Category Archives: Plastic Pollution Articles & News

Ambitious goals, messaging and enforcement put the nation at the top of the sustainability pack, serving as a model as the World Economic Forum pushes to end plastic waste.HWASEONG, South Korea — At a sprawling recycling plant in this city of farmland and industry, the sound of sustainability is deafening.The Recycling Management Corporation plant, one of the country’s nerve centers of plastics recycling, runs around the clock, its maze of conveyor belts and sorters producing a din that could rival an airport runway.Yet places like this recycling plant helped South Korea reach the No. 10 spot in this year’s “Green Future Index” report by the M.I.T. Technology Review. The World Economic Forum has cited the report on its website, listing 10 countries that are models for a greener future.While attendees gather at the World Economic Forum summit in the bucolic mountains of Switzerland this month, factories like those run by Recycling Management tend to the daily grind of creating a greener planet.The factories help South Korea meet ambitious sustainability goals, which are reinforced with policies, messaging and enforcement.South Korea, which is the size of Portugal, but with a population of nearly 52 million — while surrounded by water on three sides and a hostile neighbor to the north — is like much of the rest of the planet: under pressure to better utilize existing resources, and to do so before it is too late.South Korea, which has a population of nearly 52 million, is surrounded by water on three sides and a hostile neighbor to the north. It reached the No. 10 spot in this year’s “Green Future Index” report. Woohae Cho for The New York TimesThat sense of urgency, and a United Nations effort to reach an international agreement by 2024 to eliminate plastic waste, may well be on many minds at the Davos summit this year as the ecological fallout from the pandemic becomes clear.“One of the things the pandemic revealed was a rise in the use of plastic for food deliveries and a sense of safety with extra packaging all over the world,” said Kristin Hughes, the director of resource circularity at the World Economic Forum. “Recycling was put on hold in many countries. It wasn’t deemed as essential.”Now that the crisis phase of the pandemic has passed, she said, it’s time to switch direction. “We need to move away from the take-use-dispose approach,” she said.The challenge of consumption and disposal is evident across South Korea. A train ride through this country reveals patches of crammed houses, businesses and farms. There’s little room for landfills. In fact, one of the largest in the country, which absorbs much of the waste from Seoul and its 10 million residents, is expected to be full by 2025.South Korea is also a major manufacturer, exporting electronics, cars and appliances at breakneck speed, which keeps it hovering in or near the top 10 countries for G.D.P. This has created the need for factories and shipyards, in an already crowded nation that has scant room to accommodate them.So recycling bins and food waste canisters are ubiquitous, and 32-gallon food-recycling containers line the curbs of Seoul much the way cars pack the roads in the capital’s notorious traffic.At the Recycling Management factory on a recent afternoon, dozens of workers in protective gear stood alongside jolting conveyor belts, sorting and positioning thousands of plastic bottles and sending them on to their second or third life.Searing temperatures in rattling machinery removed paper logos, then melted the plastic into small pieces known as PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, chips that were then bundled into 1,540-pound bags to be shipped around the world and repurposed into items such as bottles and synthetic clothing. Two hundred of these massive bags are produced daily (except on Sundays, when the factory is closed), accounting, along with a sister facility in nearby Osan, for 19 percent of South Korea’s total PET bottles recycling output.The Green Future Index found that Singapore and South Korea were “the world’s best-ranked recycling economies,” as they “routinely expand policy programs to encourage better waste management.”RM Corporation“We collect, recycle and repurpose,” said Im Sung-jin, the vice chairman of Recycling Management. “But the bigger picture for me is that we do this because we have an obligation to the planet.”That notion of responsibility was the focus of the Green Future Index, the second annual ranking of 76 economies “on their progress and commitment toward building a low-carbon future.” It also singled out nine other countries for their efforts at goals like curbing fossil fuel emissions, reaching carbon neutrality or increasing electric car sales.South Korea was spotlighted specifically for recycling. Its waste management system, known as jongnyangje, calls for food, garbage, recyclables and bulky items to be separated into color-coded bags. The policy is strict, and there are both penalties for noncompliance (up to 1,000,000 Korean won, or about $785) and rewards for those who report violators (up to $235).“We look at what a country has done but also what will be done, both actual and aspirational,” said Ross O’Brien, who led the research and writing of the Green Future Index, in a phone interview from his home in Hong Kong. “For example, no other country has as many new green patents per billion-dollar G.D.P. than South Korea. Based on that, we believe South Korea is the most productive green innovation economy in the world.”The report found that Singapore and South Korea were “the world’s best-ranked recycling economies,” as they “routinely expand policy programs to encourage better waste management.”The emphasis has had an impact: The average Korean citizen now throws out about 1.02 kilograms of household waste daily, about a third of the amount produced in 1991. Its recycling and composting rate is 60 percent, one of the highest in the world, according to the World Bank.By 2030, South Korea aims to reduce its plastic waste by 50 percent and recycle 70 percent of it. And a nationwide deposit-return policy charging 300 Korean won (about 25 cents) for all disposable coffee cups and other single-use beverage containers — and then reimbursing upon return — takes effect June 10.As for food waste, the World Economic Forum lauded South Korea as far back as 2019, pointing out that the country recycled 95 percent of its food waste then, up from 2 percent in 1995. Dumping most food into landfills was banned in South Korea in 2005, and compulsory food waste recycling was introduced in 2013 at a cost of about $6 a month for biodegradable bags.The Recycling Management Corporation plant, one of the country’s nerve centers of plastics recycling, runs around the clock, its maze of conveyor belts and sorters producing a din that could rival an airport runway.RM Corporation“This induced the public to be more active in waste separation since they had to pay for waste bags in proportion to their disposal,” said Kim Jong-min, the deputy director of the waste-to-energy division of the Ministry of Environment. “Before implementing the policy, food waste obviously created a foul odor and spawned a great amount of leachate in landfills.”Yet the approach to recycling has been shifting here and in other countries so that it is no longer viewed as solely a consumer responsibility, according to M.I.T.’s findings, which have been echoed by other environmental groups monitoring Asia.One example is South Korea’s E.P.R. (extended producer responsibility) system for packaging, which began in 2003. The Korea Packaging Recycling Cooperative, a nongovernment agency, monitors and charges fees to thousands of manufacturers.“Under the E.P.R. scheme, it’s all about the design of the products, as fees that the manufacturers pay vary,” said Ma Jae Jeong, the director of the resource recycling division at the South Korea Ministry of Environment. “The more recyclable the products are, the less the fee. The producer can pay a fee up to 50 percent less for products that have the highest recyclable rating. This gives companies enormous incentive to produce more recyclable products.”Still, South Korea has fallen short in other areas, such as electricity production.“What the M.I.T. report highlights is great because South Koreans have a high level of consciousness about climate change, and we don’t have two opposing political sides, such as in the U.S., arguing about its reality,” said Kim Joojin, the managing director and founder of Solutions for Our Climate, a Seoul-based advocacy group. “But, at the same time, South Korea is saddled with an antiquated power sector and is lagging other less wealthy nations. This is often at odds with its global image as a leader in so-called green technology.”At the World Economic Forum, one session will focus on plastics pollution, following up on a U.N. Environment Assembly meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, in March in which 175 countries, including South Korea, agreed to consider a binding resolution to eradicate plastic waste pollution at the end of 2024. The hope, Ms. Hughes said, is that Davos will spotlight the urgent need to produce sustainable practices worldwide.“It’s this whole idea of ‘take, use, reuse, refill, recycle,’ and how we keep using and reusing,” she said. “We’re looking more and more at resource circularity. We’re not just chucking it all into the landfill any more.”

