The torrent of man-made chemical and plastic waste worldwide has massively exceeded limits safe for humanity or the planet, and production caps are urgently needed scientists have concluded for the first time.
There are an estimated 350,000 different manufactured chemicals on market and large volumes of them end up in the environment.
“The impacts that we’re starting to see today are large enough to be impacting crucial functions of planet Earth and its systems”, Bethanie Almroth, co-author of a new study told AFP in an interview.
The study, by the Stockholm Resilience Center, comer ahead of a UN meeting in Nairobi at the end of the month on tacking plastic pollution “from source to sea”, UN Environment Program head Inger Andresen said.
Chemicals and plastics are affecting biodiversity, piling additional stressed ecosystems.
Pesticides kill living organisms indiscriminately and plastics are ingested by living things.
“Some chemicals are interfering with hormone system, disrupting growth, metabolism and reproduction in wildlife,” Carney Almorth said.
While greater efforts are needed to prevent these substances being released into the environment, scientists are now pushing for more drastic solution, such as production caps.
Recycling has so far yielded only mediocre results.
Less then 10 percent of the world’s plastic is currently recycled, even as production has doubled to 367 million tones since 2000.
Today, the total weight of plastic on earth is now four times the biomass of all living animals, according to recent studies.