Plastic Pollution Pushes Earth Beyond All Nine Planetary Boundaries: Report

“Plastic pollution exacerbates the impact of all (nine) planetary boundaries,” warns A report published this month in the magazine One Earth ahead of what could be the final United Nations summit to hammer out an international treaty to tackle the global plastics crisis. That meeting, known as INC-5in Busan, South Korea, takes place from Monday, November 25 to Sunday, December 1.

The planetary boundary framea hypothesis created in 2009 and updated several times since by an international group of scientists, seeks to identify the safe limits of human activities that affect Earth systems. Beyond those safe boundaries – also known as the “safe operating space for humanity” – the planet’s natural processes can destabilize, degrade, stop self-regulating or even collapse, creating an extreme and hostile environment for life as we know it. Since this year, so have human activities six of the nine limits were exceeded.

The fifth of these boundaries to be violated, scientists note, was the boundary of new entitieswhich one was determined crossed in 2022. New entities include man-made chemicals and other synthetic entities added to the natural environment.

One of the most pervasive new entities today is plastic. Globally, 500 million tons of plastic are produced annually, but only 9% is recycled, says the One Earth research article. Plastics are persistent and do not break down. And some plastics, along with many of their additives, are toxic to life.

Plastic has been found everywhere on Earth – from the deepest oceans to high mountains, in clouds and from pole to pole. Microplastics have also been found everywhere in the human body where scientists look for them, from the brain to the testes, breast milk and artery plaque. Microplastics pose health risks for humans and wildlife, researchers warn.

The myriad harmful impacts of plastic occur throughout the petrochemical supply chain, from resource extraction to production and uncontrolled release into the environment during use and disposal. As a result, these ubiquitous new entities contribute to the destabilization of all other planetary boundaries: climate change, ocean acidification, altered nitrogen and phosphorus fluxes, loss of biosphere integrity, freshwater change, land system change, atmospheric aerosol load and ozone in the stratosphere. exhaustion.

“It is necessary to consider the entire life cycle of plastics, starting from the extraction of fossil fuels and the production of primary plastic polymers,” says Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, lead research article author at the Stockholm Resilience Center. Her research uses a social-ecological approach to focus on the global challenge of plastic pollution.

The report’s authors, an international group including researchers from Sweden, Denmark and the US, reviewed the scientific literature and found causal links between plastics and many other environmental problems. For example, plastic production already contributes significantly to climate change and is responsible for an estimated 12% of total oil demand and 8.5% of total natural gas demand. Plastics production could be responsible for half of global oil consumption by 2050.

Plastics also directly contribute to the loss of biosphere integrity. Marine organisms and microbial communities are exposed to plastic’s many hazardous ingredients and contaminants, while important species such as whales and seabirds become entangled in or ingest plastic, leading to behavioral changes and often death.

Plastic has traditionally been considered a safe, inert, unique material. But plastics number in the many thousands and represent a hugely diverse, collective soup of chemicals (including the chemicals used to make it and the additives that give plastics different properties, such as flexibility and color). These additives – many of which are toxic – migrate back into the environment throughout the life cycle of plastic, while the plastic itself breaks down into microplastics, which can spread across the planet.

The report uses the term deliberately plastic pollution to draw attention to how the impact of these synthetic materials extends far beyond just visible litter. “Treating plastics as pollutants rather than just litter implies the need for deeper and systemic changes, with a broader view of pollutants and their toxic effects, especially as many of them are persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic,” the authors write. authors.

With the fifth and hopefully final negotiations for one international plastic treaty The authors of the report, which launched this week in Busan, have called for urgent action to regulate the production and disposal of plastic, as well as more systematic research into the chemicals and impacts of plastic.

IPEN, the International Pollutants Elimination Network, released an interactive map November 12, which collects and organizes twenty years of research and data on plastics and plastic chemicals by country, to support the negotiations.

While the Biden administration indicated earlier that the US would support a cap on plastic production last week it has reportedly been reversedweakening the country’s position to embrace policies that allow each country to set its own voluntary production limits.

Banner image: People clean up plastic waste on a beach in Bali, Indonesia. Image by OCG Saving The Ocean via Unsplash (Public domain).

The plastic crisis is now a global human health crisis, experts say

Citations:

Villarrubia-Gómez, P., Carney Almroth, B., Eriksen, M., Ryberg, M., & Cornell., S. E. (2024). Plastic pollution exacerbates the impact of all planetary boundaries. One Earth. doi:10.1016/y.one year 2024.10.017

Persson, L., Carney Almroth, B.M., Collins, C.D., Cornell, S., De Wit, C.A., Diamond, M.L., Hauschild, M.Z. (2022). Outside the safe working space of the planetary boundary for new entities. Environmental sciences and technology, 56(3), 1510-1521. doi:10.1021/acs.est.1c04158

Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, A., Chapin III, FS, Lambin, E.F., … Foley, JA (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature. Retrieved from

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