Plastics, the environment and human health: current consensus and future trends

摘要

Plastics have transformed everyday life; usage is increasing and annual production is likely to exceed300 million tonnes by 2010. In this concluding paper to the Theme Issue on Plastics, the Environ-ment and Human Health, we synthesize current understanding of the benefits and concerns sur-rounding the use of plastics and look to future priorities, challenges and opportunities. It isevident that plastics bring many societal benefits and offer future technological and medicaladvances. However, concerns about usage and disposal are diverse and include accumulation ofwaste in landfills and in natural habitats, physical problems for wildlife resulting from ingestionor entanglement in plastic, the leaching of chemicals from plastic products and the potential forplastics to transfer chemicals to wildlife and humans. However, perhaps the most important over-riding concern, which is implicit throughout this volume, is that our current usage is not sustainable.Around 4 per cent of world oil production is used as a feedstock to make plastics and a similaramount is used as energy in the process. Yet over a third of current production is used to makeitems of packaging, which are then rapidly discarded. Given our declining reserves of fossil fuels,and finite capacity for disposal of waste to landfill, this linear use of hydrocarbons, via packagingand other short-lived applications of plastic, is simply not sustainable. There are solutions, includingmaterial reduction, design for end-of-life recyclability, increased recycling capacity, development ofbio-based feedstocks, strategies to reduce littering, the application of green chemistry life-cycleanalyses and revised risk assessment approaches. Such measures will be most effective throughthe combined actions of the public, industry, scientists and policymakers. There is some urgency,as the quantity of plastics produced in the first 10 years of the current century is likely to approachthe quantity produced in the entire century that preceded.