Wandering Adventure Party

That’s almost fair. The difference is: a banana is a living organism, and very few synthetic materials are supposed to have 80 differently-identifiable chemicals in them. This melange of death here is shit like dioxins, plasticizers, decomposition products, dyes and other additives, as well as the reaction products of all of THAT shit mixing at high temp in the melted plastic. If you aren’t afraid, then I don’t know how to help you, child.

Brushing this off with some trite banana comparison is just making a Robert Kehoe out of yourself.

As a chemist, but without organics specialization (my specialty is rocks), I think that what we’re seeing here is a collection of three main things, aside from polyethylene:

1. decomposition byproducts: plastics break down under heat, stress and in light. It’s not surprising that some of their breakdown byproducts might be found in plastic that has been melted into a new shape.
2. dyes: plastic is dyed with different additives, and there are a LOT of different colors of plastic being recycled. They usually try to keep the colors generally consistent among batches for recycling, but the dyes that make a sprite bottle green are different from the ones that make a dasani bottle teal.
3. Plasticizers and other additives: the things the corporations add to their plastics just to eke out that 1 cent of savings from thinner, more durable plastic, or to get the texture just right, are insane. These are things like BPA. There are loads of them, and every plastic has different types. Some of them also have different heat tolerances, but it’s not like the recyclers are keeping track.

So, yeah, be afraid. There’s a metric fuckton of shit in there, and literally no one knows what it all is, let alone how much of it made it through the manufacturing, use, recycling and manufacturing process without becoming prone to leaching. Virtually all plastic recycling is a scam perpetrated by the corporations to get us to blithely ignore how they are destroying the planet to save money, all while convincing us to blame ourselves.

Sucrose and cellulose are different-length chains of sugars, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same. Also, all of the additives in the many different types of melted-together plastic would beg to differ with your assessment.

Thanks! Edited to account for “and other additives”

Just people deciding that divorcing a statement from its context (plastics manufacturing) is sufficient to say that no alarm need be raised. As I said: Robert Kehoe.

Ah, essentially, the person said “this claim of 80 chemicals is meaningless, and can only be a scaremongering tactic!”

1. in order for it to be scaremongering, there must be a concerted effort to effect a sense of terror in the reader, and that sense of terror must be unwarranted. There is certainly an effort to terrify, but that is because the story is, objectively, terrifying.
2. they claim that bananas have more than 80 chemicals, and that the idea of counting distinct chemicals is a bad way to represent danger. As they point out, in biological systems, they would be correct, because biological systems have thousands of unique chemicals within them as a matter of course. However, they are trying to equate that banana to this issue, which is NOT a biological system, but an issue of plastic synthesis. In plastics manufacturing, there is no conceivable reason for you to need more than, to be generous, ten individual chemical constituents to form your polymer product. These might be the original polymer, very small amounts of the unbound monomer, a plasticizer or two, a couple dye compounds, and a couple other things which add properties you want, such as UV resistance, hydrophilia/phobia, or physical/chemical resistance. So, by divorcing this number from its context (plastics manufacturing), this person is trying to make it seem like a ridiculous headline, when in fact there is no conceivable reason to need even a quarter of the various impurities present in these bits of plastic. To give a much closer analogy than a fucking banana, imagine if I gave you a chunk of “steel”, and told you that it’s good, because it’s “recycled”, so I made some forks and knives out of it and gave it to you to eat with, but then you found out that it is actually an alloy of iron with a mixture of every other metal, including unsafe amounts of cadmium, mercury and lead. Even if you don’t know what metals exactly are in it, it would be concerning if I just said “hey, this steel in your fork contains 50 different metals!”, right? That’s because that statement alone tells you that something very fishy was going on with the “recycling” process, because the only conceivable reason for there to be 50 different metals in detectable amounts in your steel (which, I remind you, you are eating off of) is if they just melted a bunch of shit together and called it “close enough”.
3. I likened this person’s attitude to Robert Kehoe, who was famously bribed by the leaded gas industry to lie to the world about the natural amount of lead in the environment. By claiming that the “normal” amount of lead was the same as the “natural” amount of lead, he cast scientific doubt over the question of leaded gas for many years. It wasn’t until Clair Patterson proved that the amount of lead in the atmosphere, water and soil had gone up by tens of thousands of times since the pre-industrial steady-state levels that people finally saw Kehoe for what he was: a corrupt hack.