Maybe there’s only 80 chemicals in a pellet, as in, 80 very long molecules.

Thanks! Edited to account for “and other additives”

That’s almost fair. The difference is: a banana is a living organism, and very few synthetic materials are supposed to have 80 differently-identifiable chemicals in them. This melange of death here is shit like dioxins, plasticizers, decomposition products, dyes and other additives, as well as the reaction products of all of THAT shit mixing at high temp in the melted plastic. If you aren’t afraid, then I don’t know how to help you, child.

Brushing this off with some trite banana comparison is just making a Robert Kehoe out of yourself.

Thanks for that. No apology necessary - that was rather hilarious.

There isn’t a biologically significant difference between clothing made from various grades of nylon, polyester, polypropylene, spandex, Lycra, acrylonitrile, etc. You probably wear clothing made from each of these families or similar, related materials, each comprised of dozens of “chemicals”.

But you’ll turn up your nose at the thought of several of these materials combined into a single pellet?

After it’s been exposed to use and light for who knows how long, and after being melted together at high temperatures, inevitably higher than the decomposition temperatures of at least a few of the dyes and additives in there, because precisely zero effort has been put in to purify it before being slagged? Yes I will turn my nose up, and you should too. No self-respecting chemist sniffs chemical cocktails of unknown provenance.

ETA: Also, your clothing note is a completely false equivalence, because the chemical at issue here is polyethylene, which has a far greater range and prevalence of additives than those polymers you named for use in clothing.

I dont know why you got downvoted, you are very right!

“We identified common plastics chemicals, including UV-stabilizers and plasticizers, as well as chemicals that are not used as plastics additives, including pesticides, pharmaceuticals and biocides. These may have contaminated the plastics during their first use phase, prior to becoming waste and being recycled.”

a banana is a living organism

So what? So is poison ivy. I wouldn’t recommend eating it.

very few synthetic materials are supposed to have 80 differently-identifiable chemicals in them

I’m sorry but - what the fuck are you talking about? Who is deciding how many different chemicals should be in any given material? What sort of of ridiculousness is this?

This melange of death here is shit like dioxins, plasticizers, decomposition products, dyes and other additives, as well as the reaction products of all of THAT shit mixing at high temp in the melted plastic.

Which is my point - the NUMBER of items in a given material is just scare-mongering BS. The actual ingredients is what matters.

If you aren’t afraid, then I don’t know how to help you, child.

If you don’t understand that the count of the number of chemicals in a thing doesn’t relate to that thing’s toxicity then I can’t help you either kid.

It’s to highlight how common and widespread the contamination is.

You could say “We found 80 chemicals across a dozen facilities”, but showing how all 80 chemicals were in a single pellet highlights how widespread the contamination is.

Just people deciding that divorcing a statement from its context (plastics manufacturing) is sufficient to say that no alarm need be raised. As I said: Robert Kehoe.

The fuck did you smoke, did you even read?

We identified common plastics chemicals, including UV-stabilizers and plasticizers, as well as chemicals that are not used as plastics additives, including pesticides, pharmaceuticals and biocides.

I dont understand that, what do you mean?

Ah, essentially, the person said “this claim of 80 chemicals is meaningless, and can only be a scaremongering tactic!”

1. in order for it to be scaremongering, there must be a concerted effort to effect a sense of terror in the reader, and that sense of terror must be unwarranted. There is certainly an effort to terrify, but that is because the story is, objectively, terrifying.
2. they claim that bananas have more than 80 chemicals, and that the idea of counting distinct chemicals is a bad way to represent danger. As they point out, in biological systems, they would be correct, because biological systems have thousands of unique chemicals within them as a matter of course. However, they are trying to equate that banana to this issue, which is NOT a biological system, but an issue of plastic synthesis. In plastics manufacturing, there is no conceivable reason for you to need more than, to be generous, ten individual chemical constituents to form your polymer product. These might be the original polymer, very small amounts of the unbound monomer, a plasticizer or two, a couple dye compounds, and a couple other things which add properties you want, such as UV resistance, hydrophilia/phobia, or physical/chemical resistance. So, by divorcing this number from its context (plastics manufacturing), this person is trying to make it seem like a ridiculous headline, when in fact there is no conceivable reason to need even a quarter of the various impurities present in these bits of plastic. To give a much closer analogy than a fucking banana, imagine if I gave you a chunk of “steel”, and told you that it’s good, because it’s “recycled”, so I made some forks and knives out of it and gave it to you to eat with, but then you found out that it is actually an alloy of iron with a mixture of every other metal, including unsafe amounts of cadmium, mercury and lead. Even if you don’t know what metals exactly are in it, it would be concerning if I just said “hey, this steel in your fork contains 50 different metals!”, right? That’s because that statement alone tells you that something very fishy was going on with the “recycling” process, because the only conceivable reason for there to be 50 different metals in detectable amounts in your steel (which, I remind you, you are eating off of) is if they just melted a bunch of shit together and called it “close enough”.
3. I likened this person’s attitude to Robert Kehoe, who was famously bribed by the leaded gas industry to lie to the world about the natural amount of lead in the environment. By claiming that the “normal” amount of lead was the same as the “natural” amount of lead, he cast scientific doubt over the question of leaded gas for many years. It wasn’t until Clair Patterson proved that the amount of lead in the atmosphere, water and soil had gone up by tens of thousands of times since the pre-industrial steady-state levels that people finally saw Kehoe for what he was: a corrupt hack.

Water is a chemical. The point was using an arbitrary number and an arbitrary descriptor means absolutely fuck all.