I am, in a different life, a consumer of compost and I have started looking very carefully at the compost products for sale in the bay area.

On the urban consumer side of things I see compost collection bins which cannot possibly be decontaminated of all manner of plastic pieces which will, inevitably, be ground up into the compost product.

On the rural side of things I see miles of plastic baling twine and weedeater string - and other plastic meshes and grid - used throughout pastures year after year and then collected back up again with loads of hay and manure which also end up in the compost stream.

These truckloads of soil/compost/fill have to be significantly contaminated and the rural end users are pouring them right back on their fields.

Crazy excerpt from the report:

> "On BPA in particular, just 10 years ago, the US EPA and the EU EFSA had the same limit. Then the EFSA lowered their limit several times, resulting in a 250,000x difference in the limits. But the EPA Iris site to this day says that, no, the limit they last revised in 1988 is still correct. This is an important difference if you want to interpret PlasticList results. Remember the Boba Guys tea that contains 1.2 years of safe BPA consumption according to the EFSA? According to the EPA, it’s well under the limit."

How the heck can the limits established by the EPA and EFSA vary up to 250,000x ??? That's several orders of magnitudes...

Really hoping this study blow up so more research gets funded. The testing is supposedly cheap and there's definitely enough public interest at this point.

It's hilarious how McDonalds ends up being the safest premade meals you can get (outside a big tech company cafeteria) at least from a scary plastic chemical standpoint. They actually have the resources and a big enough PR problem to spend the money to send their stuff to labs and get it tested. Everyone else solves the PR problem by just labeling their food organic and healthy instead. https://justine.lol/tmp/healthy.jpg This is all of course assuming no one discovers anything horrible about DEHT in the future, which is the new chemical they're leaning into. I get maybe 10% as many Google Scholar hits on DEHT compared to its terrifying well-studied cousin DEHP.

Looking forward to more testing like this. I've been trying to consciously avoid anything combining "hot" with "plastic" though there's only so much you can do.

Fish are aggregators of this stuff so that's not surprising. Spam and other processed meats and prepared foods also not too surprising (though what's with the Annie's organic mac and cheese being so full of it? Maybe it's the sauce?)... I think the tap water was the scariest one to me. Sure, you expect some but ... wildly unsafe levels?!

It's interesting that everyone is talking about boba tea instead of things they regularly consume like milk and beef, also featured in dedication sections of TFA.

Either because they didn't scroll past the first chart or it's more convenient to focus on a food item they don't eat daily.

Edit: I was randomly on NewRepublic's website and saw this relevant article about how farmers using 'biosolids' (sewage) on their land multiplied the PFAS in their livestock/dairy/water: https://newrepublic.com/article/187106/pfas-milk-maine-texas... ("One State’s War on Forever Chemicals in Milk")

Great read and amazing initiative. Relevance of findings seems to 90% depend on whether you believe the EFSA BPA intake thresholds over the FDA. Love how transparent they’re about it instead of doing what most do. The world needs more of this.

This research by these non academic background folks is simply astounding and exceptional. How did they get the funding to run $500k of independent lab testing? Can we donate to the cause?

This stuff is on my mind all the time eating out or from plastic-impregnated cardboard food packaging lining, etc. I’m worried about reproductive impact on future generations and overall personal health, etc.

The boba tea result alone makes me want to never drink that again. Was a fun little treat while it lasted…

I wish similar testing were available in Australia, I'd pay for a subscription to have access to high-quality independent testing of the common foods that are available in the shops.

I wonder if enough people care for this to be a viable business model.

Paint is a huge source of microplastics that many are unaware of [1].

But also consider how you are wearing clothing made with plastic and the fact that it’s not hard to find 100% cotton shirts. Start figuring out how to have less plastic in your life. It’s not hard if you can be content to do it gradually.

[1] https://www.e-a.earth/plastic-paints-the-environment/

I wish they would have been more concentrated with their approach versus this spray and pray route (ie test chick-fil-a from different parts of the country and done it 1000 times so customers could actually impact a change to the biggest offenders). Would happily pay to crowdsource a much bigger project here.

