Jane Muncke PhD MSc
Jane holds a doctorate degree in environmental toxicology and an MSc in environmental science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ). During her graduate and postgraduate work she was trained in analytical chemistry and ecotoxicology at Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. Jane worked in the project management team of Novaquatis, an interdisciplinary research project on urban water management aiming at reducing chemical pollutants in the aquatic environment.
After post doctoral work at Eawag in the area of endocrine disruption screening in zebrafish, Jane joined Emhart Glass, a supplier company to the container glass industry. In this position she analysed scientific information on food contact materials, migration, and impacts on human and environmental health. Since August 2012, she is working for the Food Packaging Forum as Managing Director and Chief Scientific Officer. Jane is a full scientific member of the Society of Toxicology (SOT), the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC), and the Endocrine Society.
782: Jane Muncke PhD MSc: Toxins in your food from plastic packaging. You’d rather know.
Toxic chemicals leach from food packaging into your food. Some of these chemicals disrupt your hormones. Some cause cancer. Some affect your children more. Some disperse into the environment and harm wildlife.
For 300,000 years, humans lived without plastic. We created this system, maybe thinking only of the effects we wanted, imagining these toxic effects wouldn’t happen. Maybe we didn’t imagine they could happen. We don’t have to create these materials or use them. We are creating more all the time. There’s just so much oil, it’s so cheap, and there’s nothing stopping producers from creating and selling them. Nearly everyone agrees a role of government is to protect you from my taking or destroying your life, liberty, and property, yet businesses and government gain money and power from creating them.
Jane’s research and courses inform us of the dangers the producers don’t want us to know about. In this episode, she shares how she discovered this problem, what she’s doing about it, and details about the problems. She didn’t originally intend to go in this direction, but chemicals from plastic were leaching into other experiments she was doing. The producer of the leaching materials didn’t tell her. She had to do new research to find out, saw its seriousness, and kept going.
It’s scary to learn. Still, while I’d rather live in a world where we don’t permit people to poison us and profit from it, as long as we do, I’d rather know than not know.