Environmental Question #18 [Plasticizers in Milk]

Courtesy of Reddit user u/AngryBPDGirl

Q: I was checking out plasticlist.org and noticed milk bottled in glass had higher counts of some of the chemicals of milk bottled in plastic (such as the Straus Organic Milk in glass), and I was confused why this was...can you explain like I'm 5 to me?

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A: First of all, thank you for introducing me to this website! I had never heard of it before, but it rocks and I'm very glad to know about it now.

All of the chemicals listed on this website are called "plasticizers." In scientific terms the word "plastic" just means "flexible," so a plasticizer is a chemical that is mixed into various materials to make them more flexible. As an example, water acts as a plasticizer in wood, and I'm sure you're already familiar with that. Dry wood is much less flexible than wet wood.

As I'm sure you're also aware, there are many different kinds of plastic, some hard and stiff, some soft and flexible. The type of plastic that is used for milk jugs is already inherently flexible, so little to no plasticizers are used to make milk jugs since they aren't necessary. Plasticizers are generally used to make tough, durable plastics more flexible, like for example bottle caps and the tubes in milking machines.

That is to say that the chemicals in this list most likely aren't getting into the milk through the bottles, they're probably coming from some other plastic equipment somewhere else in the process. Depending on what a given dairy farm's equipment is made of and how old their equipment is, different amounts of various chemicals will be leached out into the milk.

I want to put in perspective though, that all of the numbers listed for the milk on this website are EXTREMELY LOW. As an example, this website lists the chemical DIDP along with the EU daily exposure limit for it. The EU is generally very good and strict about chemical exposure, so I think this is a good example. The limit listed here is 150,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight per day. I weigh about 80kg and this Straus milk has 66,480ng of chemicals per cup of milk. This means that for me to suffer negative health effects from chemical exposure through drinking this milk I would need to drink 180 cups of milk per day or about 11 gallons per day. I've never done the gallon challenge, but it looks like no fun, and if I were to drink 11 gallons of milk per day I would have a lot more pressing problems than chemical exposure.

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