Plastic not only represents a threat to the environment, but also a danger with exorbitant costs to human health. A few days before the opening in Busan (South Korea) of the last round of negotiations on the future international treaty aimed at ending plastic pollution, on November 25, the parliamentary office for the evaluation of scientific and technological options (Opect) sounds the alarm.
In a summary note published on Thursday, November 14, OPECST prepares a complete and worrying inventory of scientific knowledge on “The impacts of plastics on health.” To make recommendations to the treaty negotiators, deputy Philippe Bolo (MoDem, Maine and Loire), co-author, with former senator Angèle Préville, of a first reference report (“Plastic pollution: a delay of the bomb ») In 2020, in mid-October, it organized a hearing with a dozen researchers among the best French and international experts on the health effects of exposure to plastics.
Plastic production has doubled in the last twenty years and is expected to exceed 500 million tonnes in 2024: enough to wrap France 50 times in cling film. According to projections by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, this exponential production should reach one billion tons before 2050, if nothing is done.
It is accompanied by a comparable explosion of waste: it is expected to almost double between 2020 and 2040, to exceed 600 million tonnes. A very small part is recycled (less than 10%), almost half is buried in landfills and 19% is incinerated. The remainder (22%) ends up in the environment as fragments of macroplastics (88%), microplastics (less than 5 millimeters) and nanoplastics (less than 100 nanometers) as it degrades.
Increased risk of stroke
These particles have colonized the entire environment (from the top of Everest to the Mariana Trench, 11,000 meters deep) and all living organisms. There are three routes of human exposure to plastics: diet, skin contact and breathing. A Parisian inhales up to 30 million plastic particles a year. And a plastic water bottle can contain up to 250,000 particles per liter, 90% of which are nanoparticles.
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