Philip Landrigan, M.D., director of the Boston College Observatory on Planetary Health, discusses new Minderoo-Monaco Commission report on far-reaching health hazards of plastics manufacturing and pollution.
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Given what it would cost, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that the advanced countries would eschew plastics generally, and even more unlikely the poorer countries would. It is possible that (affordable) regulations will be introduced to mitigate many of these hazards. (Remember that Sinclair Lewis’s “The Jungle” didn’t cause the adoption of socialism at all but it did cause the cleanliness regulation of slaughter/packing plants.) Also, I would not take the news report of the commission at face value — plastics have been a bete noir of well-educated, high-minded people since at least “The Graduate” and there’s no reason to assume that the story isn’t highly biased relative to reality without reading the report in detail and fact-checking it.