Chemical From Plastic Water Bottles Found Throughout Oceans
- By Brandon Keim
- March 24, 2010 |
- 1:18 pm |
- Categories: Environment
A survey of 200 sites in 20 countries around the world has found that bisphenol A, a synthetic compound that mimics estrogen and is linked to developmental disorders, is ubiquitous in Earth’s oceans.
Bisphenol A, or BPA, is found mostly in shatter-proof plastics and epoxy resins. Most people have trace amounts in their bodies, likely absorbed from food containers. Its hormone-mimicking properties make it a potent endocrine system disruptor.
In recent years, scientists have moved from studying BPA’s damaging effects in laboratory animals to linking it to heart disease, sterility and altered childhood development in humans. Many questions still remain about dosage effects and the full nature of those links, but in January the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that “recent studies provide reason for some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children.”
The oceanic BPA survey, presented March 23 at an American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco, was conducted by Nihon University chemists Katsuhiko Saido and Hideto Sato. At an ACS meeting last year, they described how soft plastic in seawater doesn’t just float or sink intact, but can break down rapidly, releasing toxins. In their new findings, they showed that BPA-containing hard plastics can break down too, and found BPA in ocean water and sand at concentrations ranging from .01 to .50 parts per million.
As for what those numbers mean for public and environmental health, it’s hard to say. BPA can cause reproductive disorders in shellfish and crustaceans, and doses below a single part per trillion can have cell-level effects, but the path from water and sand to ocean animals needs to be studied.
One disturbing possibility is that BPA could bioaccumulate, with animals eating BPA-tainted animals that have eaten BPA-tainted animals, finally reaching high concentrations in top-level ocean predators and the humans who eat them. For that to happen, BPA would have to be stored in fatty tissue, rather than passing quickly through the body.
“That’s a really difficult, unsettled question,” said Shanna Swan, a University of Rochester environmental medicine specialist who wasn’t involved in the survey.
In a 2009 Environmental Health Perspectives study of BPA concentrations in people who had recently fasted, Swan found that BPA levels remained high longer than expected. It’s possible that BPA indeed accumulated in their fat, said Swan. They could also have picked up BPA from as-yet-unappreciated non-dietary sources, such as household dust or leaching from PVC water pipes. Or both scenarios may be true.
The BPA contamination found by Saido and Sato likely comes from a mix of boat paint and plastic. About three million tons of BPA-containing plastics are produced each year. The United Nations estimates that the average square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of plastic trash.
“Marine debris plastic in the ocean will certainly constitute a new global ocean contamination for long into the future,” wrote Saido and Sato in their presentation.
Image: Polihale/Wikipedia
See Also:
- We Should Have Banned Bisphenol A Twenty Years Ago
- Toxic Soup: Plastics Could Be Leaching Chemicals Into Ocean …
- Common Lab Gear Could Contaminate Critical Research
Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.
but..but…man cant affect the WORLD! the world is…too BIG for man to affect!! rush limbaugh told me so!!
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friggin tards.
Rush Limbaugh needs to take a trip to the North Pacific Gyre if he’s so sure about that idea.
I’m not worried. The American Chemistry Council has done studies and they found BPA is totally safe. I encourage the fine folks in our chemical industry to keep cranking out the BPA.. for Uncle Sam.
Um… even at the low end, that supposedly means there’s something like 3,260,000,000,000 GALLONS of Bisphenol-A in the world’s water supply. Sounds like they have a sampling problem, since the world’s total production of bisphenol-A is on the order of 600,000,000 gallons (most of which is used up in plastics production, and not available to leach into the environment). Even if all they did was dump the stuff directly into the water, the amount the authors claim to have detected is something like 5000 YEARS of the world’s total production.
My god, 3 comments and none of them came off as Pro-Pollution. I’ve never seen that happen on a environment-related article on this site.
wow, something people did is affecting the planet and it’s oceans. Thanks for the breaking news. What are you Wired to today, 1963?
@cirby More likely you made incorrect assumptions in your calculations. For one BPA is not going to be evenly distributed in ocean so you aren’t going to be able to come up with a meaningful average concentration for the entire ocean. 200 sample sites in 20 countries are not going to enable you to calculate a global burden of BPA, they do show the potential for exposure to this chemical for both humans and marine life.
So is this a big surprise?? We (as a species) have been dumping terrible things into the oceans for…….well….who knows how long?
@cirby
I don’t see where you’re getting an exact measurement from. All it says in the article is “pieces”. That could represent trace elements not visible to the eye in most of the tested locations.
Kibbles tries to look PC but then immediately turns around and uses a very offensive term “tards”. Epic Fail.
Thanks to cirby for actually doing the math. The results of the report documented in this Wired article are highly suspect.
Here’s an idea: stop hauling garbage out to sea and dumping it in the ocean.
@deckard68 I’m pretty sure our waste management companies are not dumping trash into the oceans. I would also like to know how many water bottles it would take to to produce these results in our oceans, because I have my doubts.
