- PFAS on our shelves and in our bodies
- Fractured
- Exposed: BPA science
- Agents of Change
- Cutting edge of science
- Climate catastrophe in the South
- Cancer risk in Pittsburgh
- PFAS contamination
- Breathless: Childhood asthma
- Peak Pig: The soul of rural America
- Sacred Water
- Winged Warnings
- Pollution, Poverty, People of Color
Top news in Population
From The Web
Featured
Subscribe
to Population
Experts say the report is one of the most comprehensive to date in compiling evidence of plastics’ risks for humans, the environment and the economy at every stage of their lifecycle. The commission — a group of researchers organized by the Australian foundation Minderoo, the Scientific Center of Monaco and Boston College — found plastics disproportionately harm low-income communities, people of color and children. They’re urging negotiators of the United Nations Global Plastics Treaty to take bold steps, such as capping plastic production, banning some single-use plastics and regulating the toxic chemicals added to plastics. Countries launched the plastics treaty process in March 2022, with the goal of adopting it in 2024.
From production through disposal, plastics impact people and the environment. At fossil fuel extraction sites (most plastics are made from fossil fuels like oil or natural gas) and plastic production facilities workers and surrounding communities are exposed to pollutants that can cause reproductive complications such as premature births and low birth weights, lung cancer, diabetes and asthma, among other illnesses.
Use of plastic products can expose people to toxic chemicals, including phthalates, which are linked to brain development problems in children, and BPA, which is linked to heart attacks and neurological issues. At the end of the plastics supply chain are growing landfills that leach harmful materials into the environment and surrounding communities. These landfills are often found in poor countries, described in the report as “pollution havens.”
“The bottom line is that plastic is not nearly as cheap as we thought it was, it’s just that the costs have been invisible,” Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician, director at the Boston College Global Observatory on Planetary Health and lead author of the report, told Environmental Health News (EHN). In fact, health-related costs resulting from plastic production were more than $250 billion in 2015, the report found.
He explained that the commission's recommendations for those discussing the treaty could prevent many of those costs to environmental health and the economy.
Plastics production caps and bans
Countries launched the plastics treaty process in March 2022, with the goal of adopting it in 2024.
Credit: United Nations
“There needs to be a global cap on plastic production,” Dr. Landrigan said. This cap would allow some plastic production, but prevent the anticipated growth of plastics in the coming years. Production is increasing in part because the fossil fuel industry is looking for new markets as rising demand for renewable energy could decrease the need for fuel, the report says.
The commission hopes countries signing the Global Plastics Treaty will ban avoidable plastics alongside capping production. Roughly 35% to 40% of plastic goes into disposable single-use items, and that fraction is expected to increase.
“We need to get in charge again of why we use plastic,” Jane Muncke, managing director and chief scientific officer at the Food Packaging Forum who was unaffiliated with the report, told EHN.
Plastic waste and health harms
Less than 10% of plastics are reused or recycled, according to the report, and the rest is burned or goes into landfills with devastating human and environmental tolls. Areas where plastic is burned experience elevated pollution and health risks. For example, plastic burning is linked to about 5.1% of lung cancers in cities in India, according to the report. Waste from electronics, with plastic and metal components, creates harmful exposures for the people around them, including roughly 18 million children working with electronic waste, the report says.
For plastics that remain on the market, the commission hopes to see improved health and safety testing of the thousands of chemicals added to plastics. There are more than 2,400 chemicals added to plastics that are considered a high risk, the report says, and many others have never been tested.
“The burden of proof that a chemical is problematic ends up being on society, when people start having health problems,” Andrea Gore, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Texas at Austin, told EHN. To change this, the commission proposes testing chemicals for toxicity before they’re added to plastic products that are sold.
Exposure to plastics “falls most heavily on poor people, minorities, Indigenous populations, and of course, kids,” Dr. Landrigan said. He explains that generally, poor countries facing plastic pollution want to see global commitments to reduce plastics and their health harms, while countries that produce plastics might be wary of regulations that reduce the industry’s profits.
“It’ll spin out of control”
The second negotiation meeting for the Global Plastics Treaty will start in Paris in late May. The initial meeting covered procedures and included representatives from 160 countries. It saw conflict between the High Ambition Coalition, made up of 40 countries who advocate for the treaty to include mandatory actions, and others, including the United States, who want the treaty to result in pledges from each country.
For individuals concerned about plastic in their own life, Gore recommends reducing contact with plastic wherever is practical and avoiding heating plastic in the microwave, which can leach toxics.
“Don’t panic, because it is easy to get very alarmed,” she said. ”This document gave me hope and has very strong recommendations.”
