{"id":300869,"date":"2025-08-11T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T11:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=300869"},"modified":"2025-08-09T12:20:53","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T11:20:53","slug":"from-thinking-to-action-in-the-fight-against-plastics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/08\/from-thinking-to-action-in-the-fight-against-plastics\/","title":{"rendered":"From Thinking to Action in the Fight against Plastics"},"content":{"rendered":"

7 Aug 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0In Geneva, Switzerland\u2019s Place des Nations, the plaza outside the United Nations campus, a replica of Auguste Rodin\u2019s famous sculpture, The Thinker, has been installed. Like the original, the seated figure holds his chin in hand, but the hand in this version also clutches several empty plastic bottles. A baby lays across his other arm, resting its head in the Thinker\u2019s left hand. The Thinker gazes down, past the baby, onto a sea of plastic waste that surrounds the statue. The statue\u2019s placement coincides with a ten-day summit inside the UN, where negotiators hope to finalize the Global Plastics Treaty, an ambitious effort to reverse the overwhelming amount of plastic waste polluting the environment and negatively impacting human health in countless ways. Canadian artist Benjamin Von Wong calls his piece \u201cThe Thinker\u2019s Burden.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the course of the next 10 days, we\u2019re going to be slowly adding more and more plastic to this art installation to show the growing cost being passed on to future generations if we don\u2019t take urgent and immediate action,\u201d Von Wong told Agence France Press as he added plastic to the pile. \u201cIf you want to protect health, then we need to think about the toxic chemicals that are entering our environment. We need to think about limits on plastic production. We need to think about a strong, ambitious plastics treaty.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Global Plastics Treaty was supposed to be finalized last year at a summit in Busan, South Korea. Negotiations broke down between two major blocs of nations, those seeking controls on plastics and harmful chemicals, and nations with economies largely reliant on fossil fuel production, like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia. Since then, of course, US President Donald Trump began his second term, with his MAGA<\/span> mantra of \u201cDrill, Baby, Drill.\u201d His appointees, like Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fracking company CEO<\/span>, are shutting down climate programs, attacking climate science and promoting climate deniers to key policy positions.<\/p>\n

It is in this context that The Lancet, the premier British medical journal, has launched the Lancet Countdown on health and plastics, \u201ca health-focused, indicator-based, global monitoring system on plastics,\u201d with a global team of scientists led by Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Boston College\u2019s Global Observatory on Planetary Health.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe global plastic threat has been quietly worsening; global plastic production has increased 250 times since it began in the 1950s and as it\u2019s on track to double by 2040, and triple by 2060,\u201d Landrigan said<\/a> on the Democracy Now! news hour.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason plastic production is growing so rapidly, especially production of single use plastics, is the fossil fuel industry. Ninety-nine percent of plastic is made from oil, gas and coal. They see the market for fossil fuels declining\u2026they see the long term trend for the fossil fuel market going down, so they\u2019re putting enormous resources into plastic.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dr. Landrigan continued,<\/p>\n

\u201cPlastic harms human health at every stage of the plastic life cycle, starting with the fracking and through the manufacturer and the fabrication of plastic products, and finally, when plastic is discharged into the environment. Waste plastic contains 1000s of toxic chemicals that cause human exposure that result in disease, disability and premature death.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Lancet group released a comprehensive report with their announcement, detailing the scale of the problem. Plastic pollution has been found from the deepest ocean depths to the slopes of Mount Everest. Plastic nanoparticles infiltrate the human body, from the brain to breast milk. The impacts on children are the most severe, Landrigan said:<\/p>\n

\u201cInfants in the womb and young children are very vulnerable to plastics\u2026chemicals get out of plastics, get into pregnant women and then pass through to their children, and in children they can cause a whole range of diseases that encompass brain injury, resulting in decreased IQ, injury to the reproductive organs, resulting in decreased fertility when today\u2019s child becomes tomorrow\u2019s adult, and damage to the liver, which interferes with cholesterol metabolism and increases risk for obesity, for diabetes, for heart disease and stroke.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Auguste Rodin sculpted The Thinker between 1880-1881, less than 20 years after plastic was invented in England. Rodin intended the sculpture to be part of a larger, epic piece called \u201cThe Gates of Hell,\u201d inspired by Dante\u2019s Inferno. \u201cThe Gates of Hell\u201d consumed much of Rodin\u2019s life, and was only cast after his death. His pensive Thinker, meanwhile, went on to achieve global renown on its own.<\/p>\n

We are now at a moment where life truly is imitating art; the fossil fuel industry is driving us into an inferno, accelerating the climate catastrophe and blocking meaningful action on climate and on the Global Plastics Treaty. We are standing at a real-world version of Rodin\u2019s Gates of Hell, where thinking about the problem is no longer enough.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a <\/em>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Global Plastics Treaty was supposed to be finalized last year but negotiations broke down between two blocs of nations, those seeking controls on plastics and harmful chemicals, and those reliant on fossil fuel production. Since then, of course, Trump began his second term, with his MAGA mantra of \u201cDrill, Baby, Drill.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":66339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[401,1472,1119],"class_list":["post-300869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-microplastics","tag-plastic-pollution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300869"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":300871,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300869\/revisions\/300871"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}