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‘The planetary boundary of chemicals and plastic has been crossed’
24 January 2022
The rapid growth of chemicals and plastic has exceeded a planetary boundary. The loss of ecosystems has become irreversible, while at the same time predictions are that production and usage will continue to rise sharply. There is no international policy that can keep up with and control this degradation. This is the position of 14 Scandinavian scientists in Environmental Science and Technology.
The use of plastic and chemicals around the world has increased enormously since the 1950s. These are ‘new entities’: chemicals and materials produced by people that intentionally or unintentionally may negatively impact System Earth. They did not exist before.
PLASTIC SOUP AS PLANETARY BOUNDARY
If the boundaries are passed of what the Earth can bear, ecological restoration is no longer possible and our planet becomes uninhabitable. Nine planetary boundaries have been defined. They include climate change, biodiversity and deforestation. There is now enough evidence to recognise plastic pollution as the tenth planetary boundary, argued the scientists last year. The authors looked at fragmentation processes and the leakage of chemical substances into the environment. These phenomena could lead to critical boundaries being exceeded in the future. But determining those critical boundaries is highly complicated.
PLANETARY BOUNDARY OF NEW ENTITIES
If we want to keep the earth habitable, we really need to revert back to the conditions that prevailed before the start of the industrial revolution. Measurable control variables can be determined for most of the planetary boundaries such as CO2 concentration, nitrogen fixation, acidification of the oceans and temperature rise. These are thus related to the earlier, ideal starting situation. But this quantitative approach is not possible for the ‘planetary boundary of new entities’.
What then is the critical boundary for the use of plastic or chemicals? The most recent article claims to have found a solution to this by assuming a combination of alternative control variables.
THOUSANDS OF CHEMICALS
The problem of the new entities is gigantic. It is estimated that there are more than 350,000 chemicals available for purchase worldwide. A large proportion of these is either not registered or only registered in Western countries. The chemical industry is one of the world’s biggest industries. The production of chemicals is 50 times bigger now than in 1950 and will triple by 2050. Plastic and chemicals are closely connected. Thousands of different chemicals are used in the production of plastic. The production of plastic increased by 79% between 2000 and 2015.
POLICY IS UNABLE TO KEEP UP WITH GROWTH
All the new entities have undergone a rapid rise in a short space of time. The study states that the safe habitat of the planetary boundary of new entities is being exceeded because the annual production and the worldwide environmental pollution that it causes is increasing at a speed that does not allow policy to keep up with. Effective control to avoid more environmental damage is a huge challenge.
In 2020, the European Commission launched the Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability as part of the European Green Deal in the face of exactly this challenge: protection of the environment; encourage safe chemicals; and ban the most damaging chemicals.
Illustration: Stockholm Resilience Centre/Azote
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