Dr. Landrigan points out that while reducing harms from plastic can seem daunting, there are examples of policy changing the environment for the better, such as the Clean Air Act, which reduced U.S. air pollution by 77% from 1970 to 2019. But, he said, “if we don’t act courageously and just let the plastic crisis continue to escalate, it’ll spin out of control.”
The sound of droplets hitting concrete goes on for months. I see many of the same unhoused people riding public transit all day. In the morning, one direction, and in the evening, the opposite – still in the same seat where I saw them hours earlier.
They sit out of the way, quiet. People around them pull cords, press buttons. All the while, they’re sleeping, existing, surviving. Sometimes, I find myself projecting my busy day onto them, often joking with some of them,“damn, you still here?!” But once the brief laughter subsides, I see them as the humans they are and understand: it’s warm and safe here. For some, the winter holidays are not about family and friends. Rather, it’s hours, days and months of survival.
Whenever I think of the unhoused people in Oregon and the rest of the country, I reflect that they are half a billion in number, and are emblematic of a broken affordable housing system. A history driven by discrimination and racism, bloated state housing institutions and a lack of understanding of what equitable housing looks like has shaped the inhospitable landscape of affordable housing in the U.S. The most marginalized are pitted against each other fighting for shelter in underfunded, unhealthy and dilapidated developments with the promise of a better future. A solution may exist, but America will need to look outside itself and ask the deeper questions: who builds affordable homes, how they are built, where they are placed, and what is their end goal? And answering them will require a radical solution.
Manufacturing the affordable housing crisis
A NYC housing protest in 2016.
Credit: Informed Images/flickr
To understand how we got to this bleak landscape, we need to examine the history of affordable housing in the U.S. The first affordable housing efforts came in 1937, when the federal government created the United Housing Act, which greenlit loans to public housing groups that were focused on low-rent housing construction. World War II railroaded early public housing developments in cities due to the need for immediate single-family veteran housing. The 1940s saw an influx of affluent suburban residents who had the financial flexibility to move out of the city. This diffusion of people quickly became more than just the relocation of peoples, but ultimately the redistribution of wealth, race and adequate housing.
This essay is also available in Spanish
At the end of the 1940s segregationist policies took root. Congress passed the Housing Act of 1949, which aimed at developing affordable housing in cities. But things didn’t go as planned. Mostly Black Americans moved into the low-income housing, staunchly different from the white-picket-fence homes of white people in suburbia. Black Americans found themselves round up like cattle with few choices to improve their housing situation – they could only move to similarly crumbling neighborhoods.
In 1973, President Nixon placed an 18-month moratorium on public housing spending. This decision prevented progress of urban affordable projects, effectively stopping development projects, which led to the proliferation of what we know today as the derogatory phrase “housing projects.” When no longer supported federally, various states soon followed Nixon’s steps; city communities soon faltered, trapping low-income Black Americans in decaying, underfunded buildings.
Many Black Americans in low-income urban housing developments had mounting housing needs — such as building maintenance and toxic material removal.
And to see how this still manifests today, look no further than the largest housing authority in the U.S.
Bloated state institutions
James Weldon Johnson Houses in East Harlem, NYC.
Credit: Zach Korb/flickr
Disinvestment affects even the largest public housing authority in the U.S., the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). NYCHA serves just more than half a million residents, yet the U.S. and New York state have steadily moved away from funding NYCHA since 1998, according to the agency’s 2022 fact sheet. The result is more than $40 billion – yes with a “b” – in major pending damages and only about 12,500 NYCHA employees supporting residents and maintaining the backlog of pending repairs.
The systemic disinvestment in the NYCHA prevents residents from prioritizing healthier materials for their homes. Moving away from toxic materials — such as lead-based paint and moldy building interiors — is mired in construction bureaucracy. Residents’ only option is often renovating their homes when NYCHA is planning to renovate a large number of apartments, “often as part of an even larger upgrade that includes building systems nearing the ends of their useful lives,” according to NYCHA’s most recent design guidelines. This means residents have no reassurance to timely upgrades to improve their health and well-being. Whether it’s mold, lead paint or rat infestations, affordable housing residents continue to get piecemeal solutions to unhealthy — sometimes toxic — problems in their homes.
To be clear: the people who make up the various state housing institutions are not solely to blame – it’s a system problem. A system that, among other unreasonable behaviors, encourages NYCHA superintendents to falsely record fixes. Continuing to operate in a system that does not have the consistent state or federal backing is a waste of time.
The situation is so dire that a solution might seem impossible. A part of me even feels disillusioned. I’m stubborn, though, and I searched for examples of possible solutions in Europe. I realized I might have found the radical solution I was looking for.