The Boba Guys result is a real kick in the nuts. Using a shitty paperish straw for the environment but the core product being so high in these tests.

> At least one of the 18 chemicals was found in every baby food, prenatal supplement, human breast milk, yogurt, and ice cream product that we tested, to name only a few categories.

Wow

My wife is a doctor dealing with (part of) the endocrine system and for years she has had us avoiding heating anything up in a plastic container and avoiding food/liquids+plastic where we can. She believes that these endocrine disruptors are very likely much worse for us than we currently realize, and that the research is eventually going to show that.

> Additionally, acid in foods may break down the phthalate diesters we measured into monoesters, which our testing didn't detect. This means actual phthalate levels could be higher than reported.

Just curious, is it possible for the acid to break them down completely? Like, poof, no more harmful plastic monoester, it's now just plastic-adjacent goop?

It's such a sad realization when you notice that most of the cost decreases for common products have happened through plasticizing everything.

It's basically impossible to find cheap natural products for cleaning consumables, for example, and it's really hard to find trustworthy global brands.

Plastic is entering absolutely every aspect of our lives and I really fear it's a "lead in gasoline" and "asbestos" moment for our generation :-( and it's going to be much harder to undo that either of those.

The sugar content of boba tea is much more relevant than trace levels of BPA. You will have disastrous health effects from sugar, versus potential effects from BPA.

This is so informative, thank you. I always got my kids baby food in glass, thinking it would reduce their microplastics exposure as well as reducing plastic waste. Turns out only one of those was true :(

Great work, very interesting list!

Ideally the "% Limit" column would: 1. Be right-aligned 2. Have consistent formatting (i.e. same number of digits after the dot) 3. A little bar underneath each number showing relative scale (i.e. top entry is full width, last entry is 216.7 / 32571.4 = 0.00665307601, though maybe on a log scale for confusion? ;)

Being lazy here, but would love to know more about how testing for all of these plastics chemicals that are omnipresent is done in a way that ensures the measurement process or tools themselves do not contribute trace chemicals (e.g. lab tech wears latex gloves while handling the sample, whoops, etc).

So, how about a startup for baby food / prenatals that shows transparent, third party testing for plastic compounds and heavy metals? I'm serious, would love to do this.

Am I interpreting this correctly that Brita actually works as a limiter for plasticizers in tap water? Specially since tap water plasticizer content can vary by a lot?

Did they test Wheat. I'm convinced something is up with the Wheat here. I've not seen Europeans gain anywhere near as much weight from eating bread as people do here. From my experience visiting Paris, croissants, butter and pastries pretty common on the menu. But still people are still pretty skinny in comparison. And like Pasta in Italy is a staple. Yet still, lower BMI there.

Don't miss the DIY...

https://www.plasticlist.org/diy

Are there prospective studies on effects? Afaik it's just in vitro, and I wonder if our bodies have a natural mitigation mechanism that would allow up to a certain amount without harm. I'm just afraid of what I see as a trend to attribute small factors to big things that are caused by societal problems, etc.

Well fuck.

How can I test for effects from endocrine-disrupting chemicals on my children? Are there blood tests that check for this?

Of course my favorite blueberry RXBAR is full of bad things.

So basically the headline is that Europe and US have a very different limit for BPA, most US food is also under the European limit, but there are a handful of items that are only under the US limit but not under the much lower European limit?

I guess at some point will know how dangerous to people it is, and how risky it is compared to things that we really know are really bad, but that we are still eating. (for one reason or another).

If it turns out that it is a serious health threat, then pretty much anyone alive today is f*ked. and given the build up of it, will be for quite a while.

But we also have climate change, AI apocalypse, global thermonuclear war, mcDonalds, and all other things at the same time.

And we wont know if whatever it is replaced with, if will be replaced will turn out any better for humanity in the long term.

I've been using a reverse osmosis water filter at home to reduce microplastics and other contaminants from my drinking and cooking water for the past few years. I am using the #1 recommended product on Buyer's Guide[1] for others who are interested.

