Pissed about plastic

The global plastics treaty that isn’t

The sixth round of negotiations on a UN global plastics treaty just wrapped on August 14, with absolutely nothing to show for it. Work on the treaty began in 2022 and was supposed to be completed by the end of 2024. But after talks deadlocked last year, they resumed this past month, where they met the same fate. The sticking point this time was whether or not to include production limits on plastics. Present at these talks were representatives from 184 countries, over 100 of which expressed support for some amount of production control. The powerful minority, including the US, wants to limit the scope to just waste management and reuse, rather than paring back plastics production or addressing harmful chemicals used in production processes. That’s because limiting plastics production necessarily means limiting fossil fuel production. The treaty requires consensus. That protocol has allowed for the large majority of member states’ agreement to be discarded due to the minority of wealthy oil states’ objections. The decision-making structure needs to change if anything is to be accomplished. The disheartening outcome is that there are no agreed upon next steps for action, not even a date set for more talks. 11 days of talks, after 3 years of efforts, have produced no tangible results.

The reasons plastics are bad are as numerous as the microplastics we consume in a week (which is about 2,327 for Americans, by the way). It’s commonly understood that plastics pose a serious waste problem and dire threats to marine and wildlife. The focus here is on an underdiscussed element of their deplorableness, and also the one closest to home – the human health impacts from plastic. Particularly the health impacts on women.

How plastics are made

From production to consumption to waste disposal, plastics are harmful to human health (I would call it ‘life cycle,’ but that implies plastic eventually decomposes, which it never does).

To understand the harmful health effects of plastic, one must know how plastic is made. Plastic is made from oil, gas, and coal, also known as fossil fuels. The raw fossil fuel is extracted, heated and refined, broken down into monomers, converted into polymers, and then melted and mixed with various blends of materials. Those ‘various blends of materials’ are chemical concoction additives, varying based on desired goals for the product – from color, to UV-resistance, to flame retardance, to pliability, and more. Of these chemicals that have been researched and commonly found in plastic products, many are known to be toxic.    

How plastics affect our health

Microplastics are tiny particles of plastic that are smaller than 5 millimeters.

We’ve probably all seen the headlines (of how many microplastics we have in our brains, blood, organs, etc). In the past 5 years especially, these disturbing studies have been piling up. We can confidently say that microplastics have infiltrated every environment on Earth (even the most remote places you can imagine), and every organ in every human body. Scientists have found that they populate the air, our water, our food, our clothes, our cosmetics and personal care products. It’s actually impossible for researchers to conduct a true randomized control study because there are no discoverable beings that have not been exposed to microplastics, that could suitably serve as a control group. Even the first poop of a newborn just after birth has been found to be majorly contaminated with microplastics. 

There are four main plastic chemicals that scientists understand well so far: phenols (BPA, BPS, BPF), phthalates, PFAS (forever chemicals), and parabens. Microplastics and their chemicals make their way into our bodies through products on our skin, through the water we drink, and through the air we breathe. Plastics leach chemicals into our food when heated. In a powerful demonstration of plastic chemical ubiquity, at the recently treaty talks, IPEN (International Pollutants Elimination Network) “placed chemical-detecting wristbands on U.N. officials, delegates from Latin America and Europe, and waste workers, and found that everyone was exposed to at least 26 of the 73 plastic chemicals they tested for, with much more chemical exposure for the waste workers.” (Grist).

Researchers have repeatedly found microplastics to be strongly associated with: increased risk of cancers, pregnancy complications, pre-term birth, reproductive abnormalities and fertility issues in all genders, genetic damage, vascular diseases, endometriosis, ovarian cysts, respiratory diseases, stroke, heart attack, neurological impacts on babies and toddlers, resistance to chemotherapy treatments, early puberty, inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes. Even just touching paper receipts can be harmful because they’re coated with BPA. Imagine if every plastic product had to have a fast-talk legal disclaimer about all the negative health effects, like prescription drug ads do. It’d be the longest disclaimer ever. It might even convince people to seriously cut back on plastic.

It’s so perilous because tiny microplastics are invisible to the human eye. We can’t see the harm it’s causing us. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade – it only breaks down endlessly into smaller and smaller pieces. That quality makes plastics especially dangerous because the smaller the microplastic, the deeper it can entrench into your body. And as they break down, they release those toxic chemicals. Further, the chemicals in plastic are lipophilic. That means they combine with and attract other harmful oil-based chemicals, so when they pass from creature to creature, the toxic effect is compounded! 