A radical affordable housing solution
In the 1980s, the city of Vienna, Austria, collaborated with private housing developers by buying land and enabling the housing developers to build on this government-owned property. Fast-forward, Vienna populated the nearly 200,000 units in its social housing market with primarily low-income residents. Opting to move away from owning residential developments (like what we see in the United States), Vienna is pushing that ownership to private developers, who have the financial muscle to repair, maintain and upgrade buildings.
Privatization does not mean that developers act with impunity. Vienna evaluates proposals based on architectural quality, environmental performance, social sustainability and cost. Additionally, private developers who choose to collaborate with the Viennese government must rent half of the new apartments to low-income residents (low income in Vienna is defined as paying no more than 20% to 25% of their household income for housing) in exchange for low-interest loans. Unlike the U.S., where affordable housing developments are stigmatized as “public housing,” Vienna uses the term “social housing,” which centers people and their community irrespective of how much money they make. The developments never become “that place where only poor people live.”
A great example: Vienna’s 12th district, Kabelwerk. Comprising about 1,000 or so subsidized residential units, the Kabelwerk community also has a local metro station and various communal shops – amenities that are a direct result in the country's investment in social housing communities, not away from them. Kabelwerk’s residential units also serve as an indirect intersection between various groups of people including homeowners, renters, refugees, students and individuals who may require assisted living. The intersection of these groups is designed to get people together of various backgrounds, dismantling barriers, in lieu of erecting them. Austria’s approach to social housing is a great example of how systematic investment into affordable housing contributes to positive living conditions for low-income residents.
As American state-led agencies like NYCHA and others look for answers within the same decrepit system, the need for a completely revamped affordable housing system becomes painfully evident. The way we as a nation approach affordable housing should begin with centering the people in the homes, staying away from social stigmas and empowering decision-makers to build healthy communities. We need projects that are completed, and are maintained during their lifespan.
A strong person, home or community begins with its foundation. It’s time to rebuild ours.
Nsilo Berry is a health impact researcher for the Healthy Building Network, where he works to research the health associated outcomes of building products in historically marginalized communities, as well as the environment. Connect with him on Linkedin.
This essay was produced through the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice fellowship. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.
I, of course, have lived in an amazing time for a scientist. When I was first fooling around with butterflies, scientists knew nothing about DNA. We thought humanity’s prehistory was a pretty straight line from a chimplike ancestor, through Australopithecus, to Homo erectus, to Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Only later did scientists uncover the great diversity of our ancestors and the evolutionary relatives with which they interacted. Doctors had just begun using catheters to diagnose problems in beating hearts, electron microscopes had just been developed, nuclear power and nuclear proliferation were still in the future, computers did not then control much of human activity as they do now, no artificial satellites were circling Earth, and no human being had ever ventured above the atmosphere.
That we now know so much more about how organisms function and evolve and how ecological systems work than was known when I caught that Euphydryas phaeton in Bethesda at the age of fifteen I find mind-boggling. At a more plebeian level, when I started at Stanford in 1959 we had no Xerox machines, no smartphones, no desktop computers, and, of course, no word processing and no email.
On the cultural front, as noted earlier, I might have been able to write a similar screed of social and political accomplishment for America if I were writing this in, say, 1980, before the Reagan presidency set us on the facilis descensus Averno.
In 1980 the situation of African Americans compared to twenty-five years earlier had improved greatly — lynchings had died out in the South, no facilities in Lawrence, Kansas, were still segregated, and increasing numbers of people were realizing that those with darker skins could be top scholars and excellent politicians. Women were well on their way to penetrating niches once reserved for men, and I had taken much of my instrument training from a female pilot.
People in religious minorities were infrequently at risk of violence.
Further, official notice of and action on environmental problems was, if inadequate, in existence and cheering, bolstered by some landmark legislation. Much of that was reversed by Reagan, and since Reagan, socioculturally it’s been at best a roller-coaster of destruction of environmental safeguards and social safety nets followed by the reinstitution of these safeguards, greater acknowledgment of the threat of fossil fuel – induced climate change, and attempts to increase access to affordable medical care and the like.
Nevertheless, inequality has continued to grow, and there has been a decline generally in American indirect democracy, epitomized by the nearly successful Trump putsch of January 6, 2021, a set of events virtually inconceivable a decade or more before. To cope with the crises of biodiversity loss, climate change, overpopulation, and threats to the provision of life’s essentials, far more is needed than scientific reports that are too often largely ignored.
To rescue the human enterprise in the long run requires strong action in the short run directed toward saving biodiversity and bringing the human enterprise within sustainable limits.
This is an excerpt from Life: A Journey Through Science and Politics by Paul R. Ehrlich is published by Yale University Press.
Banner photo credit: Left - Wikipedia Commons; Right - Yale University Press.