Cigarette butt recycling scheme aims to stub out waste in CataloniaMove could provide income for homeless and clean up Barcelona’s streets and beaches, says government In a move that could provide some income for homeless people and clean up the streets, the Catalan government is looking at paying €4 to anyone who hands in a pack’s-worth of cigarette ends at a recycling point.The cost of the proposal would be covered by a 20-cent levy on each cigarette, its proponents say, which would nearly double the price of a pack of Marlboro Red from about €5 (£4.25), compared with about £13 in the UK.A similar levy on plastic bottles and aluminium cans introduced in New York City in 1982 has provided the homeless with a small but steady income.“We want to put a stop to the present situation where around 70% of cigarette butts end up either on the ground or in the sea,” Isaac Peraire, the head of the Catalan waste agency, told El Periódico earlier this week.According to the EU, cigarette butts are the second-most common single-use plastic found on European beaches – and the environmental organisation Ocean Conservancy says that of all the rubbish thrown into the sea, butts are the most numerous.In an effort to limit marine pollution, smoking will be banned on all of Barcelona’s city beaches from July. Spain’s Socialist-led coalition government is also planning to overhaul the country’s smoking laws to make it illegal to light up on the outside terraces of bars and restaurants, on beaches, and at open-air sports venues.According to figures from 2019, 19.7% of Spaniards smoke on a daily basis, slightly above the EU average of 18.4%. The three EU countries with the highest rates of smoking are Bulgaria (28.7%), Greece (23.6%) and Latvia (22.1%).The details of the levy plan have yet to be confirmed but one proposal is that the butts could be returned to the tobacconist or kiosk where the cigarettes were bought.“The idea isn’t to generate income but to reduce the environmental impact of these products,” Peraire said. “It’s hoped that one day this measure will cease to be necessary because the problem will have disappeared.”Meanwhile, the Spanish government is proposing that cigarette manufacturers should pay the cost of sweeping up butts and should educate the public not to discard them because they contain an environmentally damaging cellulose acetate.Andrés Zamorano, the president of the National Committee for the Prevention of Tobacco Use, said he was in favour of the measure because “tobacco comes at a high cost, not just from an environmental point of view, but because it pollutes public spaces”.Zamorano conceded, however, that tobacco companies were likely to add the clean-up cost to the price of their products.Ismael Aznar Cano, director general for quality and assessment at Spain’s environment ministry, said the proposal came within the context of a law on waste due to take effect at the start of 2023.The law will prohibit the sale of plastic cotton buds, cutlery, plates, expanded polystyrene cups and plastic straws, although cigarette butts are not yet covered by the law.Spain is not the only country trying to address the issue. In 2016, Naman Gupta and Vishal Kanet, two Young Indian entrepreneurs, launched a project to recycle some of the estimated 100 billion butts that are dumped every year in the country.They devised a scheme to collect cigarette ends and a process that separates any remaining tobacco, which is recycled into compost, while the filters are treated and made into a substance used for stuffing soft toys and cushions.Another Indian scheme launched in Kolkata last year is ButtRush, which organises the collection of butts for recycling.On the island of Guernsey, authorities have introduced so-called ballot bins where the public can vote on local issues or the result of a football match by depositing their fag ends in a bin showing their preferred option.The bins are at the bus station and outside a chemist’s shop, where cigarette butt pollution is said to have fallen by 46%.In the United States, the recycling firm TerraCycle offers businesses a free collection service and will recycle not only cigarette ends but also the packaging and the foil lining. And in the French city of Bordeaux, a public-private partnership collects and recycles up to 200,000 butts a year and has so far collected more than 1.5 million. Similar action has been taken in nearby Toulouse.One study suggests that there are 4.5 trillion butts littering the environment. The plastic in the filters takes up to 10 years to biodegrade, releasing toxic arsenic and lead as they do so.According to the World Health Organization, tobacco waste contains up to 7,000 toxic chemicals.It is not uncommon to find cigarette ends in the bodies of dead fish and sea birds and they can be lethal to freshwater and marine species.There are no precise figures for the cost of cleaning up cigarette ends in Spain. However, a Catalan study estimates the cost at €12-21 each inhabitant a year, with the cost highest in coastal areas.TopicsBarcelonaCataloniaSpainEuropeTobacco industrySmokingPollutionnewsReuse this content

