Featured News: The State of Plastic Research
This week we are featuring a new and useful resource by the Minderoo foundation. It is an interactive map designed to show the current and historical state of research on the thousands of chemicals associated with plastic use. One of the biggest takeaways from this resource is that we don’t know much about more than 2/3rds of the chemicals commonly used. We don’t know how they will impact human health and they aren’t, and haven’t really been, thoroughly studied. The second big takeaway is that when we do establish that a chemical is harmful and successfully get it removed from commercial use, we often replace it with a wholly unknown chemical. Often, it will take several years for this new chemical to even be tested for the same issues that flagged the chemical it replaced. While we won’t speculate here on why that might be, it is our current reality. To learn more, check out the full interactive map here!