(Photo: Chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso listens to a comment by a delegate during the fifth session of the U.N. Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution in Busan, South Korea, on Dec. 1, 2024. Credit: Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)
No place on Earth is safe from plastic pollution. Plastic garbage and tiny shards of these long-lived petroleum-based polymers taint the highest Himalayan mountains, deepest ocean trenches, outermost Antarctic field stations and hidden recesses of the human body.
To manage the rapidly accelerating plastic crisis, 175 countries adopted a United Nations resolution in 2022 to end plastic pollution through an international legally binding treaty. The resolution created the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop the treaty, and kicked off two years of talks. Member nations failed to reach an agreement by the two-year deadline after five negotiating sessions, but settled on text that will be a starting point for the next round of negotiations.
With those talks set to resume next month in Geneva—and plastic production expected to triple by 2060—leading environmental health and policy experts are urging world leaders in the new issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization to prioritize protecting health and the environment by reducing plastic production and encouraging less harmful alternatives.
Manufacturers produced more than 9 billion tons of plastic since 1950, according to the U.N. Environment Program, cranking out more than half of that volume in the past 20 years alone. With consumption rising and recycling barely making a dent in the problem—about 9 percent of plastic is recycled globally—the authors of the commentary urged the U.N. to cap and reduce production, halt the use of toxic chemicals in plastics and rebuff calls by industry and major oil- and gas-producing nations to focus on recycling and waste management.
Fossil fuel-producing countries and industry groups representing the fossil fuel, petrochemical and plastics industries are pushing a deeply flawed agenda on recycling and waste management to solve the global plastics crisis, said lead author Nicholas Chartres, a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney in Australia. They hope that plastic production will continue to grow without restrictions and that the public’s concerns about the harms of plastics will be eased by false solutions, said Chartres, an expert on the commercial factors that drive disease.
Although the U.N. resolution highlights the need to prevent plastic pollution and its related risks to human health, the proposed treaty text has “major gaps” that put human health at risk from hazardous chemicals and plastics, Chartres and his colleagues wrote in the commentary, published in the World Health Organization’s peer-reviewed public health journal. “For a meaningful treaty, health considerations must figure more prominently.”
Plastics, made primarily from natural gas and crude oil, contain more than 16,000 synthetic chemicals that are also derived mostly from fossil fuels. Chemicals form the backbone of the primary material, aid in processing, confer properties like flexibility and rigidity as additives and enter plastics unintentionally as by-products of degradation or other impurities.
Production of petrochemicals, like that of plastics, has skyrocketed since the 1950s. And fossil-fuel companies ramped up production of petrochemicals even more amid global efforts to address climate change by moving away from the burning of oil, gas and coal toward renewable energy sources.
About 4,200 chemicals in plastics are known to harm health and the environment, researchers reported in a new peer-reviewed study, and include bisphenols, phthalates and PFAS, among other chemicals of special concern. Exposure to these ubiquitous chemicals—found in water bottles, food containers, children’s toys, pesticides, cosmetics, carpets and hundreds of other everyday products—has been linked to hormone disruption, infertility, cancer, neurodevelopmental disorders and many other chronic diseases.
The fact that hazardous chemicals perfuse plastics, Chartres said, “means they simply cannot be recycled safely into other plastics.”
“An Urgent and Insidious Threat”
Environmental scientists have been sounding the alarm about plastics’ pervasive and destructive global distribution since marine biologists spotted plastic pellets stuck to marine life in the North Atlantic’s Sargasso Sea in 1972. They have since documented plastic filling the stomachs or entangling hundreds of marine species, including fish, seabirds, whales and sea turtles, contaminating Andean condors and poisoning the organs of domestic livestock, cats and dogs.
Plastics enter the human diet through microplastic-laden seafood, food packaging materials and, increasingly, through produce. Agricultural soils now hold around 23 times more microplastics than oceans do, researchers reported in a review of studies published in May, making their way into crops.
