It’s not just the plastics we can see that are causing problems to our health and the environment.In an attempt to unpack their effects and to influence government policy, a team led by University of California researchers has conducted theThough it’s estimated that we each ingest about a, obtaining direct evidence of the effect that has is incredibly challenging.
There are about 350,000 chemicals used globally, with only a fraction assessed for safety, explains one of the paper’s authors, Dr Nick Chartres: “The majority of these chemicals have entered into our environment without any evaluations of their potential harm to human health.” Now they are in the environment, epidemiological studies to examine the effects can take decades and, as Oliver Jones, a professor in chemistry from RMIT points out, “ethically it would be hard to justify feeding humans microplastics to see what happened for example”.So for now, we have to rely on animal studies, says Chartres, the associate director of Science and Policy at the University of California’s Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment.
But Chartres, who says the industry uses stalling tactics and demands long-term studies as a way to keep selling their products, says we must act now. “These plastics are PBTs. Persistent: they don’t ever completely break down; bio-accumulative: they continue to build up in living organisms and, now toxic,” says the Sydney-based father of three. “While we let industry argue over whether these studies provide sufficient, evidence of harm, the world my kids are going to inherit is filling up more and more with plastic.
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