Green Tip: Plastics and Human Health Symposium at NYU

The Palisadian-Post has partnered with locally founded environmental organization Resilient Palisades to deliver a “green tip” to our readers in each newspaper. This edition’s tip was written by Lisa Kaas Boyle, an environmental attorney, co-founder of Plastic Pollution Coalition and member of the Resilient Palisades Zero Waste team.

I am reporting from the Plastics and Human Health Symposium at NYU at the same time the United Nations is meeting to discuss a global plastic pollution treaty. Scientists and policy makers want the public to understand the urgency of turning off the flow of plastics into our environment.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is in New York for these meetings, brought suit against Exxon for allegedly misleading the public about recycling plastic as a solution to plastic pollution.

Plastic has never been recycled above a single digit, and recycled plastic concentrates and creates additional toxic exposure to the chemicals in plastic. So eating and drinking from recycled plastic is an increased human health risk.

We all have plastic pollution in our own tissues, including our brains, from exposures such as eating contaminated seafood, drinking and eating from plastic containers, and even breathing in plastic when it is burned.

The entire lifecycle of plastics manufacturing—from extracting the fossil fuels to make plastic through production, use and waste—is harmful to the environment and human health.

The solution to plastic pollution is in reducing the amount of plastic produced and used. Focus on “cleanup” instead of prevention while production increases is disingenuous at best.

When large companies fund the “Ocean Cleanup,” they are trying to get reporting that makes it seem like there is no need for policy to reduce the amount of plastics we use. These corporations support business as usual as they keep profiting off single-use plastics and packaging.

But those of us engaged in the science and policy realm of solving plastic pollution know that we will never stem the tide of plastic pollution until we stop the enormous flow of plastic and change our packaging and single-use products to be benign to the environment.

Every law that bans a use of plastic, such as plastic bag bans, plastic water bottle bans, the plastic micro-bead ban and laws to eliminate the automatic provision of single-use plastic utensils, helps to reduce the plastic pollution in our oceans and inside us.

We have a long way to go in terms of preventative policy to solve this problem, but hopes are high for a meaningful global treaty at the United Nations that curbs plastic production.