Author: Common Dreams

The world of plastics, in numbers

(The Conversation) From its early beginnings during and after World War II, the commercial industry for polymers – long chain synthetic molecules of which “plastics” are a common misnomer – has grown rapidly. In 2015, over 320 million tons of polymers, excluding fibers, were manufactured across the globe.

Until the last five years, polymer product designers have typically not considered what will happen after the end of their product’s initial lifetime. This is beginning to change, and this issue will require increasing focus in the years ahead.

Related: How to Detox From Plastics and Other Endocrine Disruptors

The plastics industry

“Plastic” has become a somewhat misguided way to describe polymers. Typically derived from petroleum or natural gas, these are long chain molecules with hundreds to thousands of links in each chain. Long chains convey important physical properties, such as strength and toughness, that short molecules simply cannot match.

“Plastic” is actually a shortened form of “thermoplastic,” a term that describes polymeric materials that can be shaped and reshaped using heat.

The modern polymer industry was effectively created by Wallace Carothers at DuPont in the 1930s. His painstaking work on polyamides led to the commercialization of nylon, as a wartime shortage of silk forced women to look elsewhere for stockings.

When other materials became scarce during World War II, researchers looked to synthetic polymers to fill the gaps. For example, the supply of natural rubber for vehicle tires was cut off by the Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia, leading to a synthetic polymer equivalent.

Curiosity-driven breakthroughs in chemistry led to further development of synthetic polymers, including the now widely used polypropylene and high-density polyethylene. Some polymers, such as Teflon, were stumbled upon by accident.

Eventually, the combination of need, scientific advances and serendipity led to the full suite of polymers that you can now readily recognize as “plastics.” These polymers were rapidly commercialized, thanks to a desire to reduce products’ weight and to provide inexpensive alternatives to natural materials like cellulose or cotton.

Types of plastic

The production of synthetic polymers globally is dominated by the polyolefins – polyethylene and polypropylene.

Polyethylene comes in two types: “high density” and “low density.” On the molecular scale, high-density polyethylene looks like a comb with regularly spaced, short teeth. The low-density version, on the other hand, looks like a comb with irregularly spaced teeth of random length – somewhat like a river and its tributaries if seen from high above. Although they’re both polyethylene, the differences in shape make these materials behave differently when molded into films or other products.

Polyolefins are dominant for a few reasons. First, they can be produced using relatively inexpensive natural gas. Second, they’re the lightest synthetic polymers produced at large scale; their density is so low that they float. Third, polyolefins resist damage by water, air, grease, cleaning solvents – all things that these polymers could encounter when in use. Finally, they’re easy to shape into products, while robust enough that packaging made from them won’t deform in a delivery truck sitting in the sun all day.

However, these materials have serious downsides. They degrade painfully slowly, meaning that polyolefins will survive in the environment for decades to centuries. Meanwhile, wave and wind action mechanically abrades them, creating microparticles that can be ingested by fish and animals, making their way up the food chain toward us.

Recycling polyolefins is not as straightforward as one would like owing to collection and cleaning issues. Oxygen and heat cause chain damage during reprocessing, while food and other materials contaminate the polyolefin. Continuing advances in chemistry have created new grades of polyolefins with enhanced strength and durability, but these cannot always mix with other grades during recycling. What’s more, polyolefins are often combined with other materials in multi-layer packaging; while these multi-layer constructs work well, they are impossible to recycle.

Polymers are sometimes criticized for being produced from increasingly scarce petroleum and natural gas. However, the fraction of either natural gas or petroleum used to produce polymers is very low; less than 5 percent of either oil or natural gas produced each year is employed to generate plastics. Further, ethylene can be produced from sugarcane ethanol, as is done commercially by Braskem in Brazil.

How plastic is used

Depending upon the region, packaging consumes 35 to 45 percent of the synthetic polymer produced in total, where the polyolefins dominate. Polyethylene terephthalate, a polyester, dominates the market for beverage bottles and textile fibers.

