- As final negotiations for an international plastics treaty get underway this week in Busan, South Korea, scientists warn that the global plastics crisis is far more dangerous than previously thought.
- In a research article published in November, an international group of researchers found that plastics pollution is helping to destabilize and threaten all nine planetary boundaries, putting the “safe operating space for humanity” at risk.
- The report documents serious impacts all along the petrochemical plastics supply chain — from extraction through production to use and disposal. Start with the climate change planetary boundary: Plastic production is already responsible for 12% of total oil demand. It could account for half of global oil consumption by 2050.
- Besides climate change, plastics cause increased harm to biosphere integrity and impact freshwater change, land system change, atmospheric aerosol loading (air pollution), ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion and more. The report urges urgent action to regulate plastic production and disposal.
“Plastics pollution exacerbates the impacts of all [nine] planetary boundaries,” warns a report published this month in the journal One Earth in the run-up to what could be the final United Nations summit to hammer out an international treaty addressing the global plastics crisis. That meeting, known as INC-5, in Busan, South Korea, happens from Monday, Nov. 25, to Sunday, Dec. 1.
The planetary boundary framework, hypothesized in 2009 and updated several times since then by an international group of scientists, seeks to identify the safe limits of human activity impacting Earth systems. Beyond those safe limits — dubbed the “safe operating space for humanity” — the planet’s natural processes can destabilize, degrade, stop self-regulating or even collapse, creating an extreme and hostile environment for life as we know it. As of this year, human activities have transgressed six of the nine boundaries.
The fifth of those limits to be violated, scientists note, was the novel entities boundary, which was determined crossed in 2022. Novel entities encompass human-made chemicals and other synthetic entities added to the natural environment.
One of the most pervasive of novel entities today is plastic. Globally, 500 million tons of plastics are produced every year, but only 9% get recycled, says the One Earth research article. Plastics are persistent and don’t break down. And some plastics, along with many of their additives, are toxic to life.
Plastic has been found everywhere on Earth — from deepest oceans to high mountains, in clouds and pole to pole. Microplastics have also been found in every place scientists look for them in the human body, from the brain to the testes, breast milk and artery plaque. Microplastics pose health risks to humans and wildlife, researchers warn.
Plastic’s myriad harmful impacts occur along the entire petrochemical supply chain, from resource extraction to production, and the uncontrolled release into the environment during use and disposal. As a result, these ubiquitous novel entities are contributing to the destabilization of all the other planetary boundaries: climate change, ocean acidification, altered nitrogen and phosphorus flows, loss of biosphere integrity, freshwater change, land system change, atmospheric aerosol loading and stratospheric ozone depletion.
“It’s necessary to consider the full life cycle of plastics, starting from the extraction of fossil fuel and the primary plastic polymer production,” says lead research article author Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Her research uses a social-ecological approach to focus on the global challenge of plastic pollution.
The report authors, an international group that includes researchers in Sweden, Denmark and the U.S., reviewed the scientific literature and found causal links between plastics and many other environmental problems. Plastic production, for example, is already contributing significantly to climate change, accounting for an estimated 12% of total oil demand and 8.5% of total demand for natural gas. Plastics manufacture could account for half of global oil consumption by 2050.
Plastics are also directly contributing to the loss of biosphere integrity. Marine organisms and microbial communities are being exposed to plastic’s many hazardous ingredients and contaminants, while keystone species such as whales and seabirds are becoming entangled in or ingesting plastic, leading to behavior changes and often death.
Plastic was traditionally considered a safe, inert, singular material. But plastic types number in the many thousands and represent a vastly varied, collective soup of chemicals (including those chemicals used to create it and the additives that give plastics various characteristics such as flexibility and color). These additives — many of them toxic — migrate back into the environment throughout the plastic life cycle, while the plastic itself breaks down into microplastics, which can travel around the planet.
The report intentionally uses the term plastic pollution to draw attention to the way the impacts of these synthetic materials extend far beyond visible litter. “Treating plastics as pollutants rather than just litter implies the need for more profound and systemic change, with a broader view of contaminants and their toxic impacts, especially since many are persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic,” the authors write.
With the fifth and hopefully final negotiations for an international plastic treaty kicking off this week in Busan, the report authors have called for urgent action to regulate the production and disposal of plastic as well as more systematic research into plastic’s chemicals and impacts.
IPEN, the International Pollutants Elimination Network, released an interactive map Nov. 12 that collects 20 years of research and data on plastics and plastic chemicals and organizes it by country, to aid in the negotiations.
While the Biden administration previously indicated that the U.S. would support a cap on plastic production, last week it reportedly backtracked, weakening its position to embrace a policy that would allow each nation to set its own voluntary limits on production.
Banner image: People clean up plastic trash at a beach in Bali, Indonesia. Image by OCG Saving The Ocean via Unsplash (Public domain).
The plastics crisis is now a global human health crisis, experts say
Citations:
Villarrubia-Gómez, P., Carney Almroth, B., Eriksen, M., Ryberg, M., & Cornell., S. E. (2024). Plastics pollution exacerbates the impacts of all planetary boundaries. One Earth. doi:10.1016/j.oneear.2024.10.017
Persson, L., Carney Almroth, B. M., Collins, C. D., Cornell, S., De Wit, C. A., Diamond, M. L., Hauschild, M. Z. (2022). Outside the safe operating space of the planetary boundary for novel entities. Environmental Science & Technology, 56(3), 1510-1521. doi:10.1021/acs.est.1c04158
Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, A., Chapin III, F. S., Lambin, E. F., … Foley, J. A. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/461472a
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