, and that in the long run it would not be a bad thing if there were fewer then 8 billion of us alive at the same time.)
I will never understand how so many educated people have such an anti-humanist view of the world.
Humans are awesome, intelligence is awesome. More humans means more amazing things. We are capable as a species of incredible things, and we have the ability to save our planet as well as continuing to grow. We cannot outgrow this planet and colonize other worlds, we cannot solve climate change, nuclear fusion, quantum computers, the great questions of physics without MORE smart people.
Some humans are awesome. Other humans not so much.
> intelligence is awesome.
It is indeed, but intelligence is pretty unevenly distributed among humans.
> More humans means more amazing things.
It also means more stress on the planet's ecosystems. There are awesome things on earth besides humans, and one of the problems with humans is that too few of us seem to understand this.
> we have the ability to save our planet
In theory. The jury is very much out on whether we can actually do it. Personally, given what has been done to address climate change so far, I'll give long odds against.
> We cannot outgrow this planet and colonize other worlds
And who says that these are good things? If we can't even manage to bring this planet to a sustainable steady-state what makes you think we'll have better luck elsewhere?
> without MORE smart people.
More smart people is not the same thing as more people.
There's so much to unpack here, I'd love to have a longer form discussion in a place where we won't run out of thread depth, but I can't dig into all of the points in this format.
This all gets very philosophical, but seriously, optimism is much better than pessimism here.
> There are awesome things on earth besides humans
Like what? Nature is cool, we shouldn't destroy it, but nothing else is truly sentient on this planet besides us. Nothing else on this planet can ponder and understand the world like we can, this is a good thing that the universe should have more of. A meteor (like the one that killed the dinosaurs) could hit this planet at any time, in fact it's pretty likely that it will happen again. And on a long enough timeline, the sun will die and ALL life and ALL nature will die.
In the interim what should we do? Should we just sit around on this planet and wait it out trying to preserve things the way they were when humans first evolved? What's the point?
I prefer to take the humanist approach, I like to think that humans and intelligence will make an incredibly cool, adventure-filled future for the universe and that we can and will do great things with more people.
> nothing else is truly sentient on this planet besides us
This is definitionally wrong. Sentient merely means "having sensations" or even the weaker having "senses". Perhaps you mean "sapient", with reasoning, self-knowledge, and an "internal life".
This too would be wrong, but not as obviously so. When we actually try to look and measure other animals fairly, we generally find that in measures of cognitive capability, there are animals that are not that different from humans. Many animals pass the mirror test. There are birds with complex vocal languages. Both apes and birds have been recorded spreading adaptions in food preparation within a cohort and down generations (the two astounding cases are dealing with the toxic backs of cane-toads in Australia -- learning to flip them over and only eat through the stomach (corvids) and picking them up and washing them (ibises)).
You also have the opposite problem, where things we think we're good at, even ones some would say define us as a species, are actually pretty poorly done by many of us. GPT-2, which is clearly not sapient, and only capable of writing a terrible, meandering essay, still does better than many high-school students, or even college students. And we now have much better examples, that still clearly aren't sapient.
Yes, this is what I meant. What I really meant to say was "nothing else is truly sentient on this planet in the same way that humans are."
And to further elaborate what I'm really trying to get at is what Carl Sagan said "we are a way for the cosmos to know itself". No other creature is capable of it in the same way we are.
Yes I understand that consciousness is a continuum and that some species are more sentient than others (humans are obviously the furthest along this continuum though I would say).
Obviously I am biased since I am a human, but I really do think that the human ability internally monologue, to reason about our own thoughts, build complicated mental models and make decisions about them, is unique in the animal kingdom, possibly the universe depending on your parameters to the drake equation.
> nothing else is truly sentient on this planet besides us.
Your optimism is one thing, but this human supremacist stuff is just wrong. Do you think humans are a separate form of life,evolutionarily distinct from the animal kingdom or something?
There's clearly a qualitative difference between humans and our closest relatives. There's some axis on which humans are an outlier for life on earth. I mean, we're not worried about any other animal rising up and taking over, for one.
Except you only need to look at a large number of countries with high populations (and often those with high fertility rates) and see little correlation with ability to achieve what you call "amazing things".
A billion people with good access to necessary resources is going to achieve more than 10 billion living in poverty because we've largely trashed our planet's ability to support us.
A counterpoint: some of the biggest and best advances in the developed world occurred during or after a time of high fertility. The boomer generation is a good example. I'm not a boomer (I'm < 30), they get a lot of hate, but that generation basically invented the entirety of the modern world, without which we wouldn't even have the tools to understand climate change. If you want to achieve great things you need people to exist and do the work.
Examples of high fertility rates combined with poverty are often correlated with dictatorships and corruption, in my opinion they are cultural.
This is an emergency, which would probably require we do a revolution on use commercial packaging and plastic. But I don't have much faith, given how entrenched this industry is. Right now, industry is pushing BPA-free packaging, but I strongly suspect BPA-free plastics have similar endocrine effects, we just haven't studied them long enough.