WHAT!!!! Nurses have been reading and attending webinars to learn about scientific evidence regarding the health risks that plastics are having on human and environmental health and guess what the plastic industry has been doing? Successfully influencing California schools to teach our children how wonderful plastic is, including plastic bags!!
Listening to the California Report on my public radio station (KQED), I just found out about a new report, Expelled: Exposing Industry Propoganda in US Schools, by the Plastic Pollution Coalition, that reveals how the plastic industry is influencing schools across the US, including in California, to integrate curriculum that teaches students how important plastic is, including plastic bags. Under pressure from the American Chemistry Council, a lobbying group for the plastics industry persuaded school officials in California to bring a new environmental curriculum into K-12 schools that includes positive messages about plastic shopping bags, interviews and documents show. This includes lesson plans and worksheets, hands-on science experiments, and a program called “PlastiVan” that travels from city to city teaching students about “the contribution plastics make to modern life.”
“The rewritten textbooks and teachers’ guides coincided with a public relations and lobbying effort by the chemistry council to fight proposed plastic bag bans throughout the country. But despite the positive message, activists say there is no debate: Plastic bags kill marine animals, leach toxic chemicals, and take an estimated 1,000 years to decompose in landfills.” Full California Report article.
The public health community will NEVER be able to compete with corporate America’s financial capability and current doubt about messaging from government agencies is making it even more difficult to bring real science to the public, but we must continue to try. For more information created by nurses about plastics, see California Nurses for Environmental Health and Justice’s plastics webpage and find a 1-hour CE, on-line primer course on plastics here.
For those of you interested in joining nurses’ advocacy campaigns about environmental health, including bringing the facts about plastics to our communities and policy makers, JOIN HERE.
