Pediatrician Describes Health Risks and Solutions to Country’s Plastics Problem
Mary Lhowe | January 23, 2023 | ecoRI News
A medical doctor and epidemiologist with decades of experience in pollution’s impact on the health of people, animals, and nature reminded a national audience recently that “disease, disability, and death occur across the whole life cycle of plastic,” from production through use and disposal.
The increasingly destructive nature of plastic has become a familiar story in recent years, but the speaker, Philip J. Landrigan, director of Boston College’s Global Public Health Program, tried to soften the dour information with reminders of public actions that have reversed the harms of pollution in the past. Among them: the Clean Air Act of 1970, the banning of DDT, and the removal of lead from gasoline and paint, all from the ’70s.
Further, Landrigan said, some states and communities are now taking up arms against the public health dangers and environmental assaults of plastic with policies like bottle deposit-and-return systems, bans on plastic shopping bags — which the Rhode Island General Assembly passed last year and which takes effect in 2024 — and policies that require manufacturers to help pay for disposal of plastic waste from their products.
Landrigan’s online talk was hosted by Beyond Plastics¸ a Vermont-based advocacy group that disseminates information on harms of and alternatives to plastics.
Production, use, and disposal of plastics for broad consumer use got underway around 1950. At the time, single-use plastics such as tableware were promoted and praised for their throw-away convenience. Plastic production has skyrocketed in recent years as the oil and gas industry see their profits from fossil fuels endangered by more renewable sun and wind energy and the increasing electrification of buildings and transportation.
Landrigan showed a graph illustrating the growth of global plastic production. In 1955, 1.7 million tons of plastic was produced globally; that annual figure rose to more than 400 million tons in 2015.
Plastic is made primarily with fossil fuels, along with thousands of chemical additives, all produced by the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. On the consumer level, the worst offender is single-use plastics such as soda bottles and shopping bags. The use-once-and-discard ethic of single-use plastics like food and consumer goods packaging is “turning our oceans into a watery landfill,” said Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics.