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said Thursday that it will not impose a total ban on a set of dangerous chemicals commonly found in fast-food packaging, angering scientists and environmental groups who have long pressed for their removal.

The decision came in response to three separate petitions requesting that the FDA limit the use of compounds called phthalates, which are known to disrupt hormone function and have been linked to birth defects, infertility, learning disabilities and neurological disorders. 

Despite proven negative health impacts, the compounds are still common ingredients in food packaging. Scientists have found that marginalized groups suffer disproportionately from the chemicals, partly because they consume more fast food.

The FDA on Thursday did institute a ban on the use of 23 phthalates for food contact applications, but it noted that those particular compounds had already “been abandoned” by manufacturers anyway. In taking its action, the FDA agreed to a July 2018 petition submitted by an industry group known as the Flexible Vinyl Alliance.

The FDA will still allow the use of nine other similar compounds in food contact applications. And it denied a separate petition on Thursday from several environmental groups that had asked it to ban the 23 phthalates and an additional five from having food contact.

It said the organizations that had brought the petition, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Earthjustice and the Environmental Defense Fund, “did not demonstrate that the proposed class of phthalates is no longer safe for the approved food additive uses.”

The FDA also denied another related petition — from some of the same environmental groups — that requested a ban on food contact use for certain phthalates and the revocation of previously sanctioned authorizations for others.

The FDA said it rejected this petition because it failed to “demonstrate through scientific data or information” that such a ban on phthalates was warranted.

