Plastic Chemical BPA Declared Toxic In Canada 168
Julie188 writes "The Canadian government has formally declared bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical widely used to create clear, hard plastics, as well as food can liners, to be a toxic substance. Does this mean that you'll be tackled by the Canadian Mounties if you stroll around with some bottled water? Not exactly. Being a toxic chemical doesn't mean you can't get a little love. The government will at first try and set limits on how much BPA can be released into the air or water by factories that use the compound."
Re:But asbestos is fine! (Score:4, Interesting)
100 years ago, lung cancer was so rare that doctors would tell their students to take a good look, because they'd probably never see another case in their lifetime. People were smoking back then, but we didn't have both bomb residues and high levels of asbestos dust (asbestos brake shoes meant that pretty much everyone has bee exposed).
Thermal Receipts have the most BPA (Score:3, Interesting)
If you get a receipt and then eat your burger is the receipt a food product regulated in the same way you might regulate a plastic fork?
In Canada regulation will all depend on if the receipt paper is made in Quebec or near Ottawa.
Re:Bottled water (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Glass Brita Pitcher!? (Score:3, Interesting)
One other major use of BPA you may not know about is as a coating on sales slips. BPA is easily absorbed from these coatings just by handling them without gloves. For shoppers, the exposure is not much, but for someone working a cash register all day, it's a problem.
The sickest part of all this is that we guessed BPA could be trouble as far back as the 1930s! It's frightening how special interests have managed to keep these rather important safety questions from being answered for almost 80 years. BPA could be one of the reasons for the current obesity and diabetes epidemic.
Today, we're still being just as foolish. "Doubt is our product". One wonders if we're doomed when you look around and see that far from Big Tobacco's program to sow doubt and confusion having become the canonical example of unethical, immoral, and stupid behavior, it is actually rather admired and emulated! The Climate Change deniers look to Big Tobacco's efforts for inspiration. Lately, those finance guys who needed a huge bailout from the public have been trotting out the same sort of excuses about how no one could have known. They're supposed to be the savvy sophisticated experts, but never mind that. They did know, and everyone knows it. Their claims that they couldn't know are pathetic. Yet so far, they are being allowed to get away with it, and that is in no small part because of the constant war being waged upon facts and science. And the constant diversion of our attention to other matters such as war and piracy. If I understand the bargain made with Mozilo, he will not see any jail time, and I fear he was let off way too easily.
I don't know what reforms we can make to change all this. Shine more "light of day" on everything? But we have a huge amount of deliberately created confusion over just what is right and wrong, and what wrongs are important and what aren't. Potheads do time while so-called white collar crooks walk free. Baseball players get grilled by Congress for steroid use while big corporations slide by for much worse things, or even get a few apologies as BP did! Perhaps the problem is that too many students pass through our education system failing to really get science, so that they are easily befuddled by nonsense? Or are too sheltered and come out naive and ripe for fleecing and hustling? Or are spoiled and careless, easily diverted with bread and circuses? Or have been corrupted and made cynical, and think that there isn't an honest person in the whole world, so they might as well also cheat and steal as much as possible? Why do so many people endure the shady treatment they get from telecoms companies, for one? A huge task to begin straightening that out while calling out the perps for the liars, thieves, and murderers that they are. Throwing them into jail would be a start. And take away all their ill gotten gains. ALL of it. We also desperately need to regain control of executive pay, which has risen so high that the difference between what each executive is paid and what the President of the US is paid is enough to have bailed out the economy several times over. But all that is not enough. We don't want people cynically feeling that these hucksters were cool and smooth, admiring them for being "successful", and worst of all thinking that they were righteous.
Re:But asbestos is fine! (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually it's very easy to keep it out of the air. Asbestos is like glass, once you break it, you get explosive contamination of it, with shards everywhere. Otherwise it's a cheap, effective, and very useful material.
Re:But asbestos is fine! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actinides (other than uranium and plutonium) are rare in bomb fallout. You are probably thinking of polonium.
Anyway, if biological fallout uptake were the principal driver for the relationship between smoking and lung cancer, then the dose-response relationship -- first measured in the 1950s -- should have changed by roughly a factor of two during the course of the 1960s.
One would expect both incidence and mortality of lung cancer to be rarer in Europe and the US prior the 1930s because mortality from other causes was higher. Furthermore, cigarette smoking became much more popular in the early 1900s, perhaps corresponding with the rise of the cinema. It's not that people didn't smoke tobacco before then... but they were almost always pipe-smokers.
Re:But asbestos is fine! (Score:1, Interesting)
My grandmother used to make Asbestos snow men as they lived next to an Asbestos factory, whenever she goes to the doctor she has to tell them she doesn't have cancer as on her X-Rays it is all throughout her body. Hasn't killed her yet mind you.
Re:Glass Brita Pitcher!? (Score:3, Interesting)
While I think it's ridiculous when CEOs are giving hundreds of millions in bonuses or salaries, those are privately-owned companies, and they're free to (over)pay as much as they want to.
Yes. And then their overpaid executards buy off Congress, loot their companies and run them into the ground, wreck the economy and demand trillion dollar bailouts funded by people who actually do productive work.
So no, letting a bunch of obvious crooks and psychopaths steal all they want doesn't actually work in practice. This should hardly come as a great surprise.
This action is favored by the Democrats and the Republicans: remember, TARP was done by a Democrat-controlled Congress under Bush, and then the GM/Chrysler bailout was done by Obama and friends.
The Senate approved the bailout measure on Oct. 1, 2008, on a bipartisan vote of 74 to 25. The House initially rejected the proposal, but under prodding from the White House and leading members of both parties, House members ultimately voted 263 to 171 for the bill, with 91 Republicans joining 172 Democrats in backing it; 108 Republicans and 63 Democrats voted no.
And I actually don't have a problem with TARP per se - clearly the financial system had been wrecked by 30 years of idiotic laissez-faire policy - the problem I have with it is that the perpetrators of that collapse have all walked free (adding insult to injury, plenty of them have served in both the Bush and Obama administrations), and many of them are still running the same Wall Street firms that precipitated the collapse.
At least with the GM/Chrysler bailout, the executives who ran those companies into the ground were also forced out. Those bailouts also cost a tiny fraction of what we've spent so far bailing out Wall Street (not to mention the multi-trillion dollar impact the collapse of Wall Street's gambling spree has had on the economy as a whole).