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When you eat or drink things that are stored in plastic, taste it, smell it, wear it, sit on it, and so on, plastic is incorporated into you. In fact, the plastic gets into the food and food gets into the plastic and you. So, quite literally, you are what you eat[1]. . . drink. . . and breathe plastic! These plastics are called "Food Contact Substances" by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but until April 2002, they were called "Indirect Food Additives."[2] The new name is cleansed of the implication that plastic gets into your food. In spite of this semantic deception, migration is a key assumption of the FDA.

by Paul Goettlich 3aug2005

Popular plastic water bottles, sippy cups and baby bottles made with a chemical called bisphenol A may be on their way out.

Two big signs in this morning’s papers: Wal-Mart says it’s going to stop selling BPA baby bottles early next year, and the company that makes Nalgene water bottles says it will stop using the chemical as well.

BPA is good for making hard, clear, nearly unbreakable plastic containers — just what you want on the trail or in the nursery. But concerns have been floating around for a while that the chemical could present long-term cancer risks, especially to infants.

While the data are still unclear, a few key dominoes fell this week: Canada moved toward declaring the chemical a dangerous substance, and a draft version of a U.S. government report said BPA might present risks.

by Jacob Goldstein

Plastics are synthetic substances produced by chemical reactions. Almost all plastics are made from petroleum, except a few experimental resins derived from corn and other organic substances.

One brilliant summer morning in 2000, the small private research vessel Alguita discovered a 10-mile-wide flotilla of the disposable sacks, an estimated 6 million of them destined for Taco Bells around the country, bobbing more than 1,000 miles west of the Ventura store. We were out in the middle of the Pacific, where you would think the ocean would be pristine, recalls the Alguitas captain, Charles Moore. And instead, we get the Exxon Valdez of plastic-bag spills.

THOMAS HAYDEN / U.S. News & World Report 4nov02

A. 1990 Running shoes spill

B. 2002 Garbage strip

C. 2000 Plastic bag spill

D. Shoes found

E. Eastern Garbage Patch
At the eye of the gyre, plastic reaches concentrations of a million pieces per square mile. Researchers have mapped a giant spill of bags and a mile-long strip of wind-driven garbage.

F. Caught in a gyre
Some of the plastic drifting in the North Pacific is swept to shore, like the thousands of Nike shoes that washed up in the Pacific Northwest. But much is trapped by calm winds and sluggish water within the North Pacific's loop of currents.

Bottle caps and other plastic objects are visible inside the decomposed carcass of this Laysan albatross on Kure Atoll, which lies in a remote and virtually uninhabited region of the North Pacific. The bird probably mistook the plastics for food and ingested them while foraging for prey.

CHARLES MOORE / Natural History v.112, n.9, Nov03