Several groups in a research consortium called Project TENDR — Targeting Environmental Neuro-Developmental Risks — condemned the FDA’s decision.

“These chemicals are approved for their use, they have the ability to leach out of these products into the food, they’re ending up in our food in our bodies and are leading to serious and irreversible health effects,” said Ami Zota, an associate professor at the George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health who is a member of Project TENDR.

“That can affect the basics of human condition — like our ability to learn, our ability to have safe and healthy families,” she added. “And marginalized communities are disproportionately being burdened.”

A statement from the consortium faulted the agency for leaving “numerous authorizations in place that perpetuate phthalate contamination of the food supply.”

Earthjustice, one of the organizations behind the rejected petitions, pointed out that although Congress deemed many phthalates too dangerous for use in children’s toys more than a decade ago, the FDA is enabling the continued “contamination of food and drinks.”

“FDA’s decision recklessly green-lights ongoing contamination of our food with phthalates,” Earthjustice attorney Katherine O’Brien said in a statement.

She accused the agency of “putting another generation of children at risk of life-altering harm” while “exacerbating health inequities experienced by Black and Latina women.”

“FDA’s announcement that it will now start reviewing new data on phthalate safety — six years after advocates sounded the alarm — is outrageous and seeks to sidestep FDA’s legal duty to address the current science in proceedings on the existing petitions,” O’Brien added.

In January, the House Oversight and Reform Committee sent a letter to the FDA demanding that the agency take immediate action to address this class of compounds, as The Hill previously reported. 

The previous month, health and environmental advocates sued the FDA over its failure to rule on the 2016 petition that was rejected on Thursday. The FDA was required by law to respond to the principal petition within 180 days of filing, according to the suit.

Asked why the agency would have approved the industry petition, but rejected the two broader petitions from the environmental organizations, Zota said that she could not speak to the FDA’s rationale or motivation.

She suggested, however, that the point of the industry petition may have been to “continue use of those phthalates that are most commonly used in plasticizers” — compounds that serve to soften plastics.

“Here is a way we can prevent impaired learning and reproduction in all Americans, but especially the most vulnerable,” she said. “Here’s a pathway to prevention. We do not need more science. The science is clear.”

In response, Flexible Vinyl Alliance’s executive director, Kevin Ott, said that members of the group requested that the FDA ban 25 phthalates as they are “simply no longer employed in food contact or packaging applications.” 

To succeed with the petition, Ott explained, the group also worked across the industry to survey real-life use of phthalates in food packaging — determining that their removal would help assure consumers that unnecessary chemicals are no longer used in contact with food.  

Alongside these decisions, the agency also issued a request for information on Thursday, with the goal of “seeking available use and safety information on the remaining phthalates authorized for use.”

“The FDA is generally aware of updated toxicological and use information on phthalates that is publicly available,” the agency said in a statement. “Nevertheless, stakeholders may have access to information that is not always made public.”

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Zota disputed the notion that the scientific information is insufficient, urging “the FDA to make evidence-based decisions to protect the health of Americans.”

“Given the ubiquity of the problem and its magnitude on health, we need upstream policy decisions, policy action, and this is in FDA’s regulatory authority,” she added.

— Updated at 6:35 p.m.

