The Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health : overview and outlooks

Plastics have conveyed great benefits to humanity and made possible some of the most significant advances of modern civilization in fields as diverse as medicine, electronics, aerospace, construction, food packaging, and sports. It is now clear, however, that plastics are also responsible for significant harms to human health, the economy and the earth’s environment. These harms occur at every stage of the plastic life cycle: production, use, and disposal.

Plastics are complex, highly heterogeneous, synthetic chemical materials comprised of a carbon-based polymer backbone (derived from coal, oil, or gas)  and thousands of additional chemicals. Many 16,000 chemicals used in plastic production are toxic, and they include carcinogens, neurotoxicants and endocrine disruptors. Current annual plastic production exceeds 400 Megatons globally, a 230-fold increase from 1950. Production is on track to treble by 2050, with greatest projected increases in manufacture of single-use, disposable plastics.

Workers in the fossil fuel industry suffer increased mortality from injuries, pulmonary and cardiovascular disease, and lung cancer. Plastic production workers are at increased risk of cancer, neurotoxic injury, and decreased fertility. Plastic recycling workers have increased rates of cardiovascular disease, toxic metal poisoning, neuropathy, and lung cancer. Residents of communities adjacent to plastic production and waste disposal sites experience increased risks of premature birth, low birthweight, asthma, and childhood leukemia.

The extraction, production of plastics and transport processes are responsible for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions equivalent to nearly 2 Gigatons of carbon dioxide annually. Plastics therefore also contribute to climate change, which also has direct and indirect consequences for human health.

During use, plastics release toxic chemicals including additives and residual monomers into the environment and into people. Plastic additives disrupt endocrine function and increase risk for premature births, neurodevelopmental disorders, male reproductive birth defects, infertility, obesity, cardiovascular disease, renal disease, and cancers. Emerging, albeit still incomplete evidence indicates that MNPs may cause toxicity due to their physical and toxicological effects as well as by acting as vectors that transport toxic chemicals and bacterial pathogens into tissues and cells.

Plastics and plastic chemicals are responsible for widespread pollution. They contaminate marine, freshwater, terrestrial, and atmospheric environments globally. Adverse impacts of plastic pollution occur at multiple levels from molecular and biochemical to population and ecosystem. MNP contamination of seafood results in direct, though not well quantified human exposure to plastics and plastic chemicals. Marine plastic pollution endangers the ocean ecosystems upon which all humanity depends for food, oxygen, livelihood, and well-being.

Plastics are both a boon to humanity and a stealth threat to human and planetary health. Plastics convey enormous benefits, but current linear patterns of plastic production, use and disposal with little attention to sustainable design and a near absence of recovery, reuse and recycling are responsible for grave harms to health, great economic costs, and deep societal injustices. These harms are rapidly worsening. Knowledge of plastics’ harms is still incomplete, but this Commission concludes there is sufficient evidence of plastics’ clear and present danger to require urgent intervention against the plastic crisis at global scale.