An Inconceivable Truth

You don't want to be paranoid. You certainly don't want your spouse, or family to think you are crazy, or any crazier than you already are. But then you are, rifling through the bathroom, reading the backs of the face creams and shampoos, wondering about the long list of ingredients.
And once you start looking, well, it is easy to see your life has been invaded by chemicals. You try to ignore that facts, for instance that your hair gel, or the air freshener in your washroom is a suspect. You may try to ignore the scores of chemicals that we breathe and ingest and absorb, that stay with us, in some cases even after industry-wide regulations phase them out. The fact is, no matter how much you try not to, you begin to feel paranoid.

It dawns on you, and you see more and more that the future of our species depends not just on our buying organic strawberries or carrying a canvas bag to the farmer's market. You now see that the fertility of human person hinges on the changes we must make to our immediate environment.
Fertility, while it is still a private matter, is becoming more and more a concern of public health. And of course the chief suspect in decline in fertility are chemicals that are practically the fabric of our everyday lives. This might have begun with what we dumped into our environment over the past 50 years- the synthetic compounds that now lace our water and landfills. Since World War II, an estimated 80,000 chemicals have been introduced, in plastics, in lawn-care products, in the products that we put on our skin and our hair. And now the evidence that these chemicals are affecting our fertility is building- even certain in a lot of cases.

Who wants to panic?
You are never going to gt rid of every exposure. Especially when we know that in the chemical industry, compounds are considered safe until proven dangerous, and only when determined dangerous are they banned. Kinda like the lead pain we used for oh so many years, and only after some 20 years have we finally learned the truth - lead is extremely toxic to living organisms.

Sure you don't want to be living in panic, just remember every time you pick up that bottled water- or pop - or juice- consider your self forewarned- BPA which is widely used in plastics- migrates from plastic water bottle into the water. BPA masquerades as a healthy hormone while causing havoc in your body. BPA has been shown in animal studies to cause prostate cancer and malformed genitals, and to harm mammary-gland development in females at puberty. Low-level exposures have been linked to breast cancers, and a recent study in Japan traced the chemical to an increased risk of miscarriage.

What can I say? Plastic is no longer fantastic.

Paper or Plastic?

I know it is hard to imagine, but the US produces some 12 billion tons of waste each year. Of the amount, about 200 million tons consists of everyday, ordinary trash- the kind of garbage each of us throws out with no thought!
Start considering those numbers, however, and you'll never hear those seemingly bland words "paper or plastic?" in the same way again.
Food packaging- 20% of which is made of plastic- is a $105 billion industry in the US, and growing. And just because you put packaging in the recycling bin or take it to a recycling center doesn't guarantee that it will be recycled. Recycled materials must compete with non-recycled ones, and when the cost of using the former exceeds the latter, many items you think you're recycling actually end up in landfills anyways. Especially plastics.
Unfortunately, even paper has an environmental downside. To make paper bags, cardboard boxes and to-go cups, we clear-cut forests, grind the wood into chips, then pulp and bleach them with chlorine-based compounds, which generate carcinogenic by-products of their own.
The realization that even such a common, everyday option as "paper or plastic" really isn't as simple a decision as it first seems may be the beginning of wisdom.
So the proper answer to that paper vs. plastic question really is 'neither". When you head out to the market, take along your own cloth shopping bag, or start a collection of bags that can be reused rather than ones that turn into instant trash.