Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The last show with David Cooper. Procrastinate your life away with us.
You buy a pair of headphones. You put them on your head because what else would you do? And then you find out there are traces of chemicals in them that could do serious damage for your health. Well, that is what has happened. So much so that European retailers are yanking certain headphone models off the shelves because of weird, toxic chemicals in them. Great.
And these aren't just like one-off headphones. These are popular brands.
Chapter 2: What health risks are associated with popular headphones?
We're here to discuss this story and more from the tech sector as it is time for Technology Time. Carmi Levy is here. Carmi, welcome to the show. Great to be with you, David. Thanks for having me. I thought we got rid of this one plastic called BPA, you know, that the old Nalgene bottles were made out of.
And then we heard there was hormone-disrupting chemicals that would leach into your water and blah, blah, blah. And I know there's still some products with BPA, but mostly... Retailers have phased them out and blah, blah, blah. Are they healthy for you?
Chapter 3: How are European retailers responding to toxic chemicals in headphones?
Are they not healthy for you? Probably not. The research not exactly clear. The more we know, the more toxic we find out they are. I'll stop talking soon. But I guess headphones were not a place I thought this would happen.
You know, I thought the same thing, David. I mean, for years, bisphenol or BPA was verboten. We know that they had been banned. When I buy water bottles for my bike, for example, I look for that BPA-free sign that shows that it's safe. Phthalates, another common chemical that was supposed to have been outlawed, flame retardants in soft plastics.
Yet, for whatever reason, this Czech nonprofit known as Arnica did some digging and they looked at wearables, headphones from Apple, Beats, Samsung, Bose, JBL, Sennheiser, all the big names. And they found that in a number of them, they looked at about 80 of them, but in a number of them, the levels of these what we call forever chemicals were significantly higher.
than what should have been, than what is mandated in the law. And it's frankly scary. I wear, as you can tell, I'm wearing a regular pair of headphones now. I wear Apple AirPods fairly frequently. Thankfully, Apple's devices are below the appropriate levels. They didn't find those chemicals there. But other devices, for example, JBL, HP, Razer, they all had levels that are really high.
And the worry here is that These are headphones that are often worn by younger people, kids who are playing games for lots of, you know, late into the night. They're worn by pregnant women who are especially susceptible to these chemicals leaching through their bloodstream. So this is really weird.
We're supposed to have laws in place, yet for whatever reason, the devices that we're buying, many of them aren't compliant with them.
And I feel like there's all these variants on plastics that get released and they're slightly like chemicals, but slightly different. And we don't know the effects they have on our hormones and our bodies. I'm not trying to fear monger and say all plastic is bad for you, but it is kind of shocking that like known chemicals hit the shelves. And like, how do they even find this out?
Do people complain? Do they test them? Does someone think, oh, no one's ever looked at headphones. Maybe we should just double check that there's no unhealthy plastics in them. And then all of a sudden they find out that they are like, what other product? Is it my steering wheel in my car or my keyboard? Like, I'm a little worried.
Yeah, and I'm worried as well, especially because some of these devices or components, we are touching them fairly frequently. I'm typing on a keyboard all day long. I often wear headphones for extended periods of time.
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