Synthetic plastics made from fossil fuels scarcely existed in 1950, when the Anthropocene began. Today they are everywhere. They’ve been found on the top of Mount Everest and at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest part of the ocean. They are in the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. Every person on earth has microscopic plastic fragments in their blood and organs.
Karl Marx compared capitalism to an evil god that demands human sacrifices as the price of progress.1 The plastics industry is an extreme example of that.
The first synthetic plastic, bakelite, was patented in 1909. Polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, polyethylene, and nylon were invented in the 1930s, but it wasn’t until after 1950 that the combination of cheap oil and new technology kickstarted decades of spectacular growth, outpacing any other manufactured material: 2 million tons in 1950, 4 million tons in 1955, 8 million tons in 1960.2
After 75 years, those numbers seem small. 504 million tons were produced in 2025 and the OECD predicts that 1260 million tons of raw plastics will be made in 2060.3
Today 8% of all petroleum and natural gas goes into making plastic—half for raw material, half for energy. Huge, highly automated factories break fossil fuels into a variety of hydrocarbon molecules with distinct physical characteristics that make them appropriate for different uses from plastic bags to construction materials. Beginning in the 1950, Susan Freinkel writes, “In product after product, market after market, plastics challenged traditional materials and won, taking the place of steel in cars, paper and glass in packaging, and wood in furniture.”4 Today, plastics are truly ubiquitous, deeply embedded in every part of the capitalist economy and in our daily lives.
The benefits of plastics are undeniable. Many life-saving medical procedures would be impossible without plastic devices. The electronic devices which are so much a part of daily life are largely made from plastics. The list of examples could go on.
But there is a dark side, a realm of extreme environmental and health damage that counters the benefits. A study published in The Lancet in 2025 pulls no punches: plastics today pose “a grave, growing, and under-recognised danger to human and planetary health.”
The world is in a plastics crisis. This crisis has worsened alongside the other planetary threats of our time and is contributing to climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. Long unseen and unaddressed, the magnitude of the plastics crisis is now widely recognised, and its implications for both human and planetary health are increasingly clear.5
Plastics can be, and some are, used to make strong products that hold their shape for decades or even centuries. But capitalist enterprises quickly learned that bigger profits could be made from disposable products–commodities that had to be purchased again and again and again. Plastic products designed for long term use—primarily building and construction materials—comprise only 17% of the 8 billion tons of plastic produced since 1950. The rest, over 6 billion tons, were specifically designed to be used and discarded.6 Of that,
- 50% is buried in landfills;
- 19% is incinerated;
- 9% is recycled;
- 22% is loose in the environment somewhere.7
Historian Alexander Clapp writes,
For every human being alive right now there exists slightly more than one ton of discarded plastic out there somewhere, scattered on land or layered in the ground or adrift at sea; there is little question that most of it will outlive our own planetary presence by thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of years. In the ocean alone, per every human, there exist 21,000 pieces of plastic, a net mass of shopping bags and six-pack rings and bottle caps that by 2050 will exceed the weight of all fish put together and is expected to double every six years for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, in just the minute it took you to read this paragraph, another million plastic bottles have been discarded and another garbage truck full of plastic has entered the seas.8
Much public and environmental concern about plastics has focused on the visible presence of plastic waste in the environment, especially in the oceans, and the harm it inflicts on marine life. At least 52 million tons of plastic waste escapes into the environment every year and a large part of that is carried by wind and water to the oceans,9 where it kills millions of birds and animals every year. Over 1300 marine species, including every seabird family, marine mammal family and sea turtle species ingest plastic, mistaking it for food.
In 2025, a large-scale study of sea animals that died in the wild found that about 35% of the seabirds, 50% of the sea turtles, and 12% of the seals, sea lions, dolphins and porpoises had plastic lodged in their digestive tracts, causing internal injuries or preventing them from digesting actual food. Just six pea-sized pieces of rubber is enough to kill a seagull, and an accumulation half the size of a baseball can kill a Loggerhead turtle.10
That study focused on pieces large enough to be easily seen, but after 75 years of plastic pollution a large percentage has been broken into much smaller pieces by wind, sun, and waves. The great majority of plastics in the environment today are microplastics, smaller than a pencil eraser. Billions of pieces smaller than a human hair originate as fragments shed by the synthetic fabrics used in most clothing. They are not visible pollution, but they pose much greater threats to animal and human health. Small, strong, and very light, they are carried everywhere by wind and water and are easily consumed by animals and plants at the bottom of the food pyramid and then accumulate in the bodies of those above.
A 2024 study found microplastics in 88% of protein products purchased in U.S. food stores, including beef, chicken, pork and plant-based samples. The authors estimate that an average U.S. adult could ingest 3.8 million plastic particles a year, from proteins alone.11 The air we breathe also pollutes our bodies: a 2025 study in France found that adults inhale about 71,000 plastic particles of various sizes every day, in their homes and cars.12
A summary of recent research says that plastic particles “have been found in the human brain, heart, blood, lungs, veins, colon, liver, placenta, penis, testicles, and amniotic fluid. They are found on human skin and hair. They have also been detected in breast milk, stool—including meconium, a baby’s first fecal matter—mucus, saliva, and semen samples.”13
The extensive physical presence of plastic in the bodies of humans and other animals poses serious concerns, but an even bigger threat is posed by the thousands of toxic chemicals they leak into their surroundings and our bodies.
Plastics are composed primarily of polymers, very large molecules made up of many identical units called monomers. They exist in nature—cellulose is a common one—but almost all plastics are based on synthetic polymers made from petroleum, natural gas or coal. Alone, they don’t make good plastic products—some deteriorate in sunlight, others burn easily, or lose shape and stability, and so are inferior to the glass, metal, and other materials they are supposed to replace. The solution, which the petrochemical industry discovered 70 years ago, is to add other chemicals that impart the features required for various applications.
