Environmental Question #17 [Silicone]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/oklevel3

Q: Could you talk about silicone ? It's presented as harmless but I've also heard that it's not.

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A: Absolutely, this is a great question! That is because there are many different kinds of silicone, where some are harmless and others aren't. Silicone is a type of polymer, which means that it is made up of thousands of smaller molecules all chained together. Polymers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes depending on how many links are in the chain and how those links connect, but for simplicity here let's focus on just size.

In some ways, the cells in our bodies are like teething toddlers. You wouldn't let a toddler play with Monopoly pieces, because the toddler would try to eat the pieces and choke. However, I'm sure you wouldn't hesitate to let a toddler play with a dollhouse, because a whole dollhouse couldn't possibly fit in their mouth. Small silicone polymers can be absorbed into cells and cause harm. Of course the type of harm is different from choking, but for the purposes of our analogy I'm sure you understand. Large silicone polymers are too big for our cells to absorb (i.e. fit in their "mouths"), so they pass by harmlessly.

One place where this can get more complicated though is in cheaply made silicone products. If a manufacturer isn't careful, they can end up with some small polymer silicone mixed into their large polymer silicone, resulting in the customer getting exposed to potentially hazardous small polymer silicone by accident. This is what manufacturers mean when they refer to "medical grade silicone." Medical grade silicone has been carefully inspected to make sure there is no small molecule silicone present that could harm the consumer. Food grade silicone works by the same principle, although it is held to a slightly less rigorous standard than medical grade, because surgical products need to be more carefully controlled for safety than food products.

When manufactured correctly, silicone is an amazing material. In most cases, it interacts so little with human cells that the body doesn't even notice that the silicone is there. This makes it a great tool for medical implants, because there is not much risk of the body rejecting the implant. Silicone is still a plastic and it gets a bad reputation because it is commonly used in plastic surgery, but it is also used for heart and eye implants that save lives. Just like many of humanity's creations, silicone is just a tool that can be used for good or for ill.

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