Opinion: We need a ban on chemical plastics additives that are known or strongly suspected to damage health

What is plastic?

The question isn’t as silly as it sounds. The miraculous substances that suffuse our daily lives are not one material but many, differing wildly in look, feel and function, from the materials in Saran wrap to your kid’s Legos to airplanes. Even two seemingly identical plastics are rarely the same because manufacturers add any number of additives, such as phthalates, flame retardants, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, to imbue their products with additional flexibility, say, or heat resistance. By one estimate, there are at least 16,000 known chemical additives used by the plastics industry, of which at least 4,200 are known to be toxic. And because plastics inevitably break down into microplastics and then nanoplastics, eventually making their way into our lungs, guts, brains and even our unborn children, whatever is in our plastic is in us, too.

This is a high-stakes moment for anyone invested in what plastics might be doing to our health. Beginning this week, representatives from more than 170 countries involved in a United Nations plastics treaty process are gathering in Geneva to try, for the sixth time, to negotiate the first global agreement to regulate the production, consumption and disposal of plastics.

A previous meeting, held in South Korea in December, failed because of disagreements between countries pushing for an ambitious treaty and a group of fossil-fuel-producing nations, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and the United States. Among the causes for discord has been the question of plastics’ impact on human health. This issue should concern all Americans, given the findings of the so-called Make America Healthy Again Commission, which highlighted the potential risks of microplastics, phthalates, PFAS and other plastics additives for children’s health.

Dozens of countries and an independent coalition of scientists want to ban plastics and chemical additives that are known or suspected to harm human health. But Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, has argued that including language on the health impacts of plastics would distract from the treaty’s core focus on pollution. The Trump administration has suggested that it would support only a treaty that protects American business interests.

Exactly what, if anything, plastics are doing to our health remains hotly contested. But the signs aren’t good. Researchers have linked microplastics consumption to an increased risk of cancer, respiratory disorders, bowel disease and male and female infertility. They are also known to trigger inflammation — a precondition for cancer — and possibly interfere with antibiotics. Researchers writing in the British medical journal The Lancet recently declared plastics “a grave, growing and underrecognized danger to human and planetary health.”

That might sound pretty damning, but proving whether microplastics are causing any specific disease is surprisingly hard. For one thing, much of the science on microplastics is relatively new and based on studies of animal or human cells in a lab. As Nicholas Chartres, a senior research fellow who studies microplastics at the University of Sydney Pharmacy School, told me, “You can’t ethically randomize people to be exposed to these chemicals.” Several long-term observational studies are ongoing, but conclusive results may be years away.

In the meantime, the plastics industry has been pushing back hard against the idea that microplastics are a health issue. Lobbyists argue that the risk is overstated and that the early science is misleading.

This aligns with the industry’s seeming attempt to derail or, at the very least, blunt any global plastics treaty. The talks in South Korea were thronged by industry lobbyists, who some attending scientists said had attempted to harass and intimidate them. The industry has started paid advertising campaigns, including paying TikTok influencers to promote plastics’ recyclability. Some producers of plastic products have attempted to sue environmental groups and even the attorney general of California to try to stop them from maligning their products. These tactics recall the playbook used by the oil and gas industry to undermine climate science and the tobacco industry’s efforts to downplay the harms of smoking: defend, delay and sow reasonable doubt.

But even if the jury on microplastics is still out, there is enough evidence of the harmful effects of chemical additives in plastics for the U.N. to act now.

As with microplastics, proving these chemicals are the cause of one person’s cancer or another person’s heart attack is thorny. But in a recent article for the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers wrote that exposures to just three plastics additives — BPA, the phthalate DEHP and the flame retardant PBDE, which collectively have been linked to heart disease and developmental disorders — were associated with approximately 164,000 deaths, 364,000 strokes and 11.7 million lost I.Q. points in 2015. In all, the authors suggested, the health impact costs of just those three chemicals could be $1.5 trillion. “We did try to be conservative,” the lead author, Maureen Cropper at the University of Maryland, told me. “We don’t have data on a third of the world’s population.”

Industry experts have countered studies like these with the claim that even if chemicals in plastics are toxic, most people are exposed at such low levels that their risk is minimal. But plastic production is forecast to triple by 2060. And because plastics can persist for centuries, degrading as they age, existing plastics in our environment — like those in our carpets and tires and pipes and clothing — will continue to leach microplastics for decades to come, acting like a slow-release bomb.

Plastic exposure isn’t an individual choice made by consenting adults. To the contrary, those most exposed are young children. And while you can take steps to reduce plastics in your life, there’s no real way to prevent yourself or your children from eventually being exposed.

The only reasonable step, then, is to adopt the precautionary principle: minimize harm. The U.N. treaty negotiators, then, should ban chemical plastics additives that are known or strongly suspected to damage health. Member states should also force the chemicals industry to publish an independent public database of all known chemical additives, including public and private toxicity data. (The chemicals industry has recently taken limited and voluntary steps to do this, seemingly to avoid being forced to by regulators.)

In the past, attempts at regulating toxic chemicals have been thwarted by a practice known as regrettable substitutions, wherein manufacturers replace one toxic chemical with a nearly identical compound that is often found to have similar health effects or worse. To put a stop to that, the U.N. should agree on a scheme to prevent new plastics and additives from being brought to market without independently verified data proving their safety.

These are huge changes, ones that the industry will try hard to prevent. But there is cause for hope. In the 1970s, when scientists first identified that chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons were depleting the ozone layer, the chemicals industry tried to fight off regulation. But eventually it embraced the ban, using it as an impetus to develop (and make huge profits from) more environmentally friendly alternatives. As a result, the ozone layer is projected to fully recover by the middle of this century.

Right now, we don’t have much choice but to use plastics. But regulating them might be the only chance we get to move toward something better.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis is the author of “Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future” and an editor at GQ. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.