Virtually all plastics-based products contain a wide range of chemical additives, often in very large quantities. … Depending on the product, additives can comprise 5%—50% by weight of manufactured plastics. Most additives do not form strong chemical bonds with the polymer matrix. They can therefore leach from plastic to contaminate air, water, and soil and expose humans.14
How serious is this? There is no central registry of the chemicals that plastic makers use, but a recent comprehensive study of existing public databases identified an astonishing 16,325 different chemicals that are used in plastic production. Many of them are “chemicals of concern,” meaning that they are known to have intrinsic properties that pose health hazards.15 They include known carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, forever chemicals (PFAS) and other proven threats to human health. Each of the nine major types of polymers used in synthetic plastics is associated with more than 400 chemicals of concern.
A summary of this research identifies seven key findings.
- Over 4,200 or 25% of plastic chemicals are of concern because they are hazardous to human health and the environment.
- Half of the chemicals marketed for use in plastics are classified as of concern.
- Less than 1% of plastic chemicals may be classified as non-hazardous. However, a complete hazard assessment is lacking, implying that their safety cannot be determined conclusively.
- 3,651 plastic chemicals of concern are not regulated globally. These chemicals require most attention, and further granularity may be added by considering information on use, production, and regulatory status.
- Fifteen groups of plastic chemicals have been identified as of major concern. These groups contain a high number of chemicals of concern.
- Over 1,800 chemicals of concern are known to be present in plastics. This includes more than 500 chemicals of concern that are released from plastic materials and products, indicating potential for human and environmental exposure.
- Each major polymer type contains at least 400 chemicals of concern. Rubber, polyurethanes, polycarbonates, and PVC are most likely to contain such compounds.16
The Lancet’ s 2025 report summarizes the latest research on plastics and health. Of plastic chemicals, the authors wrote:
Most plastic chemicals, including additives, are not chemically bound to polymer matrices. Instead, they are physically blended into polymers and can be released from plastics and into the surrounding environment by leaching, volatilisation, and abrasion. These chemicals can then enter the human body via ingestion, inhalation, and dermal absorption.
Human exposure to plastic chemicals is extensive. National biomonitoring surveys detect measurable levels of several hundred synthetic chemicals, including plastic chemicals, in people of all ages, including newborn infants exposed in utero, across all global regions….
[A recent umbrella review] found consistent evidence for multiple health effects at all stages of human life for many plastic chemicals. Infants in the womb and young children are especially at-risk. These effects include impaired reproductive potential (eg, polycystic ovary syndrome and endometriosis), perinatal effects (eg, miscarriage, reduced birthweight, and malformations of the genital organs), diminished cognitive function (eg, intelligence quotient loss), insulin resistance, hypertension and obesity in children, and type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, obesity, and cancer in adults.17
The evidence of plastics as killers mounts daily. In April 2025, researchers reported that in one year, 349,113 deaths from cardiovascular failure were caused by one chemical, di-2-ethylhexylphthalate, that leached from one type of plastic, polyvinylchloride.18
A handful of giant petrochemical companies are responsible for almost all plastic production. As we will see, they are fighting hard for protect their right to spread poison around the world.
(To be continued)
Notes:
1. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” MECW, vol. 12, 222.
2. Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, and Max Roser. “Plastic Pollution,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution.
3. Global Plastic Outlook: Policy Scenarios to 2060, (OECD. 2025), 10.
4. Susan Freinkel, Plastics: A Toxic Love Story (Henry Holt, 2011), 4.
5. Philip J. Landrigan et al., “The Lancet Countdown on Health and Plastics,” Lancet, August 2025, 1044, 1056.
6. Paul Stegmann et al., “Plastic futures and their CO2 emissions,” Nature, December 2022.
7. Victoria Heath, “What actually happens to plastic?” Geographical, January 24, 2025.
8. Alexander Clapp, Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, (Little, Brown, 2025), 18.
9. Joshua W. Cottom, et al., “A local-to-global emissions inventory of macroplastic pollution,” Nature, September 2024.
10. Erin L. Murphy et al., “A quantitative risk assessment framework for mortality due to macroplastic ingestion in seabirds, marine mammals, and sea turtles,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 2025.
11. Madeleine H. Milne, et al., “Exposure of U.S. adults to microplastics from commonly-consumed proteins,” Environmental Pollution, February 15, 2024.
12. Nadiia Yakovenko et al., “Human exposure to PM10 microplastics in indoor air,” PLOS One, July 30, 2025
13. “Microplastic Deluge: How These Small Plastic Particles Harm Our Health and the Environment,” Fact Sheet, Natural Resources Defense Council, June 2025. These findings should be considered preliminary: some scientists question the methods used to identify very small plastic particles in human organs.
14. Philip J. Landrigan et al., “The Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health,” Annals of Global Health, March 2023, 78.
15. L. Monclús et al., “Mapping the chemical complexity of plastics,” Nature, July 9, 2025. The term “chemicals of concern” refers to substances that have one or more of the following characteristics. Persistence: Survives for long periods in air, water, soil, or organisms. Mobility: Spreads easily in water and air. Bioaccumulation: Remains and accumulates in animals and/or humans. Toxicity: Causes harm to living organisms.
16. Martin Wagner et al., State of the science on plastic chemicals—Identifying and addressing chemicals and polymers of concern. (PlastChem, 2024) https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10701705
17. Landrigan et al., “The Lancet Countdown,” 1049.
18. Sara Hyman et al., “Phthalate exposure from plastics and cardiovascular disease: global estimates of attributable mortality and years life lost,” eBioMedicine, July 2025.