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By Aidan Charron
By now, you’d practically have to be living on Mars not to have heard about the health risks associated with plastics and the toxic chemical cocktail used to produce them.
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Plastics producers face potential wave of lawsuits, report suggests
By Dana Drugmand
As scientific understanding and public awareness of the health and environmental harms of plastics pollution continues to mount, plastics producers and plastic packaging manufacturers could face a rising tide of lawsuits from communities and states seeking to recover damage costs, a new report suggests.
Baby bottle makers deceived parents over dangers of plastic products, lawsuits allege
By Carey Gillam
Two US baby bottle makers have been engaging in a “campaign of reckless deceit” about the dangers microplastics in their products pose to infants and young children, according to a new lawsuits filed Tuesday.
Postcard from California: The global plastics crisis is a threat to human health
By Bill Walker
Last April, an annual assessment of the clarity of Lake Tahoe found it was the clearest it had been since the 1980s. But just months later, scientists reported that the iconic alpine lake straddling the California-Nevada border had alarming levels of a nearly invisible form of pollution: microplastics.
Plastics pose broad health risks for babies, report reveals
By Shannon Kelleher
Everyday plastics may affect many major organs in babies and young children, posing a wide variety of serious health risks as they develop, according to a new report that reviewed 120 recent studies.
An “urgency to this” – microplastics posing human health risks, report warns
By Carey Gillam
Growing plastic pollution not only poses a threat to wildlife and the environment, but increasingly also to human health due to pervasive microscopic plastic particles that people are ingesting through their diet, according to a research report released Monday.
These microplastics appear to be contributing to fertility problems and poor respiratory health, and to induce biological changes that can lead to cancer in the digestive track, according to the findings.
Microplastics – generally defined as particles smaller than 5 mm (5,000 microns) – result from the breakdown of larger plastic products as well as from the manufacture of miniscule plastics used in cosmetics, industrial cleaners and other products. Most first-generation plastics are made from fossil fuels.
Though there is little research on the human health impacts of microplastics, human exposure has been well documented in recent years. Microplastics have been found in stool samples of people around the world as well as in blood samples and in human lungs.
“There is an urgency to this,” said Tracey Woodruff, professor and director of the University of California San Francisco’s Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment (PRHE), which helped lead the review of nearly 2,000 studies that formed the basis for the new report.
“The science around plastics in general is kind of in its early period,” Woodruff said. “We suspect we’re just going to continue to find more problems with these microplastics. It’s not surprising that something that is made up of chemicals that are toxic would be toxic to human health.”
The report, titled “Microplastics Occurrence, Health Effects, and Mitigation Policies: An Evidence Review for the California State Legislature,” was developed at the request of the California Senate Committee on Environmental Quality and the Assembly Committee on Natural Resources.
The work was done through the California State Policy Evidence Consortium (CalSPEC), an initiative that taps various University of California experts to produce reports on topics of concern for the state legislature.