Mr. McGuire, Benjamin Braddock’s tipsy career advisor in The Graduate, would be shocked. Writing in the scientific journal Nature, ten scientists last week reported disturbing data on the toxic nature of plastics and called on the governments of the world to reclassify certain types of plastic waste as “hazardous.”

According to the report, about 150 million metric tons of plastic each year escapes the landfill, blown by the wind around cities and towns or floating down to the sea, where it forms enormous swirling gyres of garbage that have a devastating effect on wildlife. If current plastic production trends continue, an additional 33 billion metric tons could be in circulation by 2050.

According to coauthor Mark Anthony Browne, new research shows that the developed nations’ decision years ago to classify plastic as solid waste was based on the now discredited view that plastics are inert. Now we know that plastic debris is laden with highly toxic pollutants, which can be inhaled or ingested by people and wildlife as plastic debris degrades and breaks down. Studies have found that such microscopic fibers are present in human lung cancers, and that seabirds that have ingested such waste have 300% greater concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in their tissues than other birds.

Taking their cue from the successful international effort to reclassify chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which were burning a hole in the atmosphere's protective ozone layer, as hazardous under the Montreal Protocol in 1989, the study authors are calling for a similar reclassification of plastics, starting with the most hazardous of them: Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polystyrene/styrofoam, polyurethane and polycarbonate.

The report argues that “if countries classified the most harmful plastics as hazardous, their environmental agencies would have the power to restore affected habitats and prevent more dangerous debris from accumulating.”

“We feel that the physical dangers of plastic debris are well enough established, and the suggestions of chemical dangers sufficiently worrying, that the biggest producers of plastic waste—the United States, Europe and China—must act now.”

The plastics industry, however, which earns millions of dollars of revenues every year from plastics, which it derives from petroleum purchased from the big oil companies, is likely to oppose the reclassification of its products.

-Matt Bewig

To Learn More:

Some Plastics should be Classified as Hazardous, Scientists Say (by Kenneth R. Weiss, Los Angeles Times)

Calls to Classify Plastic as ‘Hazardous’ (by Nick Livermore, Resource Magazine)