Impact statement

This letter offers a comprehensive framework for understanding plastic pollution as the gateway to our interconnected global crises, offering policymakers, business leaders and civil society a roadmap for a systemic change. By positioning plastic not merely as an environmental problem but as a critical health emergency affecting every human from conception onwards, this research fundamentally reframes the urgency of action required.

The letter highlights how industry deception has delayed necessary interventions, drawing powerful parallels with tobacco industry tactics to help decision-makers recognise and counter similar strategies. This analysis equips readers with tools to identify corporate manipulation and advocate for evidence-based policy responses.

Most significantly, the article demonstrates how solving the plastic crisis can serve as a model for addressing broader sustainability challenges. By advocating for a 70% reduction in virgin plastic production by 2040 and the elimination of harmful chemicals, it provides concrete, science-based targets that can guide international treaty negotiations and national legislation.

The research directly supports ongoing efforts to establish a UN Global Plastics Treaty by offering clear policy recommendations developed by health scientists. These include removing fossil fuel subsidies, mandating comprehensive chemical testing and investing in truly circular alternatives that work with natural systems.

For businesses, the article highlights emerging financial risks (estimated at $100 billion annually by 2040), creating economic incentives for innovation in sustainable materials and packaging systems. This economic framing helps translate environmental imperatives into business language, accelerating corporate adoption of alternatives.

By connecting plastic pollution to fundamental human rights violations and demonstrating its role in climate change, biodiversity loss and social inequality, this work provides a unifying narrative for diverse stakeholders working towards a sustainable future. It transforms plastic from a waste management issue into a catalyst for the systemic transformation our planet urgently needs.

Mankind is currently at a crossroads. One road could take us to extinction. The other will need levels of resilience, change and adaptation never seen before. But choose we must. Our planet’s systems, struggling under the weight of our consumption, are perilously fragile: from the trade and financial systems that underpin our economy to the natural systems that allow for life on the Earth.

We are consuming natural resources at a rate 1.7 times faster than the Earth can regenerate them (Global Footprint Network, 2022). In 2019, the United Nations reported that there had been a 70% increase of the global material footprint between 2000 and 2017, translating into 92 billion metric tonnes of raw material being extracted (United Nations Statistics Division, 2019). This stood at 98 billion tonnes in 2022 (United Nations Statistics Division, 2024) and is projected to grow by almost 60% by 2060 “without urgent and concerted action” (United Nations Environment Programme, 2024).

Hyper-consumption, fuelled by the widespread availability of poor-quality materials, produced in mass at low costs, underpins our everyday habits. From the minute we are born, we are taught to consume. The creation of one material in particular has made it possible beyond our wildest dreams: plastic.

Humanity has produced over 10 billion tonnes of plastic since mass production of the material became the norm in the 1950s (Environmental Investigation Agency, 2021) – today, this equates to around 400 million metric tonnes of plastic waste each year (United Nations Environment Programme, n.d.). In Western Europe, the average annual plastic consumption is circa 150 kg per person – well over twice the global average of 60 kg (European Environment Agency, 2024).

Despite growing awareness of the need to wean ourselves from the material, production is forecast to double or even triple and take one fifth of our entire global carbon budget within 25 years (Karali et al., Reference Karali, Khanna and Shah2024). Ninety percent of these carbon emissions come from the production stage, and just one reason why the problem needs to be tackled at the source (Ritchie, Reference Ritchie2023). Another is the impact of plastic on human health or ecology.

Plastic is a miracle material that is the ultimate enabler of hyper-consumption. Its versatility, durability, and low cost have transformed industries, accelerated global trade, and flooded every corner of our lives with cheap, disposable goods. But in doing so, plastic has become far more than just a material – it is a gateway to a web of global crises, sitting at the intersection of climate change, over-consumption, biodiversity loss, dependence on fossil fuels, inequality, human rights abuses and pollution. The curtain is now being lifted on plastic but just as it is the gateway to a global meta-crisis, and the changes needed to solve the plastic crisis will also be a model to the way out.

