Our seductively packaged plastic culture generates synthetic waste with no place to go, leaving a planet saturated with plastic pollution. Plastic has been observed to kill from without and within, yet there is still no consensus regarding its defined harm. But whether it’s whales and sea lion pups trapped in nets and fishing lines, or mitochondria and other intracellular structures entangled in nanoplastic fiber, all scarred by sharp particle edges and bathed in chemical additives, nothing escapes harm from plastic. We may ultimately decide plastic is the only alternative suitable for some critical needs, but its use must be carefully and thoughtfully regulated, and we need to mitigate current exposures and plastic pollution burden. Plastic simply cannot remain the cheapest available material for any possible use, while its costs are externalized in the form of damage to health and the environment.
We should intuitively recognize the potential harm from a ubiquitous synthetic material, designed to endure with a universe of chemical additives, that fractures into smaller and smaller pieces but does not meaningfully degrade or ever really “go away.” And yet, it’s everywhere—so how bad can it be?
Consider the rise and fall of asbestos and the chemical polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Asbestos, like plastic, was historically incorporated into all manner of industrial, construction and consumer goods until the 1970s. With production steeply peaking in 1980, it fell just as quickly by the early 1990’s following mass tort litigation and regulation. Chemists invented PFAS in the 1930s. Initially exploited for their stable carbon fluorine bonds in equipment designed for extreme environments, manufacturers began adding PFAS to consumer products indiscriminately without recognition of the risk. These practices began to change in the late 1990s with tort litigation, followed by production bans and steadily increasing state and federal regulation. We’ve let it happen before, and it’s happening again with plastic.
Bioaccumulative, persistent, and ubiquitous, plastic presents its own toxicological profile as both chemical and particle, and both are problematic. Early plastic microbead research lulled us into considering plastic as benign but does not represent microplastic toxicity with its smaller and widely variable shapes and assumed higher leachability of plastic additives like phthalates, bisphenol-A, and PFAS from much greater surface areas. While many studies focus on the prevalence of chemical additive contamination from plastic, we have not until recently had the analytical tools to detect, count, and speciate micro and nanoplastic and consider their potential for harm. See Corinne Purtill & Susanne Rust, Researchers Discover Thousands of Nanoplastic Bits in Bottles of Drinking Water, LA Times (Jan. 8, 2024). With these tools, we can better assess harm.
While we have not yet characterized the same “smoking gun” harm from plastic, we must recall that the critical evidence of causal harm from asbestos was based on long term worker exposure, of 20 years or more. So while experts caution us to avoid sources of plastic in our homes, on our bodies, and on our tables, we continue to live surrounded by plastic, on a plastic planet. Considering the potentially irreparable damage to our health and environment, we cannot simply wait decades for confirmation of the harms already being inflicted, and must take decisive action now, while we still can.
