“Plastics pollution exacerbates the impacts of all [nine] planetary boundaries,” warns a report published this month in the journal One Earth in the run-up to what could be the final United Nations summit to hammer out an international treaty addressing the global plastics crisis. That meeting, known as INC-5, in Busan, South Korea, happens from Monday, Nov. 25, to Sunday, Dec. 1. The planetary boundary framework, hypothesized in 2009 and updated several times since then by an international group of scientists, seeks to identify the safe limits of human activity impacting Earth systems. Beyond those safe limits — dubbed the “safe operating space for humanity” — the planet’s natural processes can destabilize, degrade, stop self-regulating or even collapse, creating an extreme and hostile environment for life as we know it. As of this year, human activities have transgressed six of the nine boundaries. The fifth of those limits to be violated, scientists note, was the novel entities boundary, which was determined crossed in 2022. Novel entities encompass human-made chemicals and other synthetic entities added to the natural environment. One of the most pervasive of novel entities today is plastic. Globally, 500 million tons of plastics are produced every year, but only 9% get recycled, says the One Earth research article. Plastics are persistent and don’t break down. And some plastics, along with many of their additives, are toxic to life. Plastic has been found everywhere on Earth — from deepest oceans to high mountains, in clouds and pole to pole.…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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