[1] https://buyersguide.org/countertop-reverse-osmosis-system/t/...

> The lab was able to test 705 samples which came from 296 different food products

Ok

> Here's a complete list of all the presently-available food samples (excluding vintage foods) we tested that exceeded a published daily intake limit for any of the chemicals we tested:

41 samples in table

> That said, with the 24 exceptions above,

What, what? There are 41 exceptions in that table, and still more than 24 even if you deduplicate.

One thing I'd like to see tested: I have a theory that reusable plastic containers leach out most of their chemicals early in their life, so the amount imparted to any food diminishes with each use. Under this theory, I save and reuse old plastic containers for a long time, and avoid new ones (especially single use). Could this be true, or misguided?

Absolutely amazing work. I wonder what kind of funding / model could make something like this sustainable. Presumably, as manufacturing processes change, everything on this list has to be re-tested again? The current website has no way of crowd sourcing + verifying data, but that would maybe be a nice addition

basically you should avoid all wild caught sea food. has roughly 50x such contaminants vs land based animal protein

32,571.4% ? 320X the limit?

Why do we continue down that path, are we that stupid collectively? We know the fertility of men is falling year after year, we know this, yet things go on as if it's not important.

We could calmly debate the amount on the limit, but at this point we know the job we have to do.

Well if <10nm pieces of plastic are swirling around Mount Everest in the "Death Zone", you bet that they are swirling around on your food down here where we have had an abandoned mercury mine leeching into the South Bay for almost 2 centuries, an island next to SF that in the Cold War they Navy would paint ships with radioactive paint to see if they could spray it off with the run-off going into the bay and parts of West Oakland still you can get lead poisoning just being outside in 80 years after the shipyards closed at the end of the war.

I love the Bay Area, native to the East Bay and no matter how hard I try to escape, I always find myself crawling right back to San Francisco's sweet embrace, but in case it isn't clear to the people just arriving and driving the cost up higher than London, Paris or Berlin, its never been anything less than an excellent example of the horrible things people will do to each other and the planet to satisfy their impulse for either money or power. Superfund sites abound in the six counties around the bay, plastic in your food is probably the least of your actual worries.

> Mattie came from far away, from New Orleans into the East Bay. He said, 'this is a Mecca!' I said, 'This ain't no Mecca, man. This place is fucked!' Six months go by, he has no home, he has no food, he's all alone. Mattie said, 'fool me once, shame on you.' Didn't fool him twice, he moved back to New Orleans!

- "A Journey to the End of the East Bay", Rancid

I don't see much that I recognize as "food" in the report, and in the database I see that actual foods — eggs, bananas, suchlike — are no-detect across the board. Conclusion: eat food, instead of whatever these things are.

For reference the guy funding this is the same person this letter was sent to: https://github.com/drop-ice/dear-github-2.0

I wonder if the Starbucks and blue bottle coffee results are due to the plastic in the throwaway cups. The Nestle instant coffee (which comes in a glass jar) had much lower scores in comparison.

Really interesting how microwaving food containers didn't do anything, in fact results usually were lower before microwaving than after.

(search "microwave)

I owe this entire team a beer - but I don’t see Russian River or Lagunitas on the list. Anyway, let me know and I can meet you at Toronado.

Yet more evidence that the Age Depopulation Bomb’s main root causes is plastic endocrine disruptors

Welp not drinking boba again

This should be run globally. Or as globally as it could be run.

so do we yet have baby food companies that have no plastics? I would buy those asap.

If you want one takeaway, it's: rethink your boba consumption.

so these are the ones in my balls (•ˋ _ ˊ•)

Oh god, the almond milk. I guess that’s that habit kicked.

Can someone explain why this is the case:

The salmon in the first table shows BPA levels at 500-1000% the safe level, with salmon near the top of the range of all tested products, but in the separate "Results" page, if I search for "salmon", the same products show up but the BPA levels are only around the 20th percentile of tested samples.