Plastic is a health crisis

Micro- and nanoplastics, along with their thousands of chemicals, are now found in almost every part of the human body, including the brain (Amato-Lourenço et al., Reference Amato-Lourenço, Dantas, Junior, Paes, Ando, de Oliveira, da Costa, Rabelo, Soares Bispo, Carvalho-Oliveira and Mauad2024), blood (Leslie et al., Reference Leslie, van Velzen, Brandsma, Dick Vethaak, Garcia-Vallejo and Lamoree2022), breast milk (Ragusa et al., Reference Ragusa, Notarstefano, Svelato, Belloni, Gioacchini, Blondeel, Zucchelli, De Luca, D’Avino, Gulotta, Carnevali and Giorgini2022), placenta (Marcus et al., Reference Marcus, Garcia, Nihart, El Hayek, Castillo, Barrozo, Suter, Bleske, Scott, Forsythe, Gonzalez-Estrella, Aagaard and Campen2024) and testicles (Hu et al., Reference Hu, Garcia, Nihart, Liu, Yin, Adolphi, Gallego, Kang, Campen and Yu2024). These particles coagulate close to our hearts, contributing to strokes and heart disease (Marfella et al., Reference Marfella, Prattichizzo, Sardu, Fulgenzi, Graciotti, Spadoni, D’Onofrio, Scisciola, La Grotta, Frigé, Pellegrini, Municinò, Siniscalchi, Spinetti, Vigliotti, Vecchione, Carrizzo, Accarino, Squillante, Spaziano, Mirra, Esposito, Altieri, Falco, Fenti, Galoppo, Canzano, Sasso, Matacchione, Olivieri, Ferraraccio, Panarese, Paolisso, Barbato, Lubritto, Balestrieri, Mauro, Caballero, Rajagopalan, Ceriello, D’Agostino, Iovino and Paolisso2024). The University of Vienna and Plastic Health Council member Professor Lukas Kenner discovered the role of microplastics in the acceleration of cancer development (Brynzak-Schreiber et al., Reference Brynzak-Schreiber, Schögl, Bapp, Cseh, Kopatz, Jakupec, Weber, Lange, Toca-Herrera, Del Favero, Wadsak, Kenner and Pichler2024), and our most recent evidence estimates that 13% of all cardiovascular deaths in individuals aged 55–64 are attributable to phthalates, toxic chemicals present in many plastics (Hyman et al., Reference Hyman, Acevedo, Giannarelli and Trasande2025).

The plastic production chain has led to around 100,000 plastic formulations on the market (Wagner et al., Reference Wagner, Monclús, Arp, Groh, Løseth, Muncke, Wang, Wolf and Zimmermann2024). A 2024 report by PlastChem found that more than 16,000 chemicals are “potentially used or unintentionally present in plastics.” This includes 12,990 chemicals with identifiable structures and 4,706 that were detected but lack essential identifiers that allow their health impact to be studied (Wagner et al., Reference Wagner, Monclús, Arp, Groh, Løseth, Muncke, Wang, Wolf and Zimmermann2024).

More than 4,200 plastic chemicals were singled out as “of concern.” Only 6% of all these chemical compounds are globally regulated (Wagner et al., Reference Wagner, Monclús, Arp, Groh, Løseth, Muncke, Wang, Wolf and Zimmermann2024). Somehow, this material – the default used for almost everything that we wear, eat, drink, travel, sleep and live with – has largely escaped appropriate scrutiny and regulation.

The PlastChem project identifies 15 groups of chemicals found in plastics that require urgent attention from policymakers due to their proven impact on human health; these include Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), parabens, phthalates and bisphenols. These chemicals meet the four criteria of hazardous chemicals: persistence, mobility, bioaccumulation and toxicity. Yet, the failure to act is normalising human exposure to toxic substances (Wagner et al., Reference Wagner, Monclús, Arp, Groh, Løseth, Muncke, Wang, Wolf and Zimmermann2024).

