Nate Seltenrich 0:00 Right, as I said, in my email, looking at, essentially, kind of; how the frame of the story is looking at how disposable food packaging use is changing during COVID, namely, going up, you know, just due to increase in takeout delivery and the like. So using that as a, you know, an opportunity, we are trying to look at evaluating some of the newer, more innovative alternatives to existing, or conventional paper and plastic. And so, you know, included in that would be bioplastics. So, maybe thought I would just get your take on some of those where they stand today, and then I'm also curious, generally, where you see disposable food use, or food packaging headed, from a chemical perspective. What are some of the remaining big risks, perhaps, and how are they perhaps, being addressed or solved? So, that's generally what I wanted to talk about if that all sounds okay. Any questions about? Terry Collins 1:29 No, have you spoken to the food packaging forum in Zurich? Nate Seltenrich 1:34 Yes, yes, indeed. Terry Collins 1:36 Did they put you in contact with me? I can't remember. Nate Seltenrich 1:41 No, I actually had you. Well... Terry Collins 1:45 Maybe I told you to speak to them, then. Nate Seltenrich 1:49 Well, yeah, you suggested that. But yeah, I've been in touch with them quite a bit over the years with Jane and Birgit. I've spoken with them for this article, and yeah, I seen your name; and a few different websites as an advisor and I know that we spoke once for a past food packaging story of mine so I just thought I'd reach out. But yeah, food packaging for him has been helpful as well. So yeah, I mean, maybe we can start with bioplastics. One of the things I've been looking at there is how different sorts of polymers lend themselves to requiring different additives. So even with the bio-based polymers, what sort of additives are often necessary? Or what are some of the chemical concerns that remain even when we've changed the sourcing of the plastic? And how can that be improved? Potentially, from a safety perspective? Is that something that you are working on? Terry Collins 2:54 Well, I don't work directly on it. But of course, I work in a scholarly fashion. Yes, come to my class and understand problems. So we're not in good shape with food contact materials at all. There are about 100,000 things that can be allowed into food contact materials, and if you were to capture the big problem, it's a data gap. We don't know enough about the safety, or lack thereof, of the vast majority of these chemicals. So it's very hard for anyone to give you; so the next thing principle wise is that you really can never prove anything as safe. You can only establish, showcase that it's not toxic. But that doesn't mean some sneaky [logos?] toxicity isn't hiding out, that will show up, you know, ten years from now. The fact that we've zeroed in on endocrine disruption which is the best understood, perhaps as the most prevalent, although not sure of that, but certainly the best understood. Low dose toxicity is a very, very good thing because we've had 20 years of people working behind the scenes, largely in another dimension from the system because the system won't support things that point to getting rid of a whole lot of chemicals that are in use. But what we've done is we've mapped out how to test for endocrine disruption. And many of these tests, when you do them, they'll catch any kind of low dose toxicity. They're mechanism agnostic, and so the push of the Environmental Health Science experts with a couple of green chemists on board and by the way, I don't use the term green chemistry even anymore even though it's in my title, certainly because it's almost gone the way of saying that's down science. Green Chemistry has largely been cheapened and infiltrated by industry and so I use the term sustainable, or what the Europeans are doing; safe and sustainable is perfectly good as well, to hit the human health issues twice. So coming back, we really, as with everything, chemical, we're not in good shape. We've had the chemical enterprise and the trade associations like the ACC, resisting, testing, appropriate testing, insisting on a three, four hundred year old roll, the dose makes the poison, which is true for some compounds, but it's not true for anything that's hormone like. The hormone system doesn't work that way. And you add, you know, you get a non-monotonic dose response curve. And you get exclusively low concentrations, because that's where the hormones work, at exquisitely low concentrations, basically telling cells what to become. And chemicals, as we know, a large number of them can invade that command and signaling system to produce adverse effects. So the real problem with chemicals today across the board, is that we've not figured out how to deal with low dose adverse effects. The second problem is a political one. We have figured out actually how to measure; I should take that back, but getting the understanding out of the scientific community and into government and regulatory, etc, has been a real problem. We've had enormous breakthroughs in October this year, when the European Union