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Guest Essay

By Oliver Franklin-Wallis

Mr. Franklin-Wallis is the author of “Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future” and an editor at GQ.

What is plastic?

The question isn’t as silly as it sounds. The miraculous substances that suffuse our daily lives are not one material but many, differing wildly in look, feel and function, from the materials in Saran wrap to your kid’s Legos to airplanes. Even two seemingly identical plastics are rarely the same because manufacturers add any number of additives, such as phthalates, flame retardants, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, to imbue their products with additional flexibility, say, or heat resistance. By one estimate, there are at least 16,000 known chemical additives used by the plastics industry, of which at least 4,200 are known to be toxic. And because plastics inevitably break down into microplastics and then nanoplastics, eventually making their way into our lungs, guts, brains and even our unborn children, whatever is in our plastic is in us, too.

This is a high-stakes moment for anyone invested in what plastics might be doing to our health. Beginning this week, representatives from more than 170 countries involved in a United Nations plastics treaty process are gathering in Geneva to try, for the sixth time, to negotiate the first global agreement to regulate the production, consumption and disposal of plastics.

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