Plastics: It’s personal

The battle against plastics began decades ago. In the early days, the focus was on the proliferation of plastic pollution and its impact on land use. The battle shifted in the 1980s, with local skirmishes against single-use plastics that created movements to push recycling and more recently to ban plastics at the state and country level. With the myth of plastic recycling discredited, the public is finally beginning to understand that this isn’t simply a “waste management” problem.

Plastics have now become personal.

Although we’ve known for decades that plastics cause endocrine disruption, it was the discovery that plastics break down into microplastic particles and leach toxic plastic-related chemicals that changed everything. They enter our bodies from the air, our food and water and even from our clothing, and it is this knowledge that jump-started millions of dollars in research.

Scientists are rushing to determine the role that plastics play in every disease from Alzheimer’s to cancer. Photos from a recent study show microplastics stuck in artery plaque, creating further blockages for Americans 60 and older who have plaque in their arteries. More disturbing is another study showing 100% of placentas tested had microplastics.

Is there proof that plastic is hurting us? While scientists hate committing to 100% certainty, the answer is likely yes. Plastic is made from oil, and all plastics contain at least two to three chemicals and heavy metals. Many of those chemicals — bisphenol A, phthalates, brominated flame retardants — are among the  Environmental Protection Agency’s “priority pollutants,” but almost none of them are banned outright; the rest of plastic chemicals are “confidential business information.”

As plastics break down into microplastics over time, they act as magnets for heavy metals, many of which are known carcinogens, as well as harboring viruses. That makes microplastics doubly harmful, in essence a “forever chemical” carrying other “forever chemicals” and all likely to last for a thousand years.

Of course, we have heard this all before.

Environmental and health history is replete with stunning examples of industries engaged in long-term, purposeful deception, tricking us all into believing their products are safe. Since the 1950s, the tobacco industry knew its products were addictive and caused cancer, but in order to deceive the public and government, it created complex and confusing disinformation campaigns. With whistleblowers’ help, the industry was finally nabbed in a civil racketeering case for marketing and selling “lethal products with zeal, with deception.”

Exxon was aware that burning fossil fuels would create climate change at least as early as the 1970s. Taking a page from the tobacco playbook, Exxon spent decades and millions of dollars “manufacturing doubt” led by scientists, mathematicians and others on its payroll. The oil industries’ tactics delayed worldwide action that could cost hundreds of millions of people their lives, and they are still doing it.

Syngenta, one of the world’s largest chemical companies, spent decades and untold millions secretly undermining researchers’ studies into their top weed killer product that contains paraquat, which is now known to cause neurological changes like Parkinson’s.

Throughout these past four-plus decades, the petrochemical and plastics industries have plotted and defrauded the public and governments, “normalizing” the idea that their products could be recycled when they knew they could not. Given industries’ long history of lying to us about recycling, it’s fair to ask what else they are hiding.

Despite recent efforts to rid ourselves of plastic pollution, the oil industry’s intention is to move its stranded fossil fuels into plastics over the coming years. Global plastic production is expected to triple over the next 15 years, which will massively increase the plastic industry’s deadly contribution to greenhouse gases and will be worth close to a trillion dollars by 2030. The health risks to humans will increase, possibly eclipsing the number of deaths caused by climate change.

If history is our prophet, it is also likely that these industries already know some of the human health impacts and have for decades. It is why EarthDay.org and a growing worldwide coalition of other NGOs and experts are calling on the plastics industry to tell us what they know.

It’s also why the New York Times recently reported on plastic industry lawyers predicting a wave of lawsuits concerning “forever chemicals” that will affect many plastic-industry companies. EARTHDAY.ORG has been calling for these companies to be held liable for what we know they have almost certainly known for a long time about the risks caused by plastics.

If they continue to hide and ignore the health and environmental harms caused by plastics — be it the microplastic particles and fibers or the toxic chemicals used to make plastics in the first place — it will cause our peril and theirs. The history of corporate deceit when it comes to environmental and health harms is well known. While it’s standard practice for industry to wait until the evidence mounts while dragging its feet to continue reaping profits, the health impacts from plastics are already affecting all of us.

This isn’t a future threat; it exists now, and we need to know what they know.

Kathleen Rogers is president of EarthDay.org , the world’s largest recruiter to the environmental movement, working with more than 150,000 partners in nearly 192 countries. This column previously appeared in The Hill.

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