A report published earlier this month by a consortium of 140 environment groups shows that potentially risky chemicals are present in dozens of everyday plastic items for sale by European retailers — from shoes to erasers, from pencil cases to sex toys.
The study focused on a group of chemicals known as phthalates, six of which have been virtually banned in toys in the EU since 1999 over fears they can damage the sexual development of children. However, as the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) found in its study, phthalates are present in common items routinely used by children.
The study, based on a chemical analysis by PiCA, an independent chemical laboratory in Berlin, found one pink pencil case with levels three times those which the EU says should be the maximum in toys and “childcare articles.” A phthalate that scientists suspect may be particularly harmful to humans was found in an eraser at a level close to that which would be banned in a toy.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Concerns about phthalates are not new and retailers selling products containing them are not breaking the law because the regulations do not cover objects such as pencil cases and erasers.
However, the EEB study also found that retailers appear to be ignoring a legal obligation to provide information about the presence of phthalates to shoppers. Less than a quarter of retailers in its survey provided satisfactory answers to requests for information about chemicals in their products.
SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT
PHOTO: REUTERS
Phthalates are a range of chemicals regularly used to make plastics more flexible. There are about 25 of them and in recent decades they have permeated the very fabric of our society, right down to the shoes on our feet. They are in the air we breathe and the paint on our office walls, they soften the vinyl floors of kitchens and bathrooms, they put the flex in our shower curtains and electric cables.
In your car, phthalates coat the chassis against rust and soften the plastics of its doors, dashboard and the steering wheel in your hands.
They are in our food, some scientists think, after leaching out of the pipes and plastics used in food processing machinery. They are in our bodies.
The global chemicals industry produces nearly 6 million tonnes of phthalates every year. Some scientists, and an increasing number of governments, have begun to suspect that phthalates might be connected to a massive drop in male fertility globally over the past few decades — in the developed world, repeated studies have shown sperm counts have decreased by about 50 percent in the past half century — as well as to problems with the sexual development of boys in the womb.
The most volatile of the chemicals disperse easily from plastics and have been shown to interfere with the sexual development of fetal rats by interrupting the production of testosterone. Some studies have suggested similar effects in humans.
As well as the toy ban, the EU controls or bans certain phthalates from things like cosmetics and paints. It has also begun to examine restricting the use of some phthalates in other products, a process that is likely to take years. The US has limited the use of certain phthalates in toys since 2008, and says it is investigating the safety of others. Australia bans the sale of items containing more than 1 percent of a single phthalate.
NOT FULLY MASCULINIZED
In pregnant rats, numerous studies have proven that exposure to some phthalates reduces testosterone levels in the male fetus, interfering with normal development of the penis and descent of their testicles. However, it was not until 2005 that scientists made a link between the chemicals and changes in humans.
A group of researchers at Rochester University, New York, studied the masculinity of newborn boys. As an indicator, they measured the distance between the anus and the base of the penis — the anogenital distance — which is typically twice as long in males as in females, and is often used by scientists as a marker of masculinity. Low anogenital distances are associated with problems of reproductive health, such as undescended testes or deformed penises.
The researchers then compared that measurement with the phthalate levels in the urine of the infants’ mothers.
“We found that in human male infants, as predicted by animal studies, when the mother was exposed to some phthalates, the boys had changes in their reproductive development, which was not fully masculinized,” says Shanna Swan, who led the study.
Respected journal Environmental Health Perspectives named Swan’s team’s study “paper of the year” last year for its massive impact on current thinking about phthalates. The study was not perfect — at just 134 infants, the sample size was very small — but Swan is working on a new, bigger and more rigorous study that could help settle the science.
GETTING CLOSER
Other scientists are also trying to pin down the link between phthalates and changes in humans. In an Edinburgh laboratory, a mouse wanders through its cage to sip at some water tainted with plastic softeners. Under the skin on its back are grafted tiny pieces of tissue from the testicles of a human fetus. The objective is to directly ascertain if those softeners could be confusing our hormones and mutating the genitalia of unborn infants. Richard Sharpe, an expert in male reproductive health at Edinburgh University and the leader of the study, believes people will find a link between our -environment and lifestyles and male reproductive health.
“We have solid evidence testicular cancer has increased progressively across Europe in the past 50 to 70 years,” he says. “And it has happened in a space of time that coincides with lifestyle and environmental changes.”
Sharpe believes that “understanding whether or not phthalates play any role in human male reproductive disorders is pivotal.” Animal studies, he says “point clearly towards effects, but human studies are very mixed. We’ll have a much clearer idea in the next 12 months. If we don’t find any effects of phthalates on the fetal human testis, they really drop down the list of suspects. If we find a positive effect, I think it could be the end of phthalates.”
SLOW REGULATION
In Europe, the group tasked with evaluating and restricting potentially risky chemicals such as phthalates is the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), based in Helsinki. Its main role is to implement a 2007 law aimed at improving understanding of and control over 30,000 chemicals regularly used around Europe that currently face few regulations.
Known as REACH — Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals — the law was one of the most intensively lobbied in European history. European chemical firms opposed it, as did the administration of former US president George W. Bush, which argued it would choke off transatlantic trade.
The law now forces companies to register the chemicals they want to sell; the ECHA is combing through data given to it by the industry to decide which should be phased out fastest. From an original broad list of around 1,500 chemicals of concern, 38 have so far been classified as “substances of very high concern” including four phthalates — DEHP, BBP, DBP and DIBP.
Many activists are unhappy with the pace of progress and feel the ECHA should look beyond the 38 substances it is tackling. Environmentalists and health campaigners, including Greenpeace and the Health and Environment Alliance, have compiled a list of 356 chemicals they want curbed immediately. The European Trade Union Confederation has a list of 334 it wants banned from the workplace.
However, the task of evaluating the evidence is so huge, and the resources of the agency so limited, that even the initial 38 chemicals will take years to phase out or approve. Geert Dancet, ECHA’s executive director, says it may take until 2014 to decide how these first few chemicals should be dealt with.
“Then there are those chemicals we don’t even know about yet, and in that case 2020 is the target date,” Dancet said.
FROM SEX TO FOOD
It’s not just children at risk. As well as testing children’s shoes, make-up bags and pencil cases, the Berlin laboratory tested samples from the shaft of the E09-039/10, a smooth blue vibrator. It was one of five sex toys tested, four of which showed high concentrations of DEHP. The blue vibrator had 55 percent DEHP by weight, while another sold as “Prince Charming” had 63 percent. Many experts feel uncomfortable discussing the issue in public, but all agree sex toys are likely to add to the overall phthalate level present in adults, and in the case of pregnant women, might affect an unborn child.
Scientists are beginning to better understand how phthalates enter our bodies. One of the main channels may be the food we eat. In one 2006 German study, three volunteers abstained from eating for 48 hours, drinking only mineral water, while the levels of phthalates were measured in their urine.
Within the first 18 hours, levels of DEHP plummeted and remained low for the remaining 30 hours, suggesting that food was the main source.
IMPORTS
Even if phthalates such as DEHP are phased out by European manufacturers, it can still enter Europe in imported products — nearly two-thirds of which originate in Asia, mainly China.
“If a non-toy product is manufactured outside the EU and imported, there’s very little protection — a notification to the authorities and not much more,” says Christian Schaible, Chemicals Policy Officer for the EEB. “The process to remove only a few very high-concern chemicals will take several decades at this pace ... Decision-makers proposed back in October 2008 a dozen substances to be phased out, but measures will only be in place for some of these by 2016.”
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