Sanitary pads and tampons may contain hundreds of toxic chemicals. These chemicals are pesticides and other substances that disrupt the body’s hormones and reproductive system, that irritate the skin, trigger allergies, and cause cancer. It’s important to know that the female body distributes fat in its own way, and that harmful substances particularly accumulate in this body fat. At the same time, women are often more likely to change the way they think and are happier taking on social responsibility. It’s also worth knowing that switching to reusable products can save you up to 94% of the money you spend on disposable items and seriously help to cut down on waste.
BPA is one of the world’s best-selling chemicals. In contact with food, BPA can migrate from plastic items. It is a harmful substance that can interfere with the body’s hormone balance, even in tiny quantities. Some countries have banned its use in a few products. There are products that are advertised as BPA-free, but the labels on these products do not tell us which other chemicals may have been used instead of BPA, or whether they are actually just as harmful.
Banning dangerous chemicals but then replacing them with other substances that may be just as dangerous does not, of course, amount to a solution. Entire groups of substances need to be banned or restricted, not just some chemicals within a group.
Plastic contains over 4,000 different chemicals, many of which are unknown even to their manufacturers. Others are added as part of top-secret recipes. If there is evidence of a risk, for example based on laboratory tests, the affected chemicals are then checked. Studies are required, which may then lead to the use of these chemicals being restricted or even banned. Different countries often come to different decisions, but sometimes they do also consult and work together.
Evaporation Small particles dissolve in the air to become gaseous. Indoors, chemical particles escape from carpets and plastic items and enter the human body when inhaled.
Migration Small particles dissolve in liquids. When humans drink from a bottle or other plastic objects, small amounts of unwanted chemical particles enter the body.
Attraction In the ocean, plastic particles attract harmful chemicals like magnets.
Very light, colorful, and durable, plastic can look great.
The long polymer chains are responsible for some of these properties. To make plastic, you take a substance such as ethylene. When you buy it, it is at most 80% to 90% pure and already contains impurities and undesirable by-products, i.e., unknown chemicals – the NIAS. More chemicals are then added to achieve the desired material properties. Additives are what we call these wide-ranging substances that are intentionally added to the plastic, embed easily, and dissolve out again just as easily.
Exposure to sunlight, for example, makes the material fragile and brittle. To protect it, you add sunscreen agents. These are free radicals that capture the energy in UV rays by bonding them to form a new substance. It works in a similar way to cat litter poured on oil stains: It perfectly absorbs the oil and bonds to form a soft mass.
A bright plastic source material can be dyed to produce colorful bottles, building bricks, figurines, and much more by adding colorants or pigments. Colorings can be anything from bright to dark, and all the way to black. Some pigments are toxic, others harmless.
Toxic means poisonous. Even in small quantities, these substances, if ingested over a long period of time, can cause serious diseases such as cancer or disorders of the immune system, and may ultimately be fatal. You’ll have seen warnings about additives on trucks that carry them: harmful to the environment, harmful to health, carcinogenic, lethal. There are threshold values for added substances in plastics that must not be exceeded. With various studies highlighting the harmful effects of many of these additives, it has become clear in recent years that they need to be lowered even further. Increasing numbers of research projects are looking into how additives accumulate in the environment through plastic waste and become sources of pollution. Some of them are persistent, which means they remain in the environment for a very long time.
The polymers are uncross-linked and held together by intermolecular forces. When exposed to heat, the chains weaken and the plastic can be molded. Thermoplastics can repeatedly be molded into new shapes. When force is applied, the material changes until it breaks.
Polyethylene is made up of ethylene monomers and is a thermoplastic. In places, the molecules cross-link several times to form more stable structures known as crystalline thermoplastics.
Polystyrene is also sometimes known as Styrofoam. It features a benzene ring, consisting of carbonatoms connected in a ring shape. The material is foamed into white beads during production, making it a lightweight plastic. That’s why it’s very commonly used in packaging.
Thermosets
Molecules are arranged in three dimensions, close-meshed, and firmly bonded together with many cross-links. They cannot be melted and remolded by applying heat. Even when subjected to force, they only deform slightly.
Bakelite was the first entirely synthetic plastic. It is dark, hard, and still used today for insulation.
Elastomers
Wide-meshed cross-linked molecules that can be shaped or stretched, sometimes considerably, by applying force, but return to their original configuration when the force is removed. We’ve seen this ourselves in rubber bands and bicycle tires.
*This figure accounts for around 20,000 different types of plastic, as well as additives. The numbers are recycling codes, which are frequently found on plastic packaging labels.
PS Polystyrene (hard, brittle, often foamed)
PUR Polyurethane (transparent or colored, often foamed)
PETPolyethylene terephthalate (transparent or colored and translucent)
PP&A Various textile fibers that do not have separate recycling codes – known as polyester, polyamide, polyacrylic
PVC Polyvinyl chloride (durable, hard, or rubbery)
The Greek word ‘plastikos’, from which we have the English word ‘plastic’, means ‘capable of being shaped or molded’. Plastic is made from two chemical elements formed into a very long chain. One of them is carbon, the basis of all life, which also occurs in natural gas and oil. We also know it as part of the gas called carbon dioxide, which is damaging the climate. Carbon is also found in coal, in graphite, and even in diamonds. In plastic, carbons bonds with hydrogen, the most common element in the entire universe.
Carbon and hydrogen form ethylene, which is a monomer. In Greek, ‘mono’ means ‚one’, and ‘méros’ means ‘part’, so together they mean ‘one part’. Using an enormous amount of energy, the carbon double bonds are opened and the monomers join together up to 10,000 times in a chain reaction to form a very long molecular chain, a polymer. This is called polymerization – ‘poly’ meaning ‘many’.
Plastic is made up of polymers and other substances called additives. Additives are embedded in plastics and dissolve out again easily. They are mobile. Some are intentionally added to the polymer to make the material more durable. All plastic unintentionally contains many other chemical substances that are either present in the source material or become embedded during the aggressive chemical process of polymerization. They are known as non-intentionally added substances, or NIAS for short.
