🌅 The Health Costs of Plastics

SOURCE

The Lancet Countdown on Health and Plastics

WHAT TO KNOW

• An international team of experts just delivered a sobering warning in no uncertain terms: “Plastics are a grave, growing, and under-recognised danger to human and planetary health.” The new review published in The Lancet found the world is facing a “plastics crisis” primarily driven by a massive acceleration in global plastic production, which has grown from 2 megatonnes in 1950 to a staggering 475 megatonnes in 2022. Production is expected to nearly triple by 2060, reaching more than a billion metric tons of plastic produced each year.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Plastics cause death and disease across all stages of human life, costing the world more than $1.5 trillion each year in health-related economic losses. Less than 10% of all plastic is recycled and more than 8 billion metric tons now pollutes the Earth from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest point in the ocean.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• The warning was published ahead of a U.N. conference in Geneva that was intended to be the final round of negotiations toward a binding global treaty to address the plastics crisis originally announced in 2022. Instead, the talks failed once again, and representatives are now working to find a date and location for another meeting.