ESR 010 - What is the Impact of Plastics on Human Health?

Plastic is everywhere.

It’s almost impossible to live your life without plastic these days.

Our society has become dependent on plastic in all aspects of life, including: household goods, food processing, packaging, personal care products, and medical applications.

More than 13,000 chemicals are used to make plastics.

Over 350 million metric tons of plastic waste are discarded annually.

The widespread presence of plastics and their degradation products in the environment leads to inevitable exposure through the food we eat and the air we breathe.

This exposure to plastic chemicals carries various health risks, particularly due to the chemical composition of plastics and their ability to disrupt biological processes.

A team of scientists at the Minderoo Foundation in Australia (in collaboration with Australian research institutes) asked two powerful questions:

• What is the impact of plastics on human health?

• How can we innovate safer plastic alternatives?

The team recently spent 3 years screening more than 100,000 papers to find studies on plastic getting into the human body and how it could be harming our health.

After doing this screening, they came up with 3,500 primary studies on plastic health from 1960 to 2022.

These finding have been used to create the first-of-its-kind interactive Plastic Health Map, which maps the existing research on the effects of plastic chemicals on human health.

The Plastic Health Map is also a tool that can help us develop safer plastic alternatives and help us transition to a world where plastic is more sustainable, safer, and free of toxic chemicals.

In this Eco Scale Radio episode I have the good fortune of interviewing Louise Goode and Manuel Brunner from the Minderoo Foundation.

Louise is the Principal Researcher at Minderoo Foundation.

She is involved in research into the impact of plastics on human health at the Minderoo Foundation.

She’s like the research wrangler who helps her team make this Map a reality.

Manuel is a chemist with a PhD from the University of Western Australia. In his role as Principal, Chemistry and Research at the Minderoo Foundation, he explores how we can create a sustainable chemical and plastics industry.

In this conversation they describe the Plastic Health Map and the challenges of innovating plastic alternatives... and much more.

After you hear this podcast interview, you will never see plastic the same way again.