Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

BPA Sales Are Booming

Bisphenol A, a chemical used in can linings and plastic bottles, is pretty nasty stuff. The Food and Drug Administration recently banished it from baby bottles (at the behest of the chemical industry itself, after baby bottle producers had already phased it out under consumer pressure). BPA, as it's known, is an endocrine-disrupting chemical, meaning that it likely causes hormonal damage at extremely low levels. The packaging industry uses it to make plastics more flexible and to delay spoilage in canned foods.

You might think that such a substance would lose popularity as evidence of its likely harms piles up and up. Instead, however, the global market for it will boom over the next six years, according to a proprietary, paywall-protected report from the consultancy Transparency Market Research. The group expects global BPA sales to reach $18.8 billion by 2019, from $13.1 billion this year—about a 44 percent jump.

TMA researchers declined to be interviewed by me and wouldn't give me access to a full copy of their report. But they did send me a heavily redacted sample. One of the few trends I could glean from it is that the "steady growth" in global BPA consumption is driven by "increasing demand in the Asia-Pacific region." (According to this 2012 paper by Hong Kong researchers, Chinese BPA production and consumption have both "grown rapidly" in recent years, meaning "much more BPA contamination" for the nation's environment and citizens.) As for the United States, the report says that North America is the globe's "third largest regional market for BPA," behind Asia and Europe. North American BPA consumption is growing, but a "at a very slow rate," the report states. As a result, our share of the global BPA is expected to experience a "slight decline" by 2019. Not exactly comforting.

The sample that Transparency Market Research sent me blacked out its analysis of which companies have what share of the global BPA market. This 2012 US Department of Agriculture report claims that just two companies, German chemical giant Bayer and its US rival Dow, "produce the bulk of BPA in the world." Another major producer is Saudi Basic Industries Corp., or SABIC, a company 70 percent owned by the Saudi government. This charming corporate crew looks set to cash in on handsomely on the ongoing BPA boom.

Original Article
Source: motherjones.com
Author: Tom Philpott

No comments:

Post a Comment