Health threat of global plastics projected to soar

By AFP
January 26, 2026


The world's addiction to plastic is a 'global public health crisis', a researcher warned - Copyright AFP/File Angelos TZORTZINIS

Daniel Lawler

The threat posed by plastic production, usage and disposal to human health will skyrocket in the coming years unless the world does something to address this global crisis, researchers warned Tuesday.

A British-French team of researchers attempted to cover all the different ways that plastic affects health, from oil and gas extraction during production to all the products that end up in landfills.

However they said that their modelling study still does not take into account an array of other ways plastic could harm health, such as microplastics or chemicals that can leach out of food packaging.

“This is undoubtedly a vast underestimate of the total human health impacts,” lead study author Megan Deeney of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine told AFP.

The study, published in The Lancet Planetary Health, said it was the first to estimate the number of healthy years of life lost due to the lifecycle of plastic worldwide.

The researchers used a measure called DALYs, which represents the number of years lost to either early death or diminished quality of life from illness.

Under a business-as-usual scenario, the number of DALYs caused by plastic was projected to more than double from 2.1 million in 2016 to 4.5 million in 2040.

Planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions from plastic production had the biggest health impact, followed by air pollution and toxic chemicals.

– ‘Public health crisis’ –

Deeney gave the example of a plastic water bottle.

Like more than 90 percent of all plastic, its production begins with the extraction of oil and gas.

A series of chemical processes then transform those fossil fuels into Polyethylene terephthalate — or PET — which the bottle is made from.

Deeney pointed out that a stretch of more than 200 petrochemical plants involved in plastic production in the US state of Louisiana is known as “cancer alley”.

Once made, the plastic bottle is transported across the world to a shop.

Then it gets chucked in the rubbish — or littered.

Despite recycling efforts, most plastic ends up in landfills where it can take centuries to decompose, leaching out chemicals during that time, Deeney said.

The researchers also modelled a scenario where the world tried harder to fight the health effects of plastic.

They found that plastic recycling made little difference.

The most effective measure was reducing the amount of “unnecessary” plastic created in the first place, Deeney said.

Talks to seal a world-first treaty to fight plastic pollution fell apart in August under opposition from oil-producing countries.

However Deeney emphasised that countries can still act at a national level to address this “global public health crisis”.


How to assess microplastics in our bodies? Scientists have a plan

By AFP
January 27, 2026


Scientists have been battling over exactly how much microplastics we have inside us - Copyright AFP/File LOUISA GOULIAMAKI

Daniel Lawler

How many tiny pieces of plastic are currently inside your body?

A series of headline-grabbing studies in the last few years have claimed to have found microplastics throughout human bodies — inside blood, organs and even brains.

However, some of this research — particularly one claiming to have found a plastic spoon’s worth of microplastic in the brains of cadavers — has recently come under stinging criticism from scientists.

Some have warned that the studies could not rule out contamination from plastic inside laboratories, or that certain techniques could be confusing human tissue with plastic.

Seeking a solution to this escalating dispute, 30 scientists from 20 research institutions across the world proposed a new framework on Tuesday for evaluating microplastic research.

The proposal, inspired by how forensic science weighs evidence found at crime scenes, offers researchers a consistent way to communicate how confident they are that microplastic has actually been detected.

No one disputes that these mostly invisible pieces of plastic are ubiquitous throughout the environment — they have been found everywhere from the tops of mountains to the bottom of oceans.

It is also “very likely” that we are regularly ingesting microplastics from air and food, Imperial College London researcher Leon Barron told AFP.

But there is simply not enough evidence yet to say whether they are bad for our health, added the senior author of the new proposal.

– Inside our brains? –

Microplastics — and even smaller nanoplastics — are very difficult to detect.

Yet some research in this new and rapidly expanding field has claimed to have found particles in “less-plausible” areas of the human body, Barron explained.

For example, a study published in Nature Medicine early last year announced it had detected relatively large particles — the researchers claimed it was a plastic spoon’s worth — inside the brains of recently deceased people.

Some scientists were sceptical because this would require the particles to cross the powerful defences of the blood-brain barrier.

Experts have also pointed out that the technique used in the research, which is called pyrolysis-GC-MS, can confuse fat with polyethylene, which is commonly used in plastic packaging. This technique was also used in several other criticised studies.

Matthew Campen, the senior author of the brain study, did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.

Other research has been disparaged for not using proper quality-control measures.

Without these measures, “it is impossible to know whether detected plastics originate from the tissue itself or from containers, chemicals, laboratory equipment or plastic particles present in the air,” researcher Dušan Materić told AFP.

This would mean the results are “simply not scientific”, said the expert at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany.

– Inspired by forensic science –

The new framework proposal, published in the journal Environment & Health, calls for researchers to use several different techniques when looking for microplastics to rule out any potential false positives.

Barron compared the proposal to a framework once agreed among forensic scientists about how to evaluate fibres found in clothes during a criminal investigation.

The idea is to bring “all of the different labs doing this type of work into an aligned language” that expresses how confident they are that they detected microplastic, he said.

The idea is already “starting to gain momentum”, he added.

The proposal requires scientists and journal articles to be transparent about their research, release all the raw data and include quality-control measures.

“To be clear, microplastics are a problem,” Barron emphasised.

All the research conducted thus far has been carried out in good faith, he said, adding that these are relatively normal growing pains for a new scientific field.

But precision is important — to determine whether microplastics are harmful for our health, researchers need to know just how much of them is in our bodies.

If the ongoing scientific debate “derails that effort to try and understand if they’re bad for us, that’s not helpful”, he said.

“Scientists trashing each other in the media is not constructive.”