Month: April 2024

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest plastic additive chemicals are present in the bodies of nearly all Americans

Dr. Trevor Hancock

23 April 2024

700 words

Last week I looked at the scale of the plastics industry and its environmental impact. This week, I examine its direct impact on human health, the harmful attitude of the industry and the hopes for national and global action.  

A team led by Professor Martin Wagner of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology recently reported that of 16,000 chemicals associated with plastic, at least 4,200 “are of concernbecause of their high hazards to human health and the environment.”

The health impacts were summarised in a commentary last month in the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Philip Landrigan, a distinguished American pediatrician who chaired the 2017 Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health. He noted: ”Data from the National Biomonitoring Surveys of the [US] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that plastic additive chemicals are present in the bodies of nearly all Americans.”

Depending on the chemical additive, their toxic effects may include causing cancer, damage to the nervous system, disruption of the endocrine (hormone) system and of lipid metabolism, which in turn can “increase the risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and stroke.”

Their potential to disrupt hormones – and of course, this is not just in humans but in many other species – is of particular concern.  A May 2023 UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report noted “women and children are particularly susceptible” and that these chemicals “can have severe or long-lasting adverse effects”, including neuro-developmental problems in children and fertility problems in both women and men.

Moreover, their impacts can cross the generations. In a release from the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) on Earth Day, Dr. Lyndia Dernis, an anesthesiologist in Québec, wrote: “when I administer an intravenous to a pregnant woman, I have to live with the knowledge that I may be exposing three generations to the endocrine disrupting phthalates in that plastic IV: the pregnant mom, her future baby girl, and the babies of that baby to be. Yet the phthalates that continue to be used in Canada have been banned in France since 2012.” 

Just as worrying as the widespread presence of these chemicals in our bodies is that plastic nano-particles are everywhere, throughout the food chain. Two recent articles in the medical literature have reported them in every placenta examined and in arteries, including coronary arteries. As one researcher stated in The Guardian, “If we are seeing effects on placentas, then all mammalian life on this planet could be impacted. That’s not good.”

But as we have seen time and again, just like other industries – such as the tobacco industry – that are focused on their own commercial interests, the plastics industry fights regulations intended to limit harm to health and the environment.

In November 2023, for example, a case brought by an industry coalition and several chemical companies that manufacture plastics overturned the federal government’s attempt to ban single-use plastics such as plastic bags, cutlery, take-out containers and straws. In the USA meanwhile, the Guardian reported last month, after a four-year legal fight “A federal appeals court in the US has killed a ban on plastic containers contaminated with highly toxic PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ found to leach at alarming levels into food, cosmetics, household cleaners, pesticides and other products across the economy.”

In addition, a recent report from the Center for Climate Integrity, a US non-profit that is committed to holding oil and gas corporations accountable for the massive costs of climate change, finds that plastics recycling is largely a fraud. “Petrochemical companies”, the report bluntly states, “have engaged in fraudulent marketing and public education campaigns designed to mislead the public about the viability of plastic recycling as a solution to plastic waste.”

Small wonder, then that the UNEP suggests that among the actions governments should take are to “eliminate the plastic products we do not need, through bans for example”, as well as recommending other steps to reduce plastics and plastic waste through re-use and recycling.

We all need to support the position of CAPE and “call on the federal government to limit plastics production, eliminate toxic additives, and protect the health of those most at risk – and advocate for this in a strong global treaty.”

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• Published as “Our addiction to plastics will come back to haunt us”

Plastics contain some very toxic chemicals and break down into nano-particles that end up in our bodies.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

16  April 2024

696 words

Tomorrow, April 22^nd, is Earth Day, and the theme this year is ‘Planet vs. Plastics’. This is timely, because Tuesday 23^rd April marks the start of a week-long session in Ottawa of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution. So this week I begin to look at the plastics industry as yet another example of an industry that harms people and planet in pursuit of profit.

Set up by the UN Environment Assembly, the Committee’s task is “to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment.” This is intended to take “a comprehensive approach that addresses the full life cycle of plastic, including its production, design, and disposal” and should be ready by the end of this year. It can’t come too soon.

According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), on its ‘Our planet is choking on plastic’ website, the world produces an estimated 400 million tonnes of plastic waste every year. This will grow to 1 billion tonnes by 2052 if we carry on as we are. Since the 1970s, adds UNEP, “plastic production has grown faster than that of any other material.” For example, an astounding one million plastic bottles are purchased every minute worldwide – yes, that is every minute! – and up to five trillion – yes, trillion, which is one thousand billion! – plastic bags are used each year, UNEP states.

