Chemical Plastic

     Every coin has two sizes, when we are enjoying the conveninent life which plastic bags bring, at the same time, we are suffring the polluted environment it causes. People has realized the bad environment which  plastic bags cause, and is determined to ban plastic bags to protect environment.
     Sandy-area residents shopping at the Sandy Fred Meyer appear split over the idea of banning plastic grocery bags.

     Welches resident Nora Galbee had plastic bags in her shopping cart, but said that was just because she had forgotten to bring her reusable bags into the store. She gave the ban a thumbs-up.

   “I think it’s something we should be doing,” she said. “(Plastic bags are) not environmentally friendly. They last too long in landfills.”

     She and others would remember to bring in their reusable bags if a ban were enacted, Galbee said. “We’ll adjust.”

    Valerie Walbert, a Sandy resident whose shopping cart contained several reusable bags, said she started shunning single-use bags – both paper and plastic – a few years ago.

   “I feel like I’m kind of taking care of my carbon footprint, my contribution to the environment,” she said.

    Everyone takes divergent stands on plastic bags, someone approves it, someone opposes it.In my opinion, we should ban plastic bags and use paper bags instead. Because it takes a long time for decaying plastic bags,also the process of decaying it will emmit a lot of toxic gas which is extremely bad for human health and our living environment.

see, I am beautiful with the flowing of sweet breeze.

     As is known to all, plastic pollution has influenced our life for a long time, and cause so much suffering to our daily life, in order to change this situation, some people which is strongly against plastic pollution will do something to cause public’s attention towards plastic pollution.

    A boat made out of 12,500 recycled plastic bottles sailed into Sydney Harbour on Monday, four months after it set out from San Francisco on a journey across the Pacific Ocean meant to raise awareness about the perils of plastic waste.

The crew of the Plastiki, a 60-foot (18.2 meter) catamaran that weathered fierce ocean storms during its 8,000 nautical miles at sea, left San Francisco on March 20, stopping along the way at various South Pacific island nations including Kiribati and Samoa.

 ”This is culmination of four years planning, so it’s a very exciting day,” Plastiki spokeswoman Kim McKay said.

The boat, skippered by environmentalist David de Rothschild – a descendant of the well-known British banking family – was being towed to the Australian National Maritime Museum for a welcome ceremony.

“We hope that Sydneysiders will turn out in force to help us celebrate,” de Rothschild said in a statement.

The six-member crew lived in a cabin of just 20 feet by 15 feet (6 meters by 4.5 meters), took saltwater showers, and survived on a diet of dehydrated and canned food, supplemented with the occasional vegetable from their small on-board garden. The boat is fully recyclable, and is powered in part by solar panels and windmills.

The Plastiki’s name is a play on the 1947 Kon-Tiki raft sailed across the Pacific by explorer Thor Heyerdahl.

The crew briefly stopped in Queensland state last week, after battling a brutal storm off the Australian coast.

De Rothschild said the idea for the journey came to him after he read a United Nations report that said pollution – and particularly plastic waste – was seriously threatening the world’s oceans .

Will this activity cause public’s attention towards plastic pollution? who know? I hope it will.

Bisphenol A (BPA), a compound in hard, clear polycarbonate plastics, is getting official scrutiny—and things are looking less than rosy for the controversial chemical. The U.S. government’s National Toxicology Program yesterday agreed with a scientific panel that recently expressed concern about physiological changes that occur in people when they ingest BPA that has leached from plastics into their food. The Canadian government is even considering declaring the chemical toxic. This could set the stage for banning it from plastic baby bottles, water bottles, and food containers. At the very least, some people will be even more eager to buy foods and beverages in BPA-free containers.

BPA has raised concerns because it appears to mimic the effects of estrogen, interfering with hormone levels and cell signaling systems. Previous studies have shown that people exposed to high levels of BPA have a greater risk of developing uterine fibroids, breast cancer, decreased sperm counts, and prostate cancer. Babies and children are thought to be at greatest risk from the exposure. In fact, the scientific evidence warrants “a higher level of concern than those expressed by the expert [scientific] panel for possible effects of bisphenol A on prostate gland, mammary gland and early onset of puberty in exposed fetuses, infants and children,” the NTP report concludes.

Not surprisingly, sales of BPA-free baby bottles spiked after yesterday’s news. “We tripled our sales overnight on the website and will be shipping an additional 300,000 bottles to Canada this week to meet an increased demand,” says Ron Vigdor, president of BornFree, which manufactures BPA-free bottles. He adds that Babies “R” Us also indicated that it would be increasing its order to U.S. stores.

Beyond switching baby bottles, another way to lower exposure to BPA is to avoid heating foods and liquids in plastic containers that contain the compound. The amount of BPA that leaches out, the NTP says, may depend more on the temperature of the liquid, food, or container itself than on the age of the plastic bottle or dish. So when it comes to Bisphenol A (BPA) exposure from polycarbonate plastic bottles, it’s not whether the container is new or old but the liquid’s temperature that has the most impact on how much BPA is released, according to University of Cincinnati (UC) scientists. Scott Belcher, PhD, and his team found when the same new and used polycarbonate drinking bottles were exposed to boiling hot water, BPA, an environmental estrogen, was released 55 times more rapidly than before exposure to hot water.

“Previous studies have shown that if you repeatedly scrub, dish-wash and boil polycarbonate baby bottles, they release BPA. That tells us that BPA can migrate from various polycarbonate plastics,” explains Belcher, UC associate professor of pharmacology and cell biophysics and corresponding study author. “But we wanted to know if ‘normal’ use caused increased release from something that we all use, and to identify what was the most important factor that impacts release.”

Belcher stresses that it is still unclear what level of BPA is harmful to humans. He urges consumers to think about how cumulative environmental exposures might harm their health.

“BPA is just one of many estrogen-like chemicals people are exposed to, and scientists are still trying to figure out how these endocrine disruptors–including natural phyto-estrogens from soy which are often considered healthy–collectively impact human health,” he says. “But a growing body of scientific evidence suggests it might be at the cost of your health.”

The UC team reports its findings in the Jan. 30, 2008 issue of the journal Toxicology Letters. UC graduate student Hoa Le and summer undergraduate research fellows Emily Carlson and Jason Chua also participated in this study, which was funded by a National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences grant.