Well! Frankly, when we started this series, we didn’t know much about Endocrine disruptors. We thought we’d run you off a quick blog and disappear off down the pub to spiritually prepare for the Easter holidays. But when we opened up our first clicks, the whole thing was absolutely vast. We felt like that Spanish bloke Nuñez de Balboa who crossed a small ridge and suddenly found himself looking at the Pacific Ocean. So- how to summarise it?

An endocrine disruptor is a chemical which can insinuate itself into the human body in such a way that it interferes with your hormone driven functions. The trouble is that these chemicals have become incorporated into an unimaginably vast array of industrial and production processes. Our Chat GPT 4 gave the following cursory over view of the sorts of things we’re talking about and where they might be found:

• Atrazine: A commonly used herbicide in crops like corn, sorghum, and sugarcane.
• Bisphenol A (BPA): Found in plastics, food packaging, and toys.
• Dioxins: Byproducts of manufacturing processes.
• Perchlorate: An industrial chemical used in rockets and explosives.
• Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS): Used in firefighting foam and nonstick coatings.
• Phthalates: Found in food packaging, cosmetics, and fragrances.
• Phytoestrogens: Naturally occurring substances with hormone-like activity found in some plants.

If you really want to delve deeper, this report is about as good as it gets, thought you’ll probably need three weeks solid to take it all in [1]

And our take? The real trouble with things like smoking, burning fossil fuels or putting lead into petrol was that the downsides took so long to emerge. That and the fact that many of the residua of past follies are still lying around. The processes we saw above are so deeply woven into the fabric of our civilisation that its hard to say when any useful substitutions can be made, let alone eliminating them from things like the food chain.

[1]https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2019/608866/IPOL_STU(2019)608866_EN.pdf

#endocrine disruptor #hormone #plastic #pollution #health #ecology