Building and construction consumes another 20 percent of the total polymers produced, where PVC pipe and its chemical cousins dominate. PVC pipes are lightweight, can be glued rather than soldered or welded, and greatly resist the damaging effects of chlorine in water. Unfortunately, the chlorine atoms that confer PVC this advantage make it very difficult to recycle – most is discarded at the end of life.

Polyurethanes, an entire family of related polymers, are widely used in foam insulation for homes and appliances, as well as in architectural coatings.

The automotive sector uses increasing amounts of thermoplastics, primarily to reduce weight and hence achieve greater fuel efficiency standards. The European Union estimatesthat 16 percent of the weight of an average automobile is plastic components, most notably for interior parts and components.

Over 70 million tons of thermoplastics per year are used in textiles, mostly clothing and carpeting. More than 90 percent of synthetic fibers, largely polyethylene terephthalate, are produced in Asia. The growth in synthetic fiber use in clothing has come at the expense of natural fibers like cotton and wool, which require significant amounts of farmland to be produced. The synthetic fiber industry has seen dramatic growth for clothing and carpeting, thanks to interest in special properties like stretch, moisture-wicking and breathability.

As in the case of packaging, textiles are not commonly recycled. The average U.S. citizen generates over 90 pounds of textile waste each year. According to Greenpeace, the average person in 2016 bought 60 percent more items of clothing every year than the average person did 15 years earlier, and keeps the clothes for a shorter period of time.

Does Monsanto’s Roundup cause cancer? Trial highlights the difficulty of proving a link

In this June 1, 2010 photo, central Illinois corn farmer Jerry McCulley sprays the weed killer glyphosate across his cornfield in Auburn, Ill. A handful of hardy weeds have adapted to survive glyphosate _ sold as Roundup and a variety of other brands _ which many scientists say threatens to make the ubiquitous herbicide far less useful to farmers. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)

(The Conversation) Does glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used weedkiller Roundup, cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma? This question is at issue now in a lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court. Hundreds more claims have been cleared to proceed in a federal multi-district lawsuit.

Illinois corn farmer Jerry McCulley sprays glyphosate across his cornfield in Auburn, June 1, 2010.AP Photo/Seth Perlman

Much of this litigation is based on a 2015 determination by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen. This report has come under heavy criticism, which is not surprising because there’s a lot of money at stake.

The IARC classification relied in part on experiments in mice. But is that enough to conclude the weed killer causes cancer in humans? Mice are not people, so probably not.

If it was simple to determine the cause of cancer in humans, scientists would do the right experiment and we’d know the answer pretty quickly.

But it’s not simple.

Related: How to Avoid GMOs in 2018 – And Everything Else You Should Know About Genetic Engineering

Proving causation in product liability lawsuits

Epidemiology is one of the sciences that provides evidence needed to prove cause and effect in medicine and public health. It is the most important tool for determining whether exposure to a given substance increases the risk of disease. The problem is that it is easy to do it badly, and a bad study is worse than no study at all.

In fact, after a special hearing examining the science on both sides of the glyphosate argument, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria called epidemiology “loosey-goosey” and a “highly subjective field.” Nonetheless, he concluded that the views on both sides were reasonable and should be heard in court, with the verdict up to a jury.

I have spent much of my working life trying to help figure out why people get cancer. To illustrate how hard it is to prove causality, consider the question: Does smoking cause lung cancer?

Innumerable epidemiological studies since the 1940s have shown a strong association between smoking and lung cancer. But there has never been a randomized trial in humans. In addition, we know from experimental studies that smoking rats don’t get lung cancer.

For years, Big Tobacco dismissed observational studies in people (epidemiology) with the mantra that “association is not causation,” and avoided regulation. The scientific community was intimidated by this strategy for far too long. Eventually, the studies accumulated to the point that the association was overwhelming, and cause and effect could not be denied.