We should also take into consideration the wide gap in publicised data of the vast majority of chemicals associated with plastics: over 10,000 of these chemicals lack hazard information, essential for their assessment (Wagner et al., Reference Wagner, Monclús, Arp, Groh, Løseth, Muncke, Wang, Wolf and Zimmermann2024). An umbrella review looking at the correlation between exposure to plastic and human health highlights a daunting reality: we are exposed to plastic-associated chemicals from pre-conception onwards (Symeonides et al., Reference Symeonides, Aromataris, Mulders, Dizon, Stern, Barker, Whitehorn, Pollock, Marin and Dunlop2024). In the United States alone, the annual health and economic costs from chemical additives in plastic in 2018 surpassed $250 billion (Trasande et al., Reference Trasande, Krithivasan, Park, Obsekov and Belliveau2024). Extrapolate that and we see a dark future.

Of the chemicals present in plastics, phthalates are a primary example of a high-alert group for its effect on our systems with a particular correlation to endocrine disruption, neurological and respiratory issues and children are much more vulnerable to exposure (Wang and Haifeng, Reference Wang and Haifeng2021). Bisphenols have been unmasked as endocrine disrupting chemicals causing issues such as obesity, diabetes and precocious puberty (Naomi et al., Reference Naomi, Yazid, Bahari, Keong, Rajandram, Embong, Teoh and Halim2022). The European Union (EU) is now preparing to ban Bisphenol A in food packaging (di Mambro, Reference Mambro2024), but it should be emphasised that the dangers of this chemical were clear before 2011 and bans have been very slow to come into force. Delays put public health at much higher risk.

When such findings are paired with reports showing the pervasiveness of microplastics in the human body, alarm bells should be ringing. Regardless of the patchwork legislative framework introduced by individual countries globally to tackle plastic pollution, we must acknowledge that plastic production continues to rise unabated. We need to ask how this has happened.

Our bodies were never designed to come into contact with the chemicals in plastics and survive unharmed. We must make prevention a priority, and take a precautionary principle to the creation of novel (chemical) entities, rather than relying on the reaction. We have had evidence on plastics’ health impact for years. With healthcare a leading issue for politicians globally, the financial cost alone, if not the human cost, should alert every legislative house.

Underhand tactics

Patterns of deceit and disruption are not a new phenomenon for global industry. The plastics industry, often referred to as “Big Plastic” (a term encompassing major petrochemical corporations and plastic manufacturers that dominate the global market), has been using the same playbook that Big Tobacco relied on from the 20th century onwards to deflect blame for pollution to consumers.

Grant Ennis, in “Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Undermines Our Health and the Environment” identifies nine frames in this playbook: denialism, post-denialism, normalisation, the silver boomerang, magic, treatment, individualisation, the knotted web and the multifactorial frame (Ennis, Reference Ennis2023). Big Tobacco used such tactics to divert attention from the industry’s profiteering deceit, which was eventually addressed in the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (Centre for Tobacco and Public Health, n.d.) and the United States v. Philip Morris case in 2006 (Tobacco Control Legal Consortium, 2006).

The plastics industry has been adopting these frames to the letter since its early days. Post-denialism can be observed in the industry’s shift from outright denial of the negative impacts of plastics to the active promotion of them as purely beneficial in early advertising campaigns (Dahlsad, Reference Dahlsad2016). The individualisation frame shifts responsibility to consumers, encouraging eco-conscious behaviours like recycling (Ennis, Reference Ennis2024).

Adding insult to injury, Big Plastic has pushed consumers to embrace the unfounded notion that recycling is a long-term, environmentally sound solution that allows for business as usual. However, in February 2024, the Centre for Climate Integrity published a document revealing that for decades, the plastics industry has been promoting recycling with the knowledge that it can never be an economically or technically viable long-term solution, largely due to the chemical complexities of recycling plastics (The Centre for Climate Integrity, 2024).

Of all the plastic ever produced, only 9% has been recycled through traditional mechanical recycling (United Nations Environment Programme, 2021). Chemical recycling, now being peddled by Big Plastic as a solution despite its yield of only 10%, has been found to have 100 times more damaging environmental and climate impacts than virgin plastic production (Beyond Plastics and International Pollutants Elimination Network, 2023). Recycled plastics often contain higher levels of chemicals such as toxic flame retardants, benzene and other carcinogens; environmental pollutants including brominated and chlorinated dioxins; and numerous endocrine disruptors that can cause changes to the body’s natural hormone levels only making the plastic health crisis worse (Greenpeace, 2024).