To curtail the escalating plastic pollution crisis, the treaty should make protecting public health and the environment core objectives, the commentary authors argued. Other recommendations include: cap and reduce production in favor of safer alternatives; end the production and use of toxic chemicals; reduce toxic emissions through the lifecycle of plastics; and finance programs by ensuring that the fossil fuels, petrochemicals and plastics industries that contribute to the pollution crisis pay the costs of addressing it.
And the treaty should include provisions to help the health care industry reduce its dependence on single-use plastics, which became particularly acute during the COVID pandemic, Chartres and his colleagues say. Plastics account for 30 percent of health care waste, according to WHO estimates, producing 1.7 million tons a year. Medical facilities can reduce reliance on disposable items made of plastic like blood pressure cuffs and surgical gowns by replacing them with reusable versions, for example, and by shifting toward more durable materials like glass and metal that can be easily sterilized.
“The world is facing a plastic pollution crisis that is getting worse every year,” said Judith Enck, president of the nonprofit Beyond Plastics and a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator.
Low-income communities are being hit especially hard, Enck said, underscoring the need to identify solutions that match the scope of the problem.
Plastics and petrochemical production are more likely to occur in low-income communities of color in the United States while plastic waste disproportionately burdens developing countries without the means to contain it.
The authors’ recommendations are “smart and reasonable,” Enck said, “and should serve as the foundation for action.
During the last session of the U.N. Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee in Busan, Korea, committee Chair and Ecuador Ambassador Luis Vayas Valdivieso called plastic pollution “an urgent and insidious threat to ecosystems, economies and human health.”
Throughout the negotiations, scientists and dozens of nations called for limits on plastic production while leading oil and gas producing countries, including the United States, and fossil fuel lobbyists fought measures to cap or reduce plastic production.
Members of the ING met for informal negotiations in Nairobi last week to hash out differences and identify ways to move forward next month.
A spokesperson for the State Department declined to comment on the Trump administration’s position on the treaty ahead of the formal Geneva negotiations.
During earlier talks, the Biden administration advocated reducing waste but not production, and ultimately resisted a cap on production. The Trump administration’s move to overturn “an irrational campaign against plastic straws,” and its push to expand oil and gas production—even though the United States already ranks first in global production—suggests it will not support a measure to turn off the plastics tap.
Most countries participating in the treaty favor setting limits on plastics production, Chartres and his colleagues noted in the commentary.
But a coalition of oil-and-gas-producing countries and groups representing fossil fuel, chemical and plastics companies are stifling progress by supporting a treaty focused on waste management and recycling, the team wrote. That approach, they said, has exacerbated the harms of plastics.
Plastics manufacturers seek an agreement that effectively ends plastic pollution, said Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, which represents some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel and chemical companies.
“The best way to achieve this with the least likelihood of unintended consequences is to adopt an instrument that prioritizes the development of circular economies, where plastics are designed for reuse and recycling, and are remade into new plastics after use,” Eisenberg said.
Chartres counters that current recycling methods can release chemicals back into the environment and use more energy than creating virgin plastics. “In addition,” he said, “the more plastics are recycled, the more microplastics are released into the environment and, therefore, our bodies, with growing evidence on their harms to human health, including links to lung and colon cancer.”
As plastic waste fouls the environment, its production is contributing to climate change, the European Environment Agency warns. Every year plastic production in the European Union releases about 13.4 million tons of carbon dioxide, or about 20 percent of the chemical industry’s emissions, the agency reported in 2021.
The World Health Organization warned last year that plastic pollution, fueled by the relentless growth of plastic production, consumption and disposal, is posing serious risks to public health by exacerbating the triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and global pollution.
This accelerating crisis leaves only one path forward to protect the planet and future generations, Chartres said.
Countries must agree to cap and reduce plastic production, end production and use of toxic chemicals in all plastics and address any historic, current or future harms these chemicals or plastics cause by enforcing the polluter pays principle, he said. “That’s the only solution to this crisis.”
Ren Ecosystem