There are two main types of epidemiological study designs: cohort and case-control. In a cohort study, a large group of people – some smokers, some not – are followed over the years to see who gets sick. In a case-control study, a group of lung cancer patients (perhaps several hundred) are asked about their smoking history, along with an equal number of people without lung cancer.

Invariably, in cohort study after cohort study, smokers got sicker from heart disease, lung cancer and many other maladies over time. In most of these studies, scientists did their best to take account of other differences between smokers and non-smokers, so as to isolate the effect of smoking. Also invariably, in case-control studies patients with lung cancer were much more likely to have been smokers than people in the general population.

In the first case of its kind to reach trial, Dewayne Johnson is suing Monsanto, the maker of Roundup. The 46-year-old blames his 2014 cancer diagnosis on Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate.

Defining ‘proof’

When scientists are asked for a definition of proof, most of them use criteria such as “reproducibility” and “statistical significance” and “plausibility.” But who decides whether each of these criteria has been met? The answer is a panel of experts. It is unsettling to most scientists to hear that “proof” can only be defined as “a consensus of experts,” but this is true from physics to bird-watching. And what has been proven can later be unproven with new experts and/or new evidence.

Who chooses the experts? They include panels convened by the National Academies of Sciences, or advisory boards of professional societies such as the American College of Cardiology. The makeup of these panels can be challenged, and of course, people can choose to ignore the “experts” and believe what they want.

In health research, “causing” disease is defined as “increasing risk.” This does not mean that exposure to something like cigarettes is both necessary and sufficient to cause disease. Most heavy smokers never get lung cancer, and some lifelong non-smokers do. However, experts agree that smoking causes lung cancer because hundreds of observational epidemiological studies show that a heavy smoker has a risk of lung cancer 10 to 20 times higher than a non-smoker. This agreement among experts is the proof that smoking causes lung cancer.

U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry holds the report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service on the relationship of smoking to health, January 11, 1964. The report led to laws requiring warning labels on cigarette packages and a ban on broadcast cigarette ads. AP Photo/hwg

For many other potential hazards, the epidemiology is either inadequate or contradictory. One study may show an association between exposure and disease, while another shows no relationship. This can happen because the exposure does not cause the disease, and studies that do show a relationship are due to chance, bias and/or confounding – in other words, they are false positive results. It also can happen because the true exposure has not been accurately measured, so existing research is masking a real causative effect – also known as a false negative result.The process of proving cause in science is quite similar to a jury trial. Evidence is presented to a jury (the expert panel or committee), which renders a verdict. To a “reasonable” person, does the evidence rise to the level of guilt – or, in science, proof of cause and effect?

A health scientist sees proof of causation when evidence from epidemiology (observational studies in people) and toxicology (experiments in rats), and, to some extent basic science (does a chemical damage DNA in a test tube?) accumulates to the point where there is no other viable explanation for the evidence than cause and effect. Epidemiology is paramount, because it is a direct assessment of risk in human beings. It is analogous to circumstantial evidence in a jury trial.

Glyphosate is widely used on field crops, including corn, soybeans, cotton and wheat. USGS

Is circumstantial evidence enough?

The fact that smoking causes lung cancer is accepted beyond a reasonable doubt based on the circumstantial evidence of numerous observational epidemiological studies. A convincing case for guilt can rest entirely on circumstantial evidence when that evidence is extensive and strong enough to convince a panel of experts.

It will be harder for jurors in the Roundup trials to weigh epidemiological evidence that glyphosate caused plaintiffs’ cancer, because jurors are rarely experts and successful trial lawyers are exceptionally persuasive.

In my view, there are two crucial requirements for an equitable assessment of proof of causation from products like glyphosate or cigarettes. First, were the epidemiological studies well done? Second, how objective are the jurors and the expert witnesses?

Both science and the judicial system are highly imperfect. The verdicts in these trials could be wrong, and could be appealed. This happens as often in the worlds of science and medicine as it does in the courtroom.

It took many years to develop a broad consensus on cigarettes. Unfortunately for the plaintiffs in the Roundup litigation, the same maybe true for glyphosate.

