Sharjah24 – AFP: The torrent of man-made chemical and plastic waste worldwide has massively exceeded limits safe for humanity or the planet, and production caps are urgently needed, scientists have concluded for the first time.
There are an estimated 350,000 different manufactured chemicals on the market and large volumes of them end up in the environment.
"The impacts that we're starting to see today are large enough to be impacting crucial functions of planet Earth and its systems", Bethanie Carney Almroth, co-author of a new study told AFP in an interview.
The study, by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, comes ahead of a UN meeting in Nairobi at the end of the month on tackling plastic pollution "from source to sea", UN Environment Programme head Inger Andersen said on Monday.
Chemicals and plastics are affecting biodiversity, piling additional stress on already stressed ecosystems.
Pesticides kill living organisms indiscriminately and plastics are ingested by living things.
"Some chemicals are interfering with hormone systems, disrupting growth, metabolism and reproduction in wildlife," Carney Almroth said.
While greater efforts are needed to prevent these substances being released into the environment, scientists are now pushing for more drastic solutions, such as production caps.
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