announcements, chemical strategy going forward. And the chemical strategy, by and large, is all about was all about, but they mentioned endocrine disruption all the time; they've got it, that you have to deal with endocrine disruption. And so to have a major jurisdiction, understanding that this is really a serious issue, and it really has to be dealt with, is a really big deal. So the United States is still basically in the dark ages, because of corporate power, I believe. But it has to change because of the things that are going on. We know from animal studies and permit illogical studies and from God knows what, that, God knows what being a lot of other things, that you know, everyday everywhere chemicals, including some that are in food contact materials, are able to redirect development and in by interacting probably with the hormone system. And or actually, we do know in many cases they interact with the hormone system to produce these adverse effects. So our situation's not good. We have health effects across the board. But the most prominent in terms of being authoritatively characterized as dropping sperm counts, you know about this? Nate Seltenrich 8:39 A specific chemical you're referring to or? Terry Collins 8:41 No no, dropping sperm counts. Nate Seltenrich 8:43 Yeah, yeah, I've definitely heard those reports. Terry Collins 8:47 Okay, so if you don't know about it, and you want to, it's definitely very important background information for anything on food contact materials, you can get it online. Just look for sperm count zero, in gentleman's quarterly magazine, which is a really excellent article on the study and on the impacts of the study on the scientific community. It won't go as far as to commit to chemicals as being the obvious source or about, you know, when you when you are peeing out chemicals that produce these sort of effects on fish, rodents, amphibians, and mammals, smaller mammals, and they, and they're in human urine at the concentrations that they sometimes cause the damage. And they're even in fetal blood because we know that for example, with BPA and derivatives as well as other things, but certainly, with BPA and derivatives, they're even in fetal blood. Then, you know, you haven't proven the case but by the time you'll prove the case, it's all over with. The projection of the sperm count reduction line collected from Western man's statistics, from 1973 to 2011, and the slope is a steady, almost linear decrease. It basically has, according to my projection of the line; the vast majority of young males will be sterile by 2040, or at least they won't be able to father a child the old fashioned way. And the only reason for raising this, because it's kind of an uncomfortable topic area, usually; but the only reason for raising is we've got good data, the very best data and and a huge amount of it. So this is again the context. Now, you then go and say, okay, will food contact materials contribute to the exposure of the population to chemicals that produce low dose adverse effects? And the answer is absolutely, yes. And you then look, and you add the plastics, and sometimes paper, well, paper in plastic, shall we say? And it is true that some things are worse than others. But you have this argument that surely bioplastic is better from a health point of view than a plastic that's produced from oil? And the answer is, that's not the case at all. So polylactic acid, the biggest of these bioplastics, it turns out, that if you take extracts of a series of plastics, including PLA, the worst, and then take those alcoholic drinks they are and expose them to cells that light up when there is an endocrine disruption effect; the worst plastic is PLA. And the reason is that PLA is a very brittle plastic, and so to get nice, flexible stuff for putting around food or anything like else, for that matter, you have to put a lot of additives there. So when you deal with plastics, the low dose adverse effect chemicals can come from two sources, either they're part of the basic polymer. Or they're the additives. Most of the times, they're the additives, but with certain plastics, like polycarbonate, the hard plastics, probably, there are almost certainly food applications where people are using polycarbonate. But they're also steering away, I think. But what happens is that polycarbonate reacts with water very slowly, but it reacts with water to release BPA, because it's basically more than 90% BPA or 90-ish percent BPA that's sort of handcuffed together by a group that when you put it on water slowly breaks down and re-releases the BPA. So you can't really safely use BPA products really in any way, shape or form. So not only have you got the problem of BPA being and polycarbonate and by the way, we are manufacturing on order 10 million tonnes a year. And it goes into an extraordinary range of products. And the net result of that is that landfill leachate has stunning concentrations of BPA and those stunning concentrations make the water extraordinarily estrogenic which is really bad news for whoever or whatever receives that water. BPA is also added as a stabilizer to other plastics that because it's dirt cheap, and