Plastics crisis poses 'grave and growing' health risk

Plastics are a "grave, growing and under-recognised danger" to human and planetary health, an expert review has warned.

- Damian Carrington

Plastics are a "grave, growing and under-recognised danger" to human and planetary health, an expert review has warned. The world is in a "plastics crisis", it concludes, which is causing disease and death from infancy to old age and is responsible for at least $1.5tn (£1.1tn) a year in health-related damages.

The driver of the crisis is a huge acceleration of plastic production, which has increased by more than 200 times since 1950 and is set to almost triple to more than a billion tonnes a year by 2060. The most rapid increase has been in the production of single-use items, such as drinks bottles and fast-food containers.

As a result, plastic pollution has also soared, with 8bn tonnes now polluting the entire planet, the review says, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10% of plastic is recycled.

Plastics endanger people and the planet at every stage, the review says, from the extraction of the fossil fuels they are made from, to production, use and disposal.

This results in air pollution, exposure to toxic chemicals, and infiltration of the body with microplastics.