Daily Defies

Designers!, often referred as sensitive species, are we sensitive to the issues around. We have numerous chemicals, heavy metals and materials around us. We are still brewing new sets of synthetic creations from our laboratories with no counterparts in nature. Where are we leading towards?

With so much green washing around, now that most us care for the environment. We try and buy things made of recyclable/recycled materials, but these things which add up to your sensitivity quotient to environment might not be designed with further use in mind, I mean recycling these products towards their end of life.Recycling and reshaping them would have cost us more energy and additives than it’s entire life cycle. It might release more harmful byproducts than it’s previous life cycle.

Forget the recycled products. Let us deal with certain aspects from our daily life.

Soaps and detergents, this one is the best example of man’s passion for simplifying things, Universal design. Single soap for the entire country, even though water qualities and needs differ from place to place. Imagine the strength of a detergent to strip off hard stains, to work efficiently in hard or saline or soft water, classic case of “designed for the worst case scenario”. What would happen when they are treated as sewage effluents, when they come in contact with aquatic lives in the rivers nearby?

Then our beloved PET bottles, the source of water for many of us in recent times is capable enough to leach out antimony into the contents stored in them. Are we aware of this, do we have a positive alternative to this?

Take out your wallet and see, how many plastic cards we carry around, we use at least one of them everyday, and we wear around some of them all day (ID cards). Does any of them have it’s material mentioned with, so sad, there are 90% chances that they were made of PVC.

And definitely your leather wallet, there are chances that they were tanned using hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen.

The computer which I use, made of brominated flame retardant chemicals, have heavy metals like cadmium, mercury and lead.Those compact discs made of Polycarbonate has bisphenol-A, which can mimic body hormones.

And the dust particle from the 3 in 1 printer/photocopier/scanner has nickel and cobalt. Imagine the kind of indoor air quality that will persist in this environment.No wonder 90% of world’s population has developed some kind of allergic sensation.

More over, we always go wrong when it comes to the debate of “Plastic or Paper”.

And our food and cooking; we might be ingesting genetically modified food products unintentionally and fluropolymers from our non-stick cook wares every day.

I need another hundred pages to explain why these things that I mentioned are not completely safe. I will try and address them in the forthcoming articles. And frankly! I am not trying to scare people away; many of these things have effective and positive alternatives too, but who cares?

Teflon Tale

Smart Teflon non-stick cook wares, what is that about them?
They help us to cook fast, saves energy and makes the whole process hassle free. Apart from this proverbial applications Teflon products are also used in apparels, automotive fabrics, exterior coatings, home furnishings, upholstery, sealants, cables and in semiconductor manufacturing.

Our fellow non-stick cook wares are usually coated with PTFE (Polytetrafluroethyelene) fluropolymer and sometimes with other fluropolymers over metal surface. We might be ingesting these fluropolymers along with the food we cook on them. Do we have PTFE on our daily menu?

PTFE has a melting point above 300 degrees and it will start to fume out above 250 degrees, usually we don’t cook at these temperatures knowingly, but broiling and use of fat/oil, frying meat etc can very well happen at these temperatures. Even though the raw material manufacturer doesn’t recommend these practices, how many of us are aware of this; when we can get a plenty of non-stick frying pans in this country. These degraded fumes are lethal to birds (claims the Teflon manufacturer) and can lead to flu-like symptoms in humans.

Well, then we have this PFOA (Perflurooctanic acid), also known as C8 used to make PTFE which is a likely carcinogen. Till date, PFOA don’t have any practical alternative. It can accumulate in human blood, has a very long half life in humans and does not break down in the environment. PFOA is used only during manufacture of PTFE and a traceable amount of it remains in the finished product, how bad is that traceable amount is a question mark.

In 2004, a renowned company in US settled 300 million dollars in a law suit filed by the residents living around its chemical plant producing PTFE, for contaminating the drinking water in that locality. Access to literatures, analysis reports on PTFE and PFOA are very limited. These chemicals are still undergoing rigorous safety reviews across various countries and organizations.

And to conclude, we still don’t know how bad PTFE and PFOA are.

PVC! - a known culprit

Vinyl chloride, a class I carcinogen is the monomer used to produce PVC. Humans have high probability of acquiring cancer due to vinyl chloride exposure. As a matter of fact 13% of death in this world happens because of cancer.

PVC is not bio-degradable like many other polymers. It is cost prohibitive to recycle PVC in a safe way, because of the number and types of additives used in its production. Less than 1% of PVC is recycled across the world. Its contents can leech out in to the environment at any point of their life cycle.

Phthalates are used as plasticizers to soften PVC, their content usually range from 1 to 40% in proportion with other additives. It can be found in soft toys, medical equipments like tubes & blood bags, cosmetics, surface coatings etc. Phthalates can leech out during use, causes liver and kidney damage and reproductive system damages.

PCB (Polychlorobiphenyl) is added as a stabilizing additive in flexible PVC. Dioxins and PCBs are produced as by-products when PVC is produced or burned. Production of PCB is completely banned in many countries since 1970 because of its adverse health effects. Dioxins can persist in the environment and can travel long distances.

Phthalates, PCB and Dioxins are identified as potential endocrine disrupters and carcinogens.
PVC is declared as ‘contaminant’ even before 10 years in many countries. Still many Indian majors are strategizing their timelines to phase out hazardous substances.

PVC is a commonly used insulation on electrical wires, used abundantly in construction applications, medical applications, automobile interiors, many forms of cards (smart cards, credit cards etc), and in clothing and footwear to name a few.