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December 6, 2007
News Flash! Vinyl toys contain vinyl, and probably phthalates
Some more pseudoscience has emerged from the the Ecology Center, this time not on automobiles but on toys, which are a sure way to get a headline these days.
The Center tested a bunch of toys, including, we presume, a bunch made out of soft vinyl, and has announced darkly that the vinyl toys have vinyl in them! Vinyl, it goes on to say, is bad - a statement directly refuted by the Consumer Product Safety Commission's four year study of vinyl toys which concluded that they presented "no demonstrated health risk" to children. It also assumed that the vinyl toys were made flexible with phthalates, which is probably true, but again, so what? Vinyl toys containing a particular phthalate are precisely what the CPSC studied. So, this report seems to be telling us exactly what we already knew, then drawing conclusions that a real scientific review dismissed. So we ask, where is the news?
Posted by Marian at 4:25 PM | Comments (0)
December 5, 2007
Australia gets it right about water bottles
Perhaps the most common urban myth we see is that plastic water bottles leach plasticizers into the water or soda pop they contain. Wrong. The familiar plastic water bottle - the one made from PET with recycling code #1 on the bottom - contains no plasticizers at all. That would seem a simple message to get across, but thanks to misinformation and disinformation from various sources, it is firmly entrenched in the blogosphere and in the media.
Now the Australian Associated Press has stepped into the communications gap. Based on information from a government agency called Food Standards Australia New Zealand, it moved a story containing the following lines:
"People who re-use a PET bottle to carry drinking water are in no danger from any chemicals leaching from the plastic into the water, as has been claimed in this email. It's an urban myth.
"Rather than worrying about inaccurate claims based on bad science, or on gossip, we would be better advised simply to use good hygiene measures to ensure that we're not letting any bugs grow in the bottle or around the drinking or sealing cap."
Posted by Marian at 7:20 PM | Comments (0)