Making and distributing all that plastic, takes a lot of fossil fuel – “98 percent of single-use plastic products are produced from fossil fuel”, notes the UNEP – and a lot of energy. “The level of greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production, use and disposal of conventional fossil fuel-based plastics is forecast to grow to 19 per cent of the global carbon budget by 2040”, UNEP states.

All that plastic has to go somewhere, but not much is recycled; less than 10 percent according to the UNEP. About half goes into landfills, while just under 20 percent is incinerated (which if done poorly can create some very toxic chemicals, such as dioxins and furans – potent cancer-causing and foetus-damaging chemicals).

Almost a quarter is mismanaged: ‘Mismanaged means, in practice, “materials burned in open pits, dumped into seas or open waters, or disposed of in unsanitary landfills and dumpsites”, notes Our World in Data.

As a result, a lot of it ends up in our oceans. The UNEP estimates that 75 to 199 million tons of plastic are currently in our oceans. As of 2016, we were adding about 9-14 million tonnes per year, but the UNEP estimates this could double or triple to 23-37 million tonnes per year by 2040.

The problem with plastic, the UNEP notes, is that it is very durable and resistant to degradation, which makes plastic “nearly impossible for nature to completely break down.” So it floats around, ends up on beaches or sinks to the bottom, and in all of those settings, it can be mistaken for food and eaten by marine life and birds, or in the case of large nets, can ensnare fish or drown birds, turtles and air-breathing mammals.

But all that plastic does not stay floating around in large pieces. Instead, it is broken down into tiny nano-particles, which then enter the food chain. An April 7^th article in this newspaper reported that “earlier this year, UBC and Ocean Wise scientists found that plastics can harm or even kill zooplankton, reducing a food source for many types of fish, including salmon.”

Its bad enough that plastics add considerably to global heating and are a threat to marine life. But just as with persistent chemicals, which I discussed last week, our plastics will come back to haunt us in other ways. They contain, can give rise to or absorb some very toxic chemicals and, we now know, they breakdown into nano-particles that end up in our bodies. The combination of toxic chemicals and nano-particles takes us into very uncharted waters in terms of health impacts.

Next week I will look in more depth at the health implications of plastics, at the way the industry has covered up these problems, and how governments and the international community need to respond.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• Published as “We still have no idea of the health effects of many pollutants

The chemical industry is subjecting us — and all the other species with whom we share this planet — to an uncontrolled experiment to which we never consented

Dr. Trevor Hancock

9 April 2024

698 words

Almost 45 years ago I co-led a report titled ‘Our Chemical Society’ for the City of Toronto’s Department of Public Health, for whom I then worked. It makes for instructive reading, because the industry we were focused on seems to have changed little in the intervening decades in terms of its appraoch, although it has grown even larger.

In 1981 we wrote: “The chemical industry is a large and powerful sector of our society, and is committed to expanding the use of chemicals. Indeed, many chemicals used in many varied ways have been beneficial to us all. However, the extent to which chemicals have penetrated ourselves and the environment of which we are a part is a matter for serious concern.”

At that time, it was estimated, there were 60,000 – 100,000 chemicals in commercial use, with 1,000 new chemicals introduced annually. Of these, 34,000 chemicals were on the US EPA’s 1978 Toxic Effects List and there were 1,400 pesticides used in North America.

Today, in spite of decades of scientific and public concern, the situation is, if anything, worse. The chemical industry, noted the authors of a recent study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, “is the second largest manufacturing industry globally. Global production increased 50-fold since 1950, and is projected to triple again by 2050 compared to 2010.” There are now estimated to be “350,000 chemicals (or mixtures of chemicals) on the global market”, of which “nearly 70,000 have been registered in the past decade.”

The study assessed whether we have passed the planetary boundary for ‘novel entities’. These are “new substances, new forms of existing substances and modified life forms”, things of which nature – including we humans – has no experience and not much adaptive capacity.

Novel entities include not only chemicals but “new types of engineered materials or organisms not previously known to the Earth system” (think nano-particles of plastic and GMOs) and heavy metals that we have mined and mobilized into the environment. 

