Heard black plastic is toxic? Listen to this before you throw it away | The Current

if you rummers around your home maybe look around the kitchen right now do you see a lot of black plastic nearby things like black plastic spatulas takeout containers toys if you do you might have felt alarmed about a study that came out this fall around the potential dangers of this material researchers studied 203 black plastic consumer products and found flame retardant chemicals in 85% of them these are toxic chemicals they can cause serious health issues like cancer Joe Schwarz is director of McGill University's office of Science and society and we spoke earlier this week about

this study here's our conversation this study created I don't say panic but certainly a lot of uh attention and and people kind of wondering whether they should toss all the black plastic that might be around them tell us a bit more about what the researchers found in the study well certainly as you mentioned it did create some panic but when we talk about toxicity it's very important to refer to numbers it isn't enough to say that something is toxic or not and this is indeed an issue with black plastic now black Plastics are sort of

fascinating the industry likes black plastics for several reasons uh one is that when you add carbon black which is the pigment that we're talking about here to to plastic it makes the plastic more heat resistant it increases its strength and rigidity and very importantly it blocks ultrair light ultra light is really poison to Plastics it causes them to break down so there is reason to to use carbon black but then there are aesthetic considerations also because consumers tend to evaluate black items as being more luxurious and uh producers also like that leakage from Foods packaged

in Black containers is less visible now the question that arises here is about things like sushi uh containers and black spatulas that you may have in in your kitchen and uh the study was um carried out by a nonprofit organization called toxin free future and published in a very reputable journal the journal is chemosphere and uh they investigated a number of plastics including toys and kitchen appliances that are made of black plastic and found that there were residues of flame retardants now these are all items that do not have flame retardants purposely added to them

cuz let's face it you know there's there's no risk of the kitchen spatula that you're using spontaneously bursting into flame even when you are turning over your pancake or your scrambled eggs so there's no need for these so how come this is happening because black plastic is notoriously difficult to recycle uh in a recycling facility the plastic items kind of scoot by on a a conveyor belt and a machine detects the recyclable ones and this is done by infrared radiation depending on reflection uh the instrument can determine what sort of plastic it is but black

plastic does not reflect infrared light so it is not sorted it goes straight through on the conveyor belt and ends up in a bin that goes into landfill but because there's a big demand for black plastic and it's not available from recycling facility then producers look elsewhere so you can either produce it from raw materials or they can reach out to some of these Asian countries where uh electronic equipment is dismantled in order to get precious metals out of it but then they are left with a lot of black plastic which is found in our

computers our television sets our cell phones and um some companies will buy this and melt it all down and reformulate it into appliances and that's how the ref fire returant which of course in TVs and and computers are necessary you sure don't want your TV bursting into flame no but then they end up in in this plastic which is all mixed together and melted down and and reassembled into the items that we're talking about so how much of that is leeching out how much of that flame R tardan is leeching out from the toys in

the spatulas that's indeed the question to ask because toxicology revolves around numbers paracelsus the Great Sage of the Renaissance told us only the dose makes the poison and that is critical to understand so researchers at the University of Birmingham investigated exactly what amount transfers and they discovered that just by handling the black plastic there is no transference so children playing with toys that is not not an issue however when they immersed bits of black plastic in olive oil at 160° for 15 minutes they did find some of this transfer to the oil now the fact

is that this is not really a mimic of how one would use spatula in a fry pan you know it's not exposed to 160 degrees for 15 minutes and of course we don't eat all of the oil that we use for frying but nevertheless based on this study scientists at toxin-free Future estimated the daily intake of 34,700 nanog of the most toxic Flame is that a lot it sounds I mean that's a big number but is that a lot it sounds like a big number and that's why we have to look at what is called

the reference dose that is the number that scientists have developed based on laboratory experiments animal experiments which is safe for our daily intake and that turns out to be 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight so the researchers said look the average body weight is 60 kg they multiplied 7,000 by 60 and they came out with 42,000 and said that the 34,700 that was detected is too close to that for Comfort but they made a mistake they made a mathematical dis mistake in the paper because 7,000 * 60 is not 42,000 but 420,000 so the