With its tactics of deceit, Big Plastic has come to violate basic human rights across the globe, leaving no one protected against this vicious pandemic of production. Article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948), Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and World Health Organisation, n.d.) and Article 24 of the UN Convention on Rights of a Child (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and World Health Organisation, n.d.) provide a legal basis for the right to health. The immoral tactics of old, mixed with the aforementioned seismic impact of plastic on each human, mean that plastic violates each of these cornerstone legal principles.

In the Global South, plastic waste exports from the Global North are “fuelling organised crime, working conditions that amount to human rights violations and devastation to human health and the environment” (Environmental Investigation Agency, 2024). This waste colonialism is crippling but those in the Global North should not rest easy in the misconception that they are safe. Unlike tobacco, where individuals can choose to avoid exposure, plastic is unavoidable. We cannot choose not to breathe, not to eat, not to drink water. This right has been taken from us by the omnipresence of plastic and its many chemicals. Even as we grow in our mother’s womb, our bodies are attacked (Miller et al., Reference Miller, Keenan-Devlin, Freedman, Odom-Konja, Ernst, Cole and Borders2025).

But if we do consider Big Plastic and Big Tobacco bedfellows, history provides a useful barometer of what is needed to help cure the plastic health epidemic. In 2003, the WHO adopted the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, to reduce tobacco consumption globally and emphasise “the right of all people to the highest standard of health” (World Health Organisation, 2003). A similar framework is needed to address the plastic epidemic and restore balance.

Solutions

Ultimately, legislation drives a change. Robust legal frameworks provide certainty for businesses, offering a clear roadmap for compliance and innovation while creating risk for those who fail to act. In the Global North, EU’s Directive on single-use plastics, including the banning of cotton buds and single-use cutlery, one example. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) programmes in California, Colorado, Maine, another. However, while such measures can help catalyse innovation and shift the market, stronger legislation is needed to establish accountability and open the door to greater litigation and, as a result, risk. It is within an evolving legal landscape that lawsuits against Big Plastic have already begun to emerge, such as those targeting Danone (McVeigh, Reference McVeigh2023), PepsiCo (Oi, Reference Oi2023) and Exxon Mobil (Noor, Reference Noor2024).

I urge investors, Chief Executives of businesses and insurers to reflect on the findings that plastic production poses a $100 billion annual risk to global businesses by 2040 and near-term corporate liabilities from plastic-related chemicals in the United States alone is expected to exceed $20 billion (2022–2030) (Minderoo Foundation (2022)). Risk creates a change. This change is currently voluntary in reality. When industry delays this choice, then policymakers must do it for them.

A UN Global Plastics Treaty would help unify standards and accountability through legislation, pointing to its importance, but negotiations have predictably been subject to intense lobbying from Big Plastic to water down provisions to ensure production is not hindered. At negotiations in Ottawa, the Plastic Health Council launched The Health Scientists’ Global Plastics Treaty (Myers et al., Reference Myers, Vethaak, Collins and Melgert2023). Written by scientists out of sheer frustration at Treaty processes that continued to ignore the irrefutable impact on human health, it outlines a clear path for the Treaty negotiators – an alternative to the zero-draft treaty that still favoured recycling and rarely mentioned the imperative to protect human health.

The Health Scientists’ Treaty included clear but ambitious targets – the removal of subsidies to plastic manufacturers; the reduction of virgin plastic production by 70% by 2040; the requirement of proper testing of chemicals in plastics and elimination of all chemicals of concern; immediate investment into safe and sustainable plastic replacements; the banning of the sale of products containing unnecessary plastic by 2030 (Plastic Health Council, n.d.). All key elements that provide a roadmap to a future free from the toxic impact of plastic.

Using materials that are truly natural and able to return to the earth after use, and not as a result, is an achievable goal for any corporation. Returnable packaging sold in a 21st-century rewards-centric system, a re-evaluation of aesthetics and good design are needed. We have normalised single use to such a degree that we have forgotten the joy of owning things of beauty, durability and constant usefulness.

We must decouple ourselves from the model of take, make, waste that has been force-fed to society to transition to a model of treasuring resources. But design and common sense will not be enough; it is the creation of financial risk through legislation and litigation that will deliver us to this point.