There is so, so much more unknown than known about the harmful effects of plastic. We will be uncovering the true and full extent of plastic and its chemical additives much slower than the harm they are doing, and slower even than new varieties of plastics are being developed. “It’s a bigger job than researchers, studying one compound at a time, can hope to finish,” as Eve Andrews put it in 2019. All we can know is that the massive body of evidence for plastic’s negative health impacts is surely a gross understatement.

Why women are more affected

Women and people with female reproductive systems are disproportionately impacted by the harmful effects of plastics. At the same time, we know less medically about female bodies than male bodies, which is a huge problem.

The endocrine system controls your body’s hormones, which oversee growth and development. It’s a very sensitive system in which small disruptions can have huge impacts in a body’s development, and female bodies are more sensitive to hormonal changes. We have known that chemicals in plastics are endocrine disruptors since the 1990s. “There are more than 16,000 chemicals used in plastics manufacturing, and over 1,000 industrial chemicals used today are suspected endocrine-disrupting chemicals” (Scientific American). 

The more body fat a person has, the more toxins their body stores. Since women and people assigned female at birth naturally have more body fat, this means they are more polluted. 

Pregnant people and fetuses are especially vulnerable. Pregnant people are cursed with the burden of passing on the effects of microplastics to the next generations. Every year, babies are and will continue to be more polluted before they are even born, because every year plastic pollution in our world continues to increase. Since fetuses are still developing, they are acutely vulnerable to the impacts of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, including abnormal organ development, which may not be discovered until later in life with a diagnosis such as cancer.

Certain industries are more exposed. In a lot of the world, jobs like waste pickers, cleaners, salon workers and hairstylists are dominated by women. Workers in those jobs are also uniquely exposed to these chemicals.

Additionally, women tend to use more cosmetic and skincare products and perfume. A lot of plastic is absorbed into the skin through these products. Speaking of personal care products, menstrual products are another huge source of toxic, endocrine-disrupting chemicals – that damage health through particularly direct contact with female sex organs. The most common tampon and pads brands are made with a ton of plastic, pesticides, and harmful chemicals. The average pad contains the equivalent of four plastic bags’ worth of plastic.

Not just women, but particularly BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) and low-income women are affected the most by the dangers of plastic. These populations experience the effects not only in the exposure to chemicals through plastic products, but also commonly in the plastics production process and the waste process. Where the vast majority of plastic waste ends up is in landfills and incinerators. Landfills and incinerators are disproportionately located near BIPOC communities, for example, so they breathe in far more toxic air, including all these plastic chemicals.

Our institutions aren’t protecting us

Since 5 years ago, the USDOE has been corrupted by the priorities of the plastics industry. As Exxon Knews and Grist reported earlier this year, The Energy Department pledged in a memo to collaborate with a plastics industry trade association called the ACC. Specifically, to fund and focus on research surrounding “chemical recycling,” which seeks to chemically break down plastics in order to endlessly create more plastic products. These are processes that are not yet viable and point to a self-serving notion that if plastics can be recycled in this way, the need to tamp down plastic production is eliminated. As an example, one chemical recycling project that received Biden administration funding was for an ACC chemical company guilty of repeat offenses to the Clean Air Act. By choosing to support and prioritize cleanup and recycling of plastics over reducing production and toxic impacts, the Department of Energy has reinforced the same ideas that have led to multiple standstills of the UN global plastics treaty.

Regulations to protect people from the chemicals used in plastic manufacturing are few and far between in the US. So much more is needed to shield people from these horrifying dangers, especially for women and pregnant people.

Rightly so, the plastics crisis is increasingly framed as a human rights issue. Grist has traced this back to a 2021 UN report by Marcos Orellana, who recommended human rights be prominently incorporated into a legally binding global treaty (the one that just got stalled again).

As Winters points out, “Most countries already have an obligation to support these rights, if they’ve signed onto agreements like the U.N.’s International Bill of Human Rights. Mentioning them in the treaty is a way to remind policymakers of what they have to do to uphold those existing commitments.” 

The fact that it’s now impossible for anyone to opt out of a toxic environment is staggering and infuriating. So is the fact that no amount of consumer consciousness can bring peace of mind of inhabiting a body free from plastic pollution. We are forced to reckon with the fact that simply existing without plastic and its chemicals contaminating our organs is not an achievable reality today or anytime soon. Entrenched plastic pollution all around us and all within our bodies is a free will issue, a human rights issue, a women’s rights issue, a reproductive justice issue, an obvious violation of classic freedom. It’s estimated that annually the world makes over 400 million tons of new plastic, a number that could grow by about 70% by 2040 if business as usual is allowed to continue (AP News). We need real enforcement mechanisms to curb plastic production and associated additive chemicals, global plastics treaty or not. Otherwise, it only gets worse.