supposed exposure is not close to the reference dose it is actually one tenth of it and this is what caused all of the panic so are you suggesting I mean the math could scramble people's heads but are you suggesting that perhaps we don't need to panic that these things are not leeching as as as much of the harmful chemical as we might want to believe exactly they were off by a factor of pen so indeed the amount that leeches out is not close to the reference level that that uh tells us safety I don't think

anybody would want any of the the leeching to come out I mean we assume that you know the spatula that you're using sure little bits and pieces of it fall off but generally you don't want you know to believe that that is going to help poison you or even in a small this this is true but I mean you know we are surrounded by potential toxins you know in our life everywhere the question is whether we are talking about you know a flea on the back of an elephant flicking that off or talking something that

is is more significant well it in this case because of this mathematical error uh I think we're talking about a very small small risk but that being said these flame retardant should never be in these items why don't we just stop using black Plastics is there something else that we could use instead of those black Plastics that have unnecessary flame retardant in them uh certainly stainless steel is the stuff that we should be using in the kitchen uh very little leeches out of that I mean you can even there if you investigate it you will

find some nickel and some chromium that leeches out because the problem is that today with our analytical chemical techniques we are Adept at picking up substances even down to the part per trillion level that's the width of a credit card compared to the distance between the Earth and the moon when we do a careful analysis of anything we will always find some potentially toxic substance that's why numbers are so critical and you have to make a distinction between things that are are very minor risk and things that are of very significant risk and I think

you know when you have a scientific paper that gets so much attention and that attention really is based on you know a tenfold error uh is a significant mathematical error so you are actually exposed to one tenth of what they claim but in this case even a minor risk can be avoided because obviously we do have alternatives that do not have any remnants of flame retardants in there the Canadian government has tried to regulate plastic including Banning certain types of black plastic the Supreme Court said that that was unconstitutional to ban those sorts of plastics

can we regulate black plastic in Canada yes it's certainly possible to regulate it of course there will be vigorous opposition to that from manufacturers but I I think it is possible to put limits on the amount of residue that can leech out from from Plastics but the issue isn't only black Plastics there are other Plastics that have you know different problems uh but banning plastic obviously this is a non-starter our life relies on Plastics or cars or airplanes or hospitals pharmaceutical and Food Industries could not function without Plastics I mean a lot of the clothes

we wear uh are based on synthetic fibers so there certainly are very significant issues with uh Plastics and I'm sure you've heard of the the concerns about nanoplastics they're found in every organ in the body because when Plastics get into the environment usually through improper uh discarding they eventually break down and they end up in our water they end up in our food and therefore they end up in our body and these are real concerns I mean those are much bigger concerns than you know turning over your omet with a black spatula so just end

where we started which was that Panic that people felt when they heard about this study a lot of people went into the kitchen and if they could cleared out all the black Plastics should I be throwing out all the black plastic in my kitchen no I don't think so and then of course there's the added problem of when you're throwing it out what happens to it right because many of the older landfills are not properly sealed and eventually everything in there starts to break down and it gets into the environment from there so that uh

the flame retardant that are found in the black plastic that you're throwing out may eventually come back to haunt us through our water and through our food and you know as as is almost always the case in science when you scratch the surface things are always much much more complicated than it first appears and so I I think the panic over black plastic is is not not warranted uh but I think we do need to have regulation so that electronic equipment waste does not end up in the Plastics which are food contact materials Joe Schwarz

we'll leave it there thank you for speaking with us about this thank you very much Joe Schwarz is director of McGill University's office of Science and Society we spoke earlier this week and after our interview we also checked the math and we contacted the authors of the study to ask about that tenfold discrepancy that Joe was pointing out the co-author of the study Megan louu replied that yes they had recently been made aware of the issue and had submitted a correction to the journal however she goes on to say it is important to note this

does not impact our results the levels of flame retardance that we found in black plastic household items are still of high concern [Music]