Plastic

Synthetic material more commonly referred to as „plastic,“ is pervasive in our lives. Indispensable items for our daily lives including food packaging, clothing, furnishings, vehicles, building materials and even replacement parts for our bodies such as prostheses and tooth fillings are made of plastic.

With such an abundance of such products, it is hardly surprising that so much plastic has been produced that the volume would be sufficient to wrap our planet in film six times. And that‘s not all: worldwide plastic consumption is continuing to rise so rapidly that more than 300 million tonnes of it is produced worldwide each year.

The downside is that an enormous quantity (estimated at 10% annually) of the currently produced plastic ends up in rivers, seas and oceans; when converted, this corresponds to one garbage truck load per minute. In the environment, macro- and mesoplastics (> 5 mm) decompose through mechanical, chemical and biological processes into micro- (1 μm to 5 mm) and eventually nanoplastics (< 1 μm). Together with microplastics from other sources, such as from wear of vehicle tyres or leaching of fibres from textiles, microplastic accumulates in the oceans. Plastics have already been proven to be present in all ocean water masses: from the poles to the equator, at the water surface, in deep sea sediments and in coastal regions.

Plastic can contain numerous toxic and hormonally active chemicals. These are released into the immediate environment and can harm humans, animals and ecosystems. We take in these toxic substances through respiration, skin contact and the food chain and thereby endanger our health.

Plastics are linear and branched molecular chains, which are produced from individual building blocks (monomers) through a synthetic binding process (polymerisation). About 99% of the plastics in use nowadays are produced from fossil fuels. Because raw plastics are brittle and hard, chemicals are added during the manufacturing process to give specific properties (such as elasticity, stability, colour-fastness, transparency, static charge, static charge, or toughness) and thereby tailor the final product to the particu-lar application. The ratio of additives to plastic depends on the type of plastic and its requirements and can lie between 5% (such as polyethylene) and 80% (such as polypropylene composites). Additives can have undesirable properties. They can disturb our endocrine system, impair our fertility or promote the development of cancer.

Chemicals can leak from plastic, which means that toxic substances and additives can trans-fer to food, living beings and the environment. This is because plastic has a sponge-like basic structure of linear or cross-linked molecular chains that are more or less interwoven. Additives are not firmly anchored within this structure. Alongside additives, plastics often contain residues from the manufacturing process, including health- and environment-damaging components (such as styrene, melamine and vinyl chloride) or solvent residues (such as chlo-rinated hydrocarbons).

Toxic and hormonally active substances such as additives can leak from plastics under certain chemical or physical conditions (heat, UV radiation, greasy/acidic environments) or over the course of the ageing process and accumulate in the environment. Humans can take in the released pollutants through respiration, the skin and the consumption of contaminated food. Particularly alarming is this “migration” of chemicals when food comes into contact with plastic packaging.

Plastic additives are used in a wide range of products and are harmful to health and the environment. Brominated flame retardants, phthalates, bisphenol A and organotin compounds are all hormonally active compounds, also known as endocrine disruptors which can interfere with our finely-balanced hormonal system and disrupt hormone-controlled processes such as metabolism, growth, immune system function and organ development. Babies and young children react especially sensitively to hormonally active chemicals. A variety of diseases and disorders including mal-formations of the sexual organs, infertility, allergies, obesity, type 2 diabetes, different types of cancer, immunodeficiency and learning and behavioural disorders are all associated with these artificial hormonally active substances.