it picks up radicals that directs their chemistry away; basically free electrons that are knocked off by light that create radicals that quenches those radicals in ways that produce less, much less reactive ones and that extends the lifetime of the product. But what that means is you got free BPA hanging around. See people won't tell you what's in their formulation, you realize that you get a piece of plastic you haven't got a clue what it is other than maybe it's polycarbonate, polypropylene, polyethylene, of various kinds, etc. But they won't tell you what. They claim trade secrets when you're asked to know what the hell else is in there. And so many of the compounds, I used to think polyethylene and polypropylene was probably pretty good, but it turns out that they have been drinking disruption, stabilizers of various kinds that they put in there and so those leak out into food. That's definitely the case. So where are we? Well, the change that's needed is that, you know, we've got this enormous plastic industry that's intent on expanding itself. It's not allowed any of the regulatory agencies to do the appropriate testing of its products, because, you know, we've got the BPA and the FDA hanging around but the dose makes the poison, as the logic of all of their testing, rather than going to the sort of protocols that we developed. So you could figure out if you had an endocrine disrupter or something like it. So we're not in good shape. And the bottom line that I have come to think, no matter what the product, is you have to; you have to test. So I can't say this plastic is better than that plastic, because I don't know what the heck's in the additives. And so the only way I can give an opinion like that is if you get the plastic and go and do extract testing, and also other kinds of testing to figure out if it is safe. So test, test, test is about all we can do. And I think pretty much the scenery out there in food contact material land is very bleak. Okay, so now having said that, the question is, what can you do about it? And if plastics are going to be in close contact with food, I think automatically, that's a red flag. Of course, that's what everything is, you know, we're wrapping everything in plastic, in intimate contact with food that we're going to eat. Well, not everything, but an awful lot of stuff. And so, the changes required are really quite astronomical. And to get away from the things that we have to do is to get away from the chemicals that are endocrine disruptors, or have low dose adverse effects, or even being in food contact materials. And once we've done that, there would be additional wisdom to figuring out how to have them in intimate contact with the food. Another way might be that you just don't wrap stuff in the way that we do, you know, maybe people take along a box, or it could could be a plastic box, something like polyethylene, terephthalate or pete, where you have an aluminum lining inside. So it's not a good thermal insulator, so if you put cold stuff in it, the stuff will stay cold. So maybe, maybe that's where we need to go; that you just go along the way we used to and buy a piece of meat and shove the meat in your in your box, maybe the box has got compartments and you go home and you know, lift it out and put it into glassware, glasses are just great for food contact materials that was just totally fabulous. Glasses are heavy so you can't be shipping around all the place. So maybe we'll go to a totally different way of doing business. We need to address these questions because we are going sterile and at the same time we're just not healthy. We have all of these rapidly increasing things like obesity. And you know you have to know that the food are involved, for example, ice cream, what's called a flowing agent, which is there are a couple of these things that are the GRAS chemicals, Generally Regarded as Safe, because they were developed and given a GRAS blessing in the in the 70s, or was it the 80s, whenever it was that they started saying, okay, the price stuff we can't deal with, because industry won't let us, basically. So let's deal with going forward. So those compounds get the label generally regarded as safe because we've been using them for decades. And people aren't dropping dead all over the place when they use them. But that, of course, totally misses low dose adverse effects. So there are a couple of; these are chemicals that are food content, in the sense that they actually go into the food. And so you know, you probably notice that you tend to fatten up pretty quickly if you eat a lot of ice cream. And there are a couple of fluffing agents so often added to powdered food as well just to keep things dry, that are obesogens. In other words, once you eat them, they're going to go in and tell stem cells, go off and become a fat cell. which wouldn't happen in the absence of that stimulus. Well, so you know, talking to me, of course, it's hard to imagine how you can write an article better you think I realized; the situation is very grim. And the one really bright light is the Europeans. The European language in their new chemical strategy is really wonderful. A