The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [61]
Chemists and industrial designers and activists use all sorts of complicated systems to classify materials. But I figure that what’s really important to us as individuals is whether or not any of the materials used in our Stuff are dangerous. So although it’s unorthodox by scientific standards, I’m going to lump all the toxic materials together—heavy metals mined from the earth, like lead, cadmium, arsenic, chromium, and mercury, alongside synthetic organic compounds, like the organochlorines (dioxin, DDT), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA, used as a water repellant), and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs, the flame retardants).
Another term you’ll frequently hear is POPs, or persistent organic pollutants. To decode that: “Persistent” means they don’t break down. They stay inside the tissues of living creatures, often bioaccumulating, which means they lodge in fat cells and get passed up the food chain at ever-increasing concentrations. “Organic” means they contain carbon, which means they can interact with the cells of living things (all of which contain carbon) in a variety of insidious ways. “Pollutant” means that they’re toxic—disruptive to the endocrine, reproductive, and immune systems and also a source of neurobehavioral disorders.*
Let’s look at the naturally occurring heavy metals. Even though these all occur in nature, the scale at which we’re extracting them, putting them into consumer goods, and distributing them around the planet is unnatural and devastating. As a case in point, global emissions of lead from industrial sources are twenty-seven times higher than lead emissions from natural sources.108 There’s a reason nature secured these metals underground rather than circulating them in biological systems: they are supertoxic to all life forms. Scientists have amassed piles of studies concluding beyond a doubt that even low-level exposure to these chemicals is causing widespread neurological, developmental, and reproductive problems. Many of the heavy metals are biopersistent, which means that once they are inside a living organism, they remain there for a really long time—we’re talking decades—before passing out of the body. Many of them also bioaccumulate.
Lead, for example, is a neurotoxin, which means it poisons the brain and the nervous system. It’s been linked to learning disabilities and reproductive disorders. “We’ve learned that virtually any level of lead is associated with neurodevelopmental impacts. It’s a continuous impact beginning from non-zero levels and on up. So, for any of us, if we are exposed to lead, there’s an impact. It may be small in the lower exposure range, but it’s there,” says scientist Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network.109 In spite of this, lead is still in widespread use in Stuff like car batteries, PVC plastic, roofing materials, lipstick, and toys. In their 2007 study, the Washington Toxics Coalition found lead in 35 percent of 1,200 children’s toys tested, with 17 percent of the products containing lead levels above the 600 ppm federal recall level for lead paint.110 Brain-harming poison in children’s toys: it sounds like a bad horror movie, except it’s real.
Another notorious toxin we surround ourselves with is mercury. There is a reason my mother warned me not to touch the irresistible silver liquid that oozed out of broken glass thermometers. Mercury exposure impairs cognitive skills; in large doses it messes with your lungs and eyes and can cause tremors, insanity, and psychosis. It’s also been linked to cancer, cell death, and diabetes.111 Children and babies are especially vulnerable to mercury because their nervous systems are still developing. A baby exposed to mercury in the womb can be born with neurological problems, physically