Plastic's Health Impacts Are Becoming Impossible To Ignore
Judith Enck | July 6, 2023 | Newsweek
Plastic has been creeping into our food, our air, our water, and our bodies for decades now, with most people blissfully unaware of its presence and health risks. But two catastrophes in the past six months suddenly made it impossible to ignore how plastic affects Americans' lives, health, and future.
The catastrophes I'm referring to are the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment and the smoke from Canadian wildfires that enveloped U.S. cities for days. If you're not already aware—and many aren't—these two moments have everything to do with plastic. Let me explain.
The train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, in February was carrying vinyl chloride—a chemical used for one purpose: making polyvinyl chloride plastic, known as PVC plastic. Following the derailment, authorities ordered five train cars of vinyl chloride to be openly burned. When vinyl chloride burns, it rains down new chemical mixtures—including dioxins, some of the most highly toxic chemicals known to science. There's no "safe" dose for humans. The government allowed residents to return to the evacuation zone a mere two days later. Residents reported everything from rashes and headaches to the death of pets, and they're still fighting for long-term health monitoring and relocation. The people of East Palestine deserve so much better.
Fast forward to June and July, when New York City and other parts of the East Coast were enveloped in a thick cloud of smoke that produced an air quality index considered "unhealthy" to "hazardous." Many residents were instructed to remain indoors and wear masks if they ventured out.
The smoke came from wildfires raging throughout Canada. Less discussed was the fact that this dystopian experience was linked to plastic production. A May 2023 peer-reviewed study found that nearly 40 percent of the burned forest area in Western Canada and the United States can be attributed to 88 major fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, including Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell—some of the primary corporations behind plastic production. The extraction and burning of fossil fuels—a key ingredient in plastic—have contributed to higher temperatures and amplified dry conditions in Canada, thereby increasing the amount of land burned by wildfires.
These two moments should be a wake-up call to everyone: plastic is a threat to our health, communities, climate, and environment. The East Palestine disaster and the Canadian wildfire smoke were just the latest displays of plastic's impacts on human health. The reality, as explained in a recent report published in the Annals of Global Health by the Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health, is that we're all being exposed to plastic's toxic ingredients every single day—even without train derailments or wildfire smoke.
According to the report, we are exposed to plastic additives that leach out of our everyday plastic-packaged products—think of your to-go coffee cup (often lined with plastic), grocery store purchases, single-use plastic beverage bottles, or even tea bags. Ironically, the plastic packaging used to protect food is also a source of chemical contamination to that food.
Chemicals are added to plastic to give it properties like pliability, durability, fire-resistance, and color. Many of these chemicals are known to be hazardous to human health and put us at risk of cancer, nervous system damage, obesity, infertility, and more.
And that's just the devil we know. Perhaps even more disturbing is the devil we don't. Of the 13,000 chemicals associated with plastic, over 6,000 have insufficient data to determine their human or environmental impacts. Of the 7,000 chemicals that do have sufficient data, nearly half have one or more hazardous properties of concern.
Some people face higher odds of adverse health effects than others, according to Minderoo. Unborn babies and young children are particularly vulnerable to plastic-related health impacts, with risks including prematurity, stillbirth, impaired lung growth, and childhood cancer. Workers in plastic production and plastic waste also suffer unusually high rates of certain diseases.
We need policies to protect low-income communities and communities of color where plastic production plants and waste disposal facilities are typically (and intentionally) built. Those residents suffer more than most. For example, big businesses have built petrochemical plants along an 85-mile stretch of Louisiana consisting mostly of Black and low-income communities. This "petrochemical corridor" has earned the moniker "Cancer Alley" because its cancer rates are higher than the U.S. average.
Americans are already feeling plastic's impact on their environment, climate, communities, and health—and it will only get worse as plastic production increases. We need local, state, national, and global policies to curb this growing crisis.
It's critical that the U.S. join the majority of the world's countries in setting binding plastic-reduction goals to reduce the production, use, and disposal of plastics. There are viable alternatives to most plastics. Recent polling has revealed that over 80 percent of American voters want governmental policies to reduce plastics. There is bipartisan support for action. The only thing missing is the political leadership to make it happen. Our health is at risk and the time to act is now.
Judith Enck is a former regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and is currently a professor at Bennington College and president of Beyond Plastics.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