Trump Takes ‘Wrecking Ball’ to Endangered Species Act, Opens Door for Corporate Attack on Wildlife

If Interior Department’s proposals are approved, “Zinke will go down in history as the extinction secretary”

(Common Dreams by Julia Conley, staff writer) Gutting the law that has protected the bald eagle, the American crocodile, the gray wolf, and countless other animals from extinction over the past four decades, the Trump administration gave its latest handout to corporate interests on Thursday when it unveiled sweeping changes to the Endangered Species Act (ESA).”These regulations are the heart of how the Endangered Species Act is implemented. Imperiled species depend on them for their very lives,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, a former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who is now president of Defenders of Wildlife, in a statement. “The signal being sent by the Trump administration is clear: Protecting America’s wildlife and wild lands is simply not on their agenda.”

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Under the newly proposed guidelines, the Interior Department would direct the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to take economic impacts into consideration when deciding whether to protect species—potentially allowing corporations to move ahead with projects that would otherwise be prohibited.

The department also proposed that it should stop extending similar levels of protection to animals and plants regardless of whether they are listed as “endangered” or “threatened,” and would remove protections for “take”—the harming or killing of species—for animals that have been newly added to the “threatened” list.

If approved by the administration, critics said, the rollback of the law—which has the approval of 90 percent of Americans—will solidify the Trump administration’s legacy as one which put the interests of corporations ahead of the well-being of wildlife.

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“These proposals would slam a wrecking ball into the most crucial protections for our most endangered wildlife,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “If these regulations had been in place in the 1970s, the bald eagle and the gray whale would be extinct today. If they’re finalized now, Zinke will go down in history as the extinction secretary.”

The ESA was enacted in 1973 and has become “one of the most successful environmental laws in U.S. history,” according to the Center for Biological Diversity—currently protecting more than 1,600 species from extinction. Less than one percent of species have gone extinct once listed under the Act, as the regulations have kept fossil fuel companies, loggers, and developers from interfering with their habitats as well as protecting many species from hunting.

“This proposal turns the extinction-prevention tool of the Endangered Species Act into a rubber stamp for powerful corporate interests,” said Hartl. “Allowing the federal government to turn a blind eye to climate change will be a death sentence for polar bears and hundreds of other animals and plants.”

‘Astronomical’ Cost of War: Average US Taxpayer Sent $3,456 to Pentagon Last Year and Just $39 to the EPA

(Common Dreams by Jake Johnson) “Congress appropriates more for U.S. military spending than the next eight countries combined, but year after year refuses to adequately invest in access to quality education and healthcare for millions of Americans.”

Image Credit: National Vanguard

As Americans rushed to pay their taxes on Tuesday before the official deadline, peace groups reminded the public of the uncomfortable fact that an “astronomical amount” of the money sent to the IRS each year goes not to funding education or a single-payer healthcare system the U.S. supposedly can’t afford, but straight into the bloated coffers of the Pentagon.

Arms industry executives make out like bandits while programs that provide essential services for most Americans remain drastically underfunded.” – Paul Kawika Martin, Peace Action

“Congress appropriates more for U.S. military spending than the next eight countries combined, but year after year refuses to adequately invest in access to quality education and healthcare for millions of Americans, infrastructure spending, and alternative energy,”  Paul Kawika Martin, senior director for policy and political affairs at Peace Action, said in a statement late Monday.

“As a result, arms industry executives make out like bandits while programs that provide essential services for most Americans remain drastically underfunded, as do development and diplomacy programs that help end wars and prevent them in the first place,” Martin added.

Highlighting America’s uniquely exorbitant military spending in a blog post on Tuesday, Lindsay Koshgarian of National Priorities noted that it is particularly important to keep in mind who funds U.S.-led endless wars overseas following President Donald Trump’s illegal attack on Syria—an attack that “added nearly $5 billion to missile-makers’ stock value.”

“It’s devastating to know who paid for it: we did,” Koshgarian observed.