Environmental toxins are worsening obesity pandemic, say scientistsExclusive: Pollutants can upset body’s metabolic thermostat with some even causing obesity to be passed on to children Chemical pollution in the environment is supersizing the global obesity epidemic, according to a major scientific review.The idea that the toxins called “obesogens” can affect how the body controls weight is not yet part of mainstream medicine. But the dozens of scientists behind the review argue that the evidence is now so strong that it should be. “This is critical because the current clinical management of obese patients is woefully inadequate,” they said.The most disturbing aspect of the evidence is that some chemical impacts that increase weight can be passed down through generations by changing how genes work. Pollutants cited by the researchers as increasing obesity include bisphenol A (BPA), which is widely added to plastics, as well as some pesticides, flame retardants and air pollution.Global obesity has tripled since 1975, with more people now obese or overweight than underweight, and is increasing in every country studied. Almost 2 billion adults are now too heavy and 40 million children under five are obese or overweight.“The focus of the clinical people is on calories – if you eat more calories, you’re going to be more fat,” says Dr Jerrold Heindel, lead author of one of the three review papers, and formerly at the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “So they wait untill you get obese, then they’ll look at giving you diets, drugs, or surgery.“If that really worked, we should see a decline in the rates of obesity,” he said. “But we don’t – obesity continues to rise, especially in children. The real question is, why do people eat more? The obesogenic paradigm focuses on that and provides data that indicate that these chemicals are what can do that.”Furthermore, the scientists say, the approach offers the potential to prevent obesity by avoiding exposure to pollutants, especially in pregnant women and babies: “Prevention saves lives, while costing far less than any [treatment].”Strong evidenceThe evidence for obesogens is set out by more than 40 scientists in three review papers, published in the peer-reviewed journal Biochemical Pharmacology and citing 1,400 studies. They say these chemicals are everywhere: in water and dust, food packaging, personal hygiene products and household cleaners, furniture and electronics.The review identifies about 50 chemicals as having good evidence of obesogenic effects, from experiments on human cells and animals, and epidemiological studies of people. These include BPA and phthalates, also a plastic additive. A 2020 analysis of 15 studies found a significant link between BPA levels and obesity in adults in 12 of them.Other obesogens are pesticides, including DDT and tributyltin, former flame retardants and their newer replacements, dioxins and PCBs, and air pollution. Several recent studies link exposure to dirty air early in life to obesity.The review also names PFAS compounds – so-called “forever chemicals” due to their longevity in the environment – as obesogens. These are found in food packaging, cookware, and furniture, including some child car seats. A two-year, randomised clinical trial published in 2018 found people with the highest PFAS levels regained more weight after dieting, especially women.Some antidepressants are also well known to cause weight gain. “That is a proof of principle that chemicals made for one thing can have side effects that interfere with your metabolism,” said Heindel. Other chemicals with some evidence of being obesogens included some artificial sweeteners and triclosan, an antibacterial agent banned from some uses in the US in 2017.How it worksObesogens work by upsetting the body’s “metabolic thermostat”, the researchers said, making gaining weight easier and losing weight harder. The body’s balance of energy intake and expenditure through activity relies on the interplay of various hormones from fat tissue, the gut, pancreas, liver, and brain.The pollutants can directly affect the number and size of fat cells, alter the signals that make people feel full, change thyroid function and the dopamine reward system, the scientists said. They can also affect the microbiome in the gut and cause weight gain by making the uptake of calories from the intestines more efficient.“It turns out chemicals dumped in the environment have these side effects, because they make the cells do things that they wouldn’t otherwise have done, and one of those things is laying down fat,” said Prof Robert Lustig at the University of California, San Francisco, and lead author of another of the reviews.The early years of child development are the most vulnerable to obesogens, the researchers wrote: “Studies showed that in utero and early-life exposures were the most sensitive times, because this irreversibly altered programming of various parts of the metabolic system, increasing susceptibility for weight gain.”“We’ve got four or five chemicals that also will cause transgenerational epigenetic obesity,” said Heindel, referring to changes in the expression of genes that can be inherited. A 2021 study found that women’s level of obesity significantly correlated with their grandmothers’ level of exposure to DDT, even though their granddaughters were never directly exposed to the now banned-pesticide.“People need to know that [obesogenic effects] are going on,” Lustig said. “Because it affects not just them, but their unborn children. This problem’s going to affect generation after generation until we get a hold of it.”Cause and effectDirectly proving a causal link between a hazard and a human health impact is difficult for the simple reason that it is not ethical to perform harmful experiments on people. But strong epidemiological evidence can stack up to a level equivalent to proof, such as with tobacco smoking and lung cancer.Lustig said that point had been reached for obesogens, 16 years after the term was first coined. “We’ll never have randomised control trials – they would be illegal and unethical. But we now have the proof for obesogens and obesity.”The obesogen paradigm has not been taken up by mainstream researchers so far. But Prof Barbara Corkey, at Boston University School of Medicine and past president of the Obesity Society, said: “The initial worldview was that obesity is caused by eating too much and exercising too little. And this is nonsense.“It’s not the explanation because all of the creatures on Earth, including humans, eat when they’re hungry and stop when they are full. Every cell in the body knows if you have enough food,” she said. “Something has disrupted that normal sensing apparatus and it is not volition.“People who are overweight and obese go to tremendous extremes to lose weight and the diet industry has fared extremely well,” Corky said. “We’ve learned that doesn’t work. When the medical profession doesn’t understand something, we always blame patients and unfortunately, people are still being held responsible for [obesity].”Lustig said: “Gluttony and sloth are just the outward manifestations of these biochemical perturbations that are going on beneath the surface.”Super-sizedHow much of the obesity pandemic may be caused by obesogens is not known, though Heindel said they will have an “important role”.Lustig said: “If I had to guess, based on all the work and reading I’ve done, I would say obesogens will account for about 15% to 20% of the obesity epidemic. But that’s a lot.” The rest he attributes to processed food diets, which themselves contain some obesogens.“Fructose is a primary driver of a lot of this,” he said. “It partitions energy to fat in the liver and is a prime obesogen. Fructose would cause obesity even if it didn’t have calories.” A small 2021 trial found that an ultra-processed diet caused more weight gain than an unprocessed diet, despite containing the same calories in the meals offered to participants.Cutting exposure to obesogens is difficult, given that there are now 350,000 synthetic chemicals, many of which are pervasive in the environment. But those known to be harmful can be removed from sale, as is happening in Europe.Heindel said prospective mothers in particular could adjust what they eat and monitor what their children play with in their early years: “Studies have shown modifying diets can within a week or so cause a significant drop in several obesogens.”Lustig said: “This cause is very pervasive and pernicious, and it’s also lucrative to a lot of [chemical] companies. But we must address it rationally.” To do that, the “knowledge gap” among doctors, regulators and policymakers must be addressed, the scientists said.“It’s time now that [obesity researchers and clinicians] should start paying attention and, if they don’t think the data is strong enough, tell us what more to do,” said Heindel, who is organising a conference to tackle this issue.Sign up to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every weekday morning at 7am BSTCorkey is yet to be fully convinced by the obesogen paradigm, but said the concept of an environmental toxin is probably the right direction to go in. “Is there proof? No, there is not,” she said. “It’s a very difficult problem, because the number of chemicals in our environment has just astronomically increased.“But there’s no alternative hypothesis that to me makes any sense and I would certainly challenge anyone who has a better, testable idea to come forth with it,” she said. “Because this is a serious problem that is impacting our societies enormously, especially children. The problems are getting worse, not better – we’re going in the wrong direction as it stands.”TopicsPollutionObesityHealthPlasticsPesticidesnewsReuse this content