lot of people love nonprofits, and a lot of cognizant advisors work really hard with them to get that language and the usual industry resistance came along, but of course, we are familiar with how they work. And basically, the people that tried to sabotage the European Union from doing us were heavily discredited. I won't say who, but I'll say by us, and that helped to really get this change of direction in the European Union. Now, they've still got to have follow-through. And so you know, you've got to escape the situation that you're in, by, presumably, new strategies; new ways of doing business that don't carry these environmental penalties. Nate Seltenrich 22:38 So, one question just to back up, you mentioned the extract, study... Terry Collins 22:45 Martin Wagner you can talk to. The lead scientist is Zimmerman. I don't know her. Nate Seltenrich 22:53 Okay, that's I was thinking you might be referring to because I actually did reach out to her. That was a paper that came out just a month or so ago. Terry Collins 23:04 There's a series of these papers. Nate Seltenrich 23:05 They did a conventional plastics and then the bio plastic. Terry Collins 23:11 Yeah, the paper came out a couple of years ago, or 18 months ago, something like that. The first one. But I mean, you know, I spoke about this in a meeting in China and these dudes from the industry get up and, and just protest, it's safe, it's safe and safe. Sorry, dude, it's not, you know. If it's safe, show me the data, if you're going to assert that it's safe, show me the data. In other words, to get right back to this. What is the strategy for improving food contact materials? Test, and test with appropriate tests that are sensitive to low dose adverse effects and to non-monotonic dose responses. And so that's what the European Union will do over time as well. You know, we did, it's all out there. It's a growing field, it's not a cap. The testing is of the time in 2030. We published this of course, it's a live tiered protocol for endocrine disruption as what we call it these days and you can add tests. So the European Union will hopefully generate a series of very powerful essays to detect endocrine disruption. A lot of them are probably going to come straight out as modifications of, part of what we we did, and this is how we did it. I don't take too much credit. I was more a cheerleader than anything else but in order to think about the logic dynamics, you've got me trying to make new chemical technologies that aren't, that don't have these properties that are; that is basically the same. And really, if you're going to make a sustainable chemical today, the number one thing that you have to ensure is that it doesn't have low dose adverse effects. So if it's nasty, toxic, you find that out really easily. You should still do those assays. But you know, most, if not many chemicals get through those pretty easily. It's the low dose adverse testing, sneaky hidden stuff that is changing organisms, rather than causing them in bad ways where it that plays out over the lifetime of the organism, that's the thing that you've got to catch. And so you know, here I am saying, shut up, pardon my French, I've made these pellets, but I don't know if they're safe. I don't know if the degradation products are safe. I don't know if what they do make things safer or less safe. So how am I going to find out? And I certainly said that is part of the stimulation to get these things going. But then Pete Myers basically put together a phenomenal team of endocrine disruption scientists to answer that question. And so the way it's like me going up, well, you're Mr. androgen, you know, male hormone. What do I have to do to make you happy that I don't have an antigen or an antiandrogen? And you're Mrs. estrogen, what do I have to do to convince you, and you Mr. thyroid, what do I have to do convince you and you're misses pituitary, what do I have to do convince you? And so that's how we approached it, and we collected all the revealing essays, and then arranged them into five tiers from, in silico, meaning you do it on a computer through high throughput screening to [XXX] of cells, to sophisticated cellular essays to fish and amphibians, and finally to mammals, and laid out all the tests. And so we have a new company now, we're developing my catalyst technologies and we have an expert board of people advising us on how to test to make sure that we don't have these problems. We of course, have done a lot of tests in the last decade, beta testing the system; it was actually being beta tested before was published on the catalyst. And the good news is that we have catalysts that appear to have no adverse effects. Like I say, you can't prove it, you can just do enough essays, and get no adverse effect, fixed to build gradually, build confidence that you have something to say. None of that's been done with PLA, we don't even know the PLA ligaments are problematic; the dimers and trimers. Because you always get these short chain things when you make a big polymer. There's usually contamination of the parent monomer and that's usually contamination of dimers and trimers. And, you know, you