Television and radio commercials are looking for people with Non-hodgkins lymphoma to join the class action law suit against Monsanto since a California jury awarded two hundred and eighty nine million dollars to a groundskeeper after he contracted the disease after prolonged exposure to Round-up herbicide.

The ads make it sound like it is a sure payday and it probably will be for the lawyers. The ruling will serve as precedent for future cases and the ads on television right now are people to sign up for a class action lawsuit against Monsanto. Last week, I watched the new television series Bluff City Law and the case they were trying was a copy cat case to the Round-up case.

While watching the episode the defense attorney's tried to shift blame to other things that could have contributed to the cancer, like smoking, chewing tobacco or drinking from a plastic bottle. Plastic bottle, how can that cause cancer you might ask?

Maybe you remember that nineteen sixty seven movie the Graduate and that famous Dustin Hoffman line “Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me. Aren't you?” But there was another line by Mr. McGuire to Hoffman “There's a great future in plastics”. And since that time plastic has been everywhere. I can remember my mother having Tupperware parties in our living room as a kid back in the seventies. Now there are numerous reports of plastics causing cancer.

First plastics took a hit because they did not breakdown in landfills. And then there was the fact that plastic litter in the oceans caused problems for sea life. Turtles would get plastic six pack holders stuck on there shells and whales would ingest plastic with their food. Now many states have banned plastic bags and plastic straws.

But even these measures are not enough when it comes to preventing humans from getting cancer from ingesting plastics. I watched a story on the news Monday morning about plastic mesh tea bags that have been shown to release micro-fine plastic particles as the tea bags steep in the hot water. This is not something you can even see with the naked eye, but it is there.

Remember putting those Tupperware bowls with the snap on lids in the microwave? The lids would always come out warped and that is another source of micro-fine plastic particles. Plastics do not break down quickly in landfields and they break down even slower in humans. Plastics will not go away overnight but you can begin the process by selecting products that are not packaged in plastic.

The worst offender is bottled water. Have you ever had a bottle of water that just had that plastic taste? Soda and milk are also a problem as there are not many choices besides plastic containers. My grand parents didn't have plastic containers around, everything was glass containers. Ball mason jars filled the shelves in my grandmother's basement from all the vegetables she and my aunt canned from the garden each summer.

It was always amazing how fresh the vegetables would taste in February when they had been canned back in August. In this disposable society that we are today, it is that disposability that is killing us. There isn't a future in plastics after all.