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More than 3,000 potentially harmful chemicals found in food packagingInternational experts who analyzed more than 1,200 scientific studies warn chemicals are being consumed with unknown long-term impacts Scientists have identified more than 3,000 potentially harmful chemicals that can be found in food packaging and other food-related materials, two-thirds of which were not previously known to be in contact with food.An international group of scientists analyzed more than 1,200 scientific studies where chemicals had been measured in food packaging, processing equipment, tableware and reusable food containers.A report released on Thursday by the Food Packaging Forum, a Switzerland-based non-profit, noted little is known about many of the 3,240 chemicals examined in these studies or their effects on people.Manufacturers are either intentionally or unintentionally adding these chemicals to packaging and other equipment, said Pete Myers, a report co-author and founder and chief scientist of Environmental Health Sciences, a non-profit advocacy group. Either way, many of those chemicals are ending up in the human body, he said.“If we don’t know what it is, we don’t know its toxicity,” Myers said. “The mix of chemicals is just too complicated to allow us to regulate them safely.”The new analysis, published in the journal Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, comes amid growing concerns about exposure to potentially toxic chemicals in food and water.The Food Packaging Forum has created a searchable database with the chemicals found in the packaging and equipment, known as food contact materials. While many of the chemicals on the list are known hazards such as phthalates and PFAS, others have not been adequately studied, the group said, and their health effects are unclear.Researchers were shocked to find chemicals in food contact materials that consumers could have no knowledge of. Just one-third of the chemicals studied appeared in a previously compiled database of more than 12,000 chemicals associated with the manufacturing of food contact materials.Previous studies have found potentially dangerous PFAS “forever chemicals” in food packaging. Those chemicals have been linked to a list of health problems.Nearly two-thirds of the studies analyzed in the new report looked at chemicals in plastic. Packaging manufacturers often add chemicals without knowing the long-term ramifications, said Jessica Heiges, a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate who studies disposable food items such as plasticware and packaging and was not involved in the report.The chemicals “are terrifying because we don’t know what their impacts are”, Heiges said. “What’s most alarming is this cocktail of chemicals, how they’re interacting with each other. Some of them are persisting in the environment and in our bodies as we’re consuming them.”It’s likely many of those unknown chemicals are harmful, said Alastair Iles, an associate professor in UC Berkeley’s environmental science, policy and management department, also not involved with the study.“The report only underlines our gross ignorance when it comes to the chemicals that people are being exposed to every day,” he said. “If we didn’t know that there were so many chemicals in packages, what does that say about our knowledge about chemical risks?”TopicsFood safetyOur unequal earthPFASFood & drink industrynewsReuse this content