A pile of plastic waste in Vietnam's northern Hung Yen province in November, 2025.NHAC NGUYEN/AFP/Getty Images
“There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?” is a memorable line from the classic 1967 movie The Graduate.
Almost six decades later, the admonition to think about plastics is more timely and urgent than ever. But not because of the business opportunity – instead, it’s because of the growing realization that plastics are having an adverse impact on our health.
“Plastics are a grave, growing, and under-recognized danger to human and planetary health,” a recently published study in The Lancet medical journal stated bluntly. “Plastics cause disease and death from infancy to old age and are responsible for health-related economic losses exceeding US$1.5-trillion annually.”
Think about it, indeed.
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Globally, more than 450 million tonnes of plastics are manufactured each year. Annual production has grown 400-fold since the Second World War, and is expected to hit a staggering 1.2 trillion tonnes by 2060.
What are all those plastics used for? Water bottles, tires, computers, food packaging, medical equipment, airplane parts, shampoos, and just about any other product you can imagine.
It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary plastics have been, facilitating incredible advances in many fields: Medicine, engineering, food production, electronics, aerospace, and more.
But the same qualities that make plastics useful – namely, their strength and durability – make them difficult to dispose of.
Plastics are essentially immortal. They end up in landfills and waterways, and in the air.
The majority of plastics end up being burned, while most of the rest pile up in the environment. It is estimated that the equivalent amount of a garbage truck full of plastics are dumped into oceans every minute of every day.
Despite our dutifully putting plastic waste out by the curb, very little of it is recycled – less than 10 per cent. It goes to the dump instead. That’s because plastic recycling is technically difficult and economically unviable. Let’s not forget, either, that plastics are made using fossil fuels. The plastic-manufacturing process releases about two gigatons of CO2 and other greenhouse-gas emissions into the atmosphere annually, contributing to climate change.
So, in addition to the planetary harm, what is all this doing to the health of humans, and other mammals?
In recent years, there has been growing interest in microplastics and nanoplastics, the tiny and often invisible bits of plastic that seep and ooze into our air, water, and food.
Author and climate activist Assaad Razzouk calls microplastics the “mother of all oil spills.”
While it can take thousands of years for plastic to fully degrade, tiny microparticles are continually shed, especially when plastics are heated or burned.
One study, commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund, estimated that the average person inadvertently consumes up to five grams of plastic weekly – the equivalent of eating a credit card. (Some scientists have challenged the methodology, but the image remains a powerful one.)
Research suggests microplastics are accumulating in our brains (and other organs), and are common in breast milk and our bloodstreams. Animal research suggests exposure to microplastics can affect fertility and cognitive ability, and increase cancer risk, to name only a few worries.
There are, after all, more than 16,000 chemicals used in the manufacture of plastics. Some of them are toxic and carcinogenic; the potential impacts of many others are unknown.
The fossil-fuel and plastics industries argue there is no hard evidence that microplastics actually harm the health of people – the same arguments used by Big Tobacco to justify selling cigarettes, and by Big Oil to dismiss the impacts of climate change.
The ultimate impact on human health is unclear because this sort of research is extremely complex, but it’s certainly not good.
There are certainly ways to mitigate the harms being caused by plastics and microplastics. Chief among them is reducing the unnecessary use of plastic products, particularly single-use plastics. Do we really need to produce 500 million bottles of water each year?
We could drastically reduce the use of plastic additives that are clearly harmful, like the widely used Bisphenol A (BPA), the chemical DEHP phthalate (which helps makes plastics more flexible), and the group of flame-retardant ethers known as PBDEs. We could also get a lot better at recycling, which principally requires better sorting.
“Plastics are the defining material of our age,” The Lancet has stated. As a result, plastics and microplastics are found everywhere, from the depths of the ocean to the highest mountains.
How we address the ubiquity of plastics, and their unintended consequences, will define the health of humanity, and the planet, in the years to come.