“The average taxpayer contributed $3,456 to the military in 2017,” she noted, compared to $80 that went to welfare programs and “just $39 to the Environmental Protection Agency.”

In an analysis published last month, National Priorities estimated that 23.8 cents of every dollar in taxes paid in 2017 went to Pentagon and military spending.

“Meanwhile, 11 cents goes to military contractors, including 1.7 cents for the Pentagon’s biggest contractor and maker of the F-35 jet fighter, Lockheed Martin,” the group found.

A 10 percent cut in spending on military contractors would provide enough money to hire 395,000 elementary school teachers or provide health insurance for 13 million children.” – Lindsay Koshgarian, National Priorities Project

Writing for Truthout on Tuesday, Koshgarian pointed out that the political choice to devote such massive sums of taxpayer money to the Pentagon and corporate war profiteers has very “real consequences.”

“A 10 percent cut in spending on military contractors would provide enough money to hire 395,000 elementary school teachers or provide health insurance for 13 million children,” Koshgarian observed.

If Trump and Republican lawmakers have their way, Americans could soon be dumping even more tax money into the American war machine while healthcare, food stamps, education, and other public programs are slashed.

As Common Dreams reported last month, Trump signed an omnibus spending bill that contained $700 billion in Pentagon funding, and he has asked for an even bigger military budget for next year.

Massachusetts Peace Action highlighted a breakdown of the president’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2019:

Taking Aim at Corporate Impunity, Sanders’ Bill Would Send Big Pharma Execs Behind Opioid Crisis to Jail

(Common Dreams by Julia Conley) “We know that pharmaceutical companies lied about the addictive impacts of opioids they manufactured…Not one of them has been held fully accountable for its role in an epidemic that is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.”

While President Donald Trump attempts to place blame for the enduring opioid addiction crisis on immigrants, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced Tuesday that he would introduce legislation to take aim at those who drug policy experts agree are truly behind the epidemic that kills tens of thousands of Americans per year—pharmaceutical companies and executives.

“At a time when local, state and federal governments are spending many billions of dollars a year dealing with the impact of the opioid epidemic, we must hold the pharmaceutical companies and executives that created the crisis accountable,” said Sanders in a statement.

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The bill (pdf) would threaten Big Pharma executives with at least 10 years in prison should their companies be found guilty of contributing to the opioid crisis through manipulative marketing practices. Executives would also face fines equal to their total compensation packages, while companies would be fined $7.8 billion—one-tenth of the annual cost of the public health epidemic, according to government estimates.

Under the legislation, companies would be required to clearly state that opioids are addictive in any marketing materials for the drugs, which include popular brands including OxyContin, Vicodin, and Percocet.

The roots of the opioid crisis are traced back to the 1990s, when Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, began marketing the drug as safe for long-term use for chronic pain, denying that prescription opioids—which are chemically similar to heroin—had highly addictive properties.

Recommended: Drug Firms Profiting From Addiction – Shipping Massive Quantities of Opioids To West Virginia

After opioid painkiller prescriptions skyrocketed as a result, the rate of overdose began to rise as well, with opioid overdoses killing at least 63,000 Americans in 2016.

In Ohio next year, Purdue is one of several drug companies that will face a jury trial over a lawsuit accusing them of “deceptively marketing opioids” and alleging distributors “ignored red flags indicating the painkillers were being diverted for improper uses.”

But Sanders noted that no company has truly been held liable for the epidemic, which Purdue alone has make tens of billions of dollars off of in recent years:

In 2007, Purdue Pharma…pled guilty and agreed to pay more than $600 million in fines for misleading the public about the risks of the drug. But the company still made $22 billion off of the drug in the past decade.

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“We know that pharmaceutical companies lied about the addictive impacts of opioids they manufactured,” said Sanders. “They knew how dangerous these products were but refused to tell doctors and patients. Yet, while some of these companies have made billions each year in profits, not one of them has been held fully accountable for its role in an epidemic that is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.”