But many of these chemicals remain inadequately tested. The article on novel entities gave an example:  Of more than 12,000 chemicals registered  for review in a European Union program, only 20 percent had been assessed after 10 years of operation of the program. And that is in a rich and well-managed region; they also reported that nearly 30,000 new chemical products “have only been registered in emerging economies, where chemical production has increased rapidly, but chemicals management and disposal capacity often are limited.”

In our 1981 report we expressed concern in particular about the problem of ecotoxicity: the dispersal of harmful pollutants throughout the environment (see my December 3^rd 2023 column). Many of those are persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that accumulate and are bio-magnified up the food chain – and guess who sits at the top of these food chains: Us, orca, raptors and other predators. As a result, we and they are born with and over time further accumulate a body burden of a mixture of POPs, the health effects of which are largely unknown, especially as a mix of many different chemicals.

Because of inadequate testing and population health monitoring and research, a Commission on Pollution and Health, established by The Lancet, suggested in 2017, that there are large categories of pollutants for which we lack knowledge of their actual health impacts. As a result, “the health effects of pollution that are currently recognised and quantified could thus be the tip of a much larger iceberg.”

Unsurprisingly, then, the assessment of the planetary boundary for novel entities found “the planetary boundary . . . is exceeded since annual production and releases are increasing at a pace that outstrips the global capacity for assessment and monitoring.”

In effect, the chemical industry is subjecting us – and all the other species with whom we share this planet – to an uncontrolled experiment to which we never consented, and of which we were not adequately informed – in fact, deliberately kept in the dark by so-called ‘trade secrets’. Forty-five years later, the chemical industry continues to fight tooth and nail to protect its profits and avoid stronger regulation, regardless of the toll on people and the myriad other species with which we share the planet.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• Published as  “Gambling industry needs stronger regulation to protect public health.”

Gambling opportunities continue to expand in spite of evidence of harms from mental-health effects to financial problems

Dr. Trevor Hancock

2 April 2024

702 words

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto just released a report on another industry that in various ways harms health – gambling.  Not only can it be addictive and harmful to health and social wellbeing, its impact is disproportionately experienced by low-income people, which makes it unjust.

Statistics Canada reported in 2022 that in 2018 (troublingly, the last year for which there is national data, it seems), almost 70 percent of Canadian adults gambled. Half of all adults bought lottery or raffle tickets, one-third bought instant lottery tickets or online games, one in eight used video lottery terminals, while one in 12 of us bet at casino tables or on sports.  

However, the StatsCan report noted, “1.6 percent of past-year gamblers were at a moderate-to-severe risk of problems related to gambling”. This equates to more than 300,000 people, but the CAMH report notes that “for every person experiencing gambling problems, another 5 to 10 people are negatively affected, with harms to mental health and financial security especially common.” So problem gambling actually affects 1.5 to 3 million Canadians.  

Problem gambling is classed as an addictive disorder.  The risks problem gamblers face include “depression and suicide, bankruptcy, family breakup, domestic abuse, assault, fraud, theft, and even homelessness”, according to the Canadian Safety Council. The CAMH study reports that “people with gambling disorder had 15 times the suicide mortality of the general population.”

While a smaller proportion of low-income people gambled, compared to high income people, they were more than twice as likely to be at risk. And worryingly, the CAMH study reported that while 1.2 percent of adults in Ontario are experiencing or are at risk for gambling problems, the rate is almost 50 percent higher in high-school students.

But gambling is also immensely profitable, both to the gambling industry and to governments that both operate and tax gambling. So it is not surprising that “gambling opportunities have been increasing globally” and that is true in Canada too; sports gambling was legalised in 2021 and in addition the provinces have expanded legal online gambling. This expansion is occurring, notes the CAMH report, in spite of evidence that “In general as gambling opportunities increase, gambling-related harms tend to increase.”

However, as a source of government revenue, gambling is unjust: First, only two-thirds of us play and pay, and second, it is a regressive form of taxation. Low-income people who gamble spend proportionately more of their annual income on gambling than do higher-income people. As the CAMH report notes, “to the extent that gambling policy fails to prevent (or even facilitates) harm, gambling policy can exacerbate health inequity.”

The CAMH report comes at the same time as a growing concern with sports gambling, especially among young people, and with the amount of advertising for gambling. The CAMH report is clear on the role of advertising: “The purpose of advertising is to drive consumption, and gambling is no exception”, their report states, adding that “there is a causal relationship between exposure to gambling advertising and . . . actual gambling activity.”

