With a mix of 350,000 synthetic artificial products and large quantities released directly or indirectly into the environment or environment, Bethany Carney Almroth, one of the authors of the Stockholm Sustainability Center study, said in a agency interview. France-Presse: “The effects we are beginning to see are large enough to affect the delicate functions of the planet and its ecosystems.”
The study precedes a UN study later this month in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, to launch talks on plastic pollution “from source to sea”.
While every effort is needed to prevent these substances from entering the environment, the scale of the problem compels scientists to seek more drastic solutions, such as caping production.
This need arises especially when the results of recycling efforts are modest, since the share of plastic recycled in the world, for example, is less than 10%, and production has doubled since 2000. and is currently at 367 million tons.
According to scientific studies, plastic on Earth is currently four times the size of the biomass of all living animals.
“We’re trying to say that maybe enough is enough and we couldn’t be more tolerant of what’s happening,” explains the Swedish researcher. Perhaps there should be restrictions on production, that is, stop production when a certain level is reached.
For many years, the Stockholm Center for Sustainability has been conducting reference research on “planetary limits” in nine areas, including climate change, freshwater use and ocean acidity.
From this study, the institute seeks to determine whether humanity is in a permanent “safety zone” or, conversely, it has crossed the border in a way that threatens the future of the planet.
And “new entities”, that is, artificial chemical products (such as plastics, antibiotics or pesticides), as well as metals in their anomalous concentration, remain the subject of unresolved issues.
“We are just beginning to understand the significant long -term implications of this impact,” he said.
In addition to the large number of these products for which risk data is still not available or subject to the principle of industrial secrecy, they are relatively new in nature (since the industrial era), in contrast to other criteria included in the studies. under “Planetary boundaries”, which can be compared to ten thousand years or more.
From pesticides that kill living organisms indiscriminately, ingestion of plastic by living organisms, exposure to hormones or reproductive effects… Chemical pollution threatens the environment through physical and biological damage process on which life depends, a phenomenon exacerbated when a product is capable of enduring for a long time.
“There are 350,000 different materials,” Carney Almrott said. We don’t know anything about most of them, their production volume, their stability, their impact on the environment, or their toxicity. ” “We know the nature of some of them,” he said. But we know nothing about most of them.
Even the most comprehensive database, such as Reach in the European Union, only includes 150,000 products, of which only a third are subject to in-depth risk studies.
With spaces in mind, the team focused on what was known, and those micronutrients were enough to make a disturbing conclusion.
A scientist from the Swedish University of Gothenburg (Gothenburg) said that “by collecting all these scattered elements and linking them to the evolution of time (…) we can say that all the signs point in fact we are going. in the wrong direction. ”
The 14 study preparation participants felt that “time does not allow this situation to change, but immediate and ambitious steps are needed at the global level.”
