a banana is a living organism

So what? So is poison ivy. I wouldn't recommend eating it.

very few synthetic materials are supposed to have 80 differently-identifiable chemicals in them

I'm sorry but - what the fuck are you talking about? Who is deciding how many different chemicals should be in any given material? What sort of of ridiculousness is this?

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.

Which is my point - the NUMBER of items in a given material is just scare-mongering BS. The actual ingredients is what matters.

If you aren’t afraid, then I don’t know how to help you, child.

If you don't understand that the count of the number of chemicals in a thing doesn't relate to that thing's toxicity then I can't help you either kid.

Water is a chemical. The point was using an arbitrary number and an arbitrary descriptor means absolutely fuck all.

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.

All those chemicals are slightly different length hydrocarbon chains. Functionally, they are nearly identical.