April 22nd marks the 48th year of Earth Day! Earth Day began in 1970, as a reaction to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring publication. Carson’s book exposed the hazards of pollution on health and the environment and catapulted the environmental movement.
This year’s campaign focuses on the reduction of plastic waste in our ecosystem. Though ubiquitous in our society, plastic is made from fossil fuels, which are non-degradable, as well as hazardous!
“Components used in plastics, such as bisphenol A (BPA), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), tetrabromobisphenol A (TBBPA) and phthalates, are released from plastic products, and are also known as endocrine-disrupting compounds (EDCs) owing to their ability to modulate the endocrine system. The detection of EDCs in the environment, biota and humans is of concern due to their potential to interfere with the physiology of living organisms (see Oehlmann et al. 2009).”1
Check out these tips to help clean-up our environment:
1 Talsness, C. E., Andrade, A. J. M., Kuriyama, S. N., Taylor, J. A., & vom Saal, F. S. (2009). Components of plastic: experimental studies in animals and relevance for human health. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1526), 2079–2096. http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0281