really have to assess that stuff. And part of the extract that's causing the problem could be these. These are ligaments of the parent polymer, in the case of PLA. Nate Seltenrich 28:34 And doesn't the European Union Union's new plan also specified mixture? Final mixture testing? Terry Collins 28:43 Yeah, I believe it does. I have to have to go look at them. Actually. I'm digging into that question right now. But yeah, mixtures are critical. Nate Seltenrich 28:53 Because in the final product as well... Terry Collins 28:56 You're basically... so the extract of the plastic is showing stuff out? You realize that should not happen in something where you can tell some literal consumer, they don't have to worry about using this food contact material. Well, that kind of assurance is pretty much impossible to give on anything at the moment. Nate Seltenrich 29:28 Sorry, what was the name of the catalysts that you just mentioned... The company or? Terry Collins 29:36 Well, the company hasn't gone live yet. But it's got phenomenal backing and it's got a phenomenal team. It'll probably go live in the next month. The website talks about our desire to really go at different things. And so this is kind of tricky, because, you know, you're going to do the testing. And the question is, what do you do if you run into negative tests? Well, you know what, you have to take those very seriously. You either have to find a way around the toxicities that show up when you have to stop. So we're going into this with with a lot of essays or a number of very revealing essays. And we, you know, we have a large number of these catalysts, because by tweaking them, we can change their properties quite a lot. And so we did a zebrafish developmental essay published in 2013, where we tested several catalysts at five different concentrations from very low to low. And, you know, four of the catalysts had, when you look at zebrafish analysis, the developmental analysis, you grow the fish up, and then you look at them and do various experiments on them. You're looking at 8 million points. And so, you know, you get a good feel of whether this chemical that the little embryo was swarming around in messes the embryo up, and four of the catalysts were squeaky clean, and two of them had some issues at the highest concentration, which is still a very low concentration, and one of them was really nasty. And they're basically the same suite of careless with just different decorations around the, the edge of the molecule. And so you really have to test. Nate Seltenrich 31:53 It is really interesting to see where this all goes. I'll definitely keep an eye out for your, your name and your work. And I continue to work myself writing about this area. I don't think I have any other specific questions. But once I'm sorting through this, if I need to follow up by email, would that'd be alright in the next couple weeks? Terry Collins 32:19 Sure. thing, yeah. Nate Seltenrich 32:20 Yeah, and this article will be out in December. So I'll also make sure to let you see it to pass along the link. It'd be trying to, you know, basically help people understand some of these issues and begin to evaluate some of the risks themselves and maybe highlight some of, at least, better alternatives... Terry Collins 32:43 You're giving them advice if they buy a block of cheese to cut about the outer layer of the cheese that's in contact with the plastic, for example? Nate Seltenrich 32:53 No, that's an interesting one. And Terry Collins 32:56 Yeah, there are things you can do. That would be one way to go. If you got other things like that. Nate Seltenrich 33:01 Well, it's more about... we're trying to look at, you know, technologies and innovations in food packaging, such as some of the PFAS-free alternatives that are being touted in like the pulp fiber molded, what are they called molded fiber, clam shells, and, you know, some of the different plant-based materials that, you know, bamboo straw, I don't know. So we're gonna be looking at some of these things. Terry Collins 33:29 Well, same question. Did they test for low dose toxicity? That's the thing. Yeah. You do that, and it's not impossible to do. People generally believe that; they go foggy on it. And the reason they go foggy on it is because the regulatory agencies have been ignoring it. Despite congressional insistence, they do something about it way back in the late 90s. And so, you know, so it's all kind of confusing, but there is a cadre of people who understand that exclusively. And, what you have to do to build a case that your product doesn't have these properties. And if they're not testing... I don't believe a thing. I don't care if it's bamboo, but it's probably bamboo with chemicals to make it what it is, and so I need to see the test. Nate Seltenrich 34:40 Yeah, that's a very, very good point and caveat that we certainly don't want to gloss over greenwashing alternatives. Terry Collins 34:52 Well, if you do, I'll tell you when you submit the article. Nate Seltenrich 34:58 All right. Thanks again for the time to chat. Terry Collins 35:03 Okay Nate, all the best. Nate Seltenrich 35:04 Take care, you too. Thanks. Okay, bye