TTTT, with all this prior historical focus on organic food, arguments over freshness, and concern with all of the more minor environmental issues, shouldn’t we be focusing on perhaps the hugest one: plastic. Plastic is all over the place! Buried all over, in all of our oceans, and it takes the longest to decompose!
Gee, the world would be so much better without all of us terrible humans. Let’s all kill ourselves so the world can go back to a Fairy Tale enviroment full of happy little critters and green trees! You go first.
“I’m pretty sure our waste management companies are not dumping trash into the oceans.”
Then our subcontractors are! Someone is.
For anyone who doubts that human activity can affect global ecology.
Gee, mcook, how ’bout instead we start asking the questions we haven’t been asking for the past 50 years - what are we doing to our Home? We live IN the world, not ABOVE it.
For all you faithful out there, read the Bible, where it says “The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it” (Genesis 2:15). It is our RESPONSIBILITY. Take it seriously.
what we need is a new government taskforce - give them a modest budget of, say, 200 million dollars, and have them work feverishly for a couple years and come up with a comprehensive poster-size PDF listing all the things i should be afraid of and all reasons why i should be ashamed of every single living breath i take for the rest of my life. lets get this done!!!
Duh. Recycle. Problem solved.
give them enough time and the hippies of the world will tell us that we need to stop eating or drinking so that we don’t destroy the earth.
@deckard68
Where else are we supposed to put our inefficient appliances and electronics that we were told to replace in order to become a greener more earth loving species?
@ Warsh, You spoke too soon.
How about Iraq, or other deserts in the Middle East? They owe us.
“But…But AL GORE is RICH! Therefore protecting the planet is just a scheme to make him richer! You’re all marxists!
-the right.
I had an eye-opening experience recently that I think everyone should try. My sister lost something very valuable off her car on the way to town. Don’t ask. Anyway, we had to search both sides of the road about 3 miles back and forth to town. We rode our bicycles and carefully scanned the roadside. What do you think the most common thing on the roadside was? Cigarette butts? NO, it was plastic bottles and aluminum cans. The roadside seems to have become the nation’s “recycling bin”.
In some of the other comments I see a lot of anger. Some of you seem to be angry that, “why are you bothering me with that unproven science stuff”? What I don’t get is, why would anyone stick up for bad chemicals? It is proven all around the world that BPA threatens reproduction in wildlife, our kids, and ourselves.
People don’t seem to be angry at our lawmakers letting bottles with BPA be made. Or that BPA is used by millions of people in our most intimate and trusted way - our water bottles - then hastily discarded. A lot of water bottles end up in the streets. They lie there next to the curb leaching their hormone-imbalancing chemicals into our neighborhood environment. Millions of stray bottles get into our storm sewer systems and rivers and harbors without ever getting collected or recycled.
There is a simple answer to this dilemma: If you really “need” bottled water, buy it in larger, more economical containers, which are easily recycled. Or better yet just buy a filter for your tap water. Then buy a BPA free water bottle for $5 at the grocery store. You wash it and refill it hundreds of times. Then when you’re done with it simply recycle it.
And it doesn’t even make financial sense to throw the disposable bottles away. A large percentage of the money you’re spending for bottled water just pays for the packaging. A few gulps and you throw it “away”. So what you’re saying is, “It’s my RIGHT to consume and discard large amounts of petroleum and chemicals if I can afford it. And by the way, I don’t care where the garbage goes or who it hurts” (yes, plastic is made from petrol, not TREES).
Only a tiny fraction (something like 3%) of plastic bags and water bottles ever get recycled.
@cirby, the concentrations ranging from .01 to .50 parts per million are from 200 SPECIFIC ocean sites, not an estimate of concentration in world’s oceans or the world’s entire drinking supply, or for that matter, any drinking supply! Did you cut and paste a comment form another web site?
I’d like to see someone do a similar study with liquor stored in plastic bottles.
In the meantime, “shoot to kill” should be order of the day for litterers.
Are they sure bisphenol A is only found in plastics?
For you folks pointing out that these samples were from “specific” sites, or from limited areas: exactly. From the numbers they cite, they apparently got their samples from places like the beach in the photograph, right next to discarded plastic items with bis-A in them. In other words, the scary story above should read “when you sample water and sand an inch away from something containing a chemical, you find very small amounts of that chemical, but when you sample a bit further away, it gets diluted dramatically.”
@cirby - yeah dude, those evil socialist marine scientists dont know what the fck theyre doing; they clearly measured wrong. cuz, you know, theyre fresh out of liberal arts college. n stuff.
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hows that Denial Hat ™ fitting? nice & snug? yeah.
Please try to be more accurate with your statements, though, if you want to properly educate the public. I have Googled the subject and learned that BPA is (or used to be) found commonly in hardened plastics such as polycarbonate (baby bottles, unbreakable refillable bottles), but never in common water bottles which is made with PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic bottles.