Moreover, CAMH notes, “Children and youth, as well as those already experiencing gambling problems, are especially susceptible to these effects.” Unfortunately, CAMH adds, “There do not appear to be rules or guidelines in Canada governing the volume of gambling ads”.

Bruce Kidd, a former Olympian and a professor emeritus of sports policy at the University of Toronto, is chair of a Campaign to Ban Ads for Gambling. Interviewed on CBC Radio’s ‘On the Coast’ on March 27^th, he stated: “Since the legalisation of sports betting in Canada there has been a tsunami of ads and it’s clear they have encouraged more and more children and youth and other vulnerable people to bet, and to bet well beyond their means, and to create very difficult situations.”

The campaign’s ‘White Paper’ (available at BanAdsForGambling.ca)is clear; it “calls for the prohibition of ads for gambling in the same way that ads for tobacco and cannabis have been restricted.” This should be part of a broader approach recommended by the CAMH report, to take a public health approach to gambling by focusing on stronger regulation of the industry, rather than just encouraging gamblers to be responsible.  

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Getting people to want and purchase more has adverse effects on both people and the planet

Dr. Trevor Hancock

26 March 2024

701 words

Last week I looked at one of the underpinnings of our economic system, the financial sector. This week I turn to another key sector that is often overlooked – the advertising industry. It is a huge industry. Forbes magazine recently reported that Magna, a major media and communications company, expects the global ad spend in 2024 “to increase by 7.2 percent, totalling $914 billion”, with over two-thirds of that being spent on digital media.  

Almost all of that nearly $1 trillion expenditure – equal to about 40 percent of the entire global auto manufacturing industry – is focused on encouraging and celebrating consumption, and getting people to want and purchase more. But this has adverse effects on both people and the planet.

Clearly people are harmed directly when advertising encourages the consumption  – or over-consumption – of health damaging products such as tobacco, unhealthy foods, alcohol, breast milk substitutes, gambling or a host of other products. But what I think we need to focus on is the harmful effects of advertising in general, regardless of the product being marketed.

Almost 2,500 years ago the Greek philosopher Epicurus wrote: “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not”, a sentiment echoed by the 19^th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Happiness is continuing to desire what you already possess.” Or as Amercian singer and actor RuPaul put it, very simply, “happiness is wanting what you already have.”

But commercial advertising, of course, is about the very opposite of this. It is about persuading you that happiness is about possessing what you don’t have, to want more of something you already have, or to envy the experiences that others are having. It fosters not just envy and greed, but anxiety about lacking what you don’t have; ask the parents of any child who feels left out and looked down upon if they don’t have the latest gadget or sneakers or whatever.

In a pamphlet on the impacts of advertising on mental health, Adfree Cities – a UK-based campaign to end all corporate outdoor advertising – notes: “Advertising often presents us with an unrealistic picture of happiness, often tied to notions of glamour, money, power and possessions. As we struggle to live up to this we can feel that we’ve failed no matter how much we spend.” In the end, then, advertising creates unhappiness.

A 2020 article in the Harvard Business Review highlighted the work of a European research team that looked at the relationship between advertising and the happiness of nations. The researchers looked at roughly I million people surveyed over 30 years across 27 European nations. They found “that increases in national advertising expenditure are followed by significant declines in levels of life satisfaction.”

One of the team, Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at the University of Warwick, noted: “if you doubled advertising spending, it would result in a 3 percent drop in life satisfaction.” That may not seem very much, but it is “about half the drop in life satisfaction you’d see in a person who had gotten divorced or about one-third the drop you’d see in someone who’d become unemployed”, meaning “advertising has sizable consequences.”

In addition to effects on our personal wellbeing, advertising also impacts planetary health by encouraging more and more consumption of just about everything. Consumption is at the root of our global ecological crisis; more ‘stuff’ extracted for a growing population with growing demands from an increasingly damaged and over-exploited environment spells trouble. So urging people to want more stuff – super-sized meals, more energy, larger cars, more trinkets, more everything – is going to increase the harm we do to the Earth and thus to ourselves.

‘Badvertising’ is a campaign  in the UK committed to stopping adverts and sponsorships fuelling the climate emergency. They point out: “We ended tobacco advertising when we understood the harm done by smoking. Now we know the damage done by fossil fuel products and activities, it’s time to stop promoting them.”

I agree. But I would suggest we expand this idea even further, to target all advertising that encourages activities that harm the Earth and damage our health. The last thing we need is encouragement to lead more unhappy, unhealthy and planet-damaging lives.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy