Over 90% of common household items contain hazardous plastic chemicals

Nearly 93% of known plastic chemicals used to wrap food and make clothes, toys, and other common household and personal care products pose a high risk to human health, according to a new investigation provided exclusively to CNN.

Potential health harms include cancer, genetic changes, and endocrine, reproductive and organ toxicity, said Naima Fenderl, lead author of “Poison Plastics: How Chemicals in Everyday Plastics are Harming Your Health,” released Wednesday .

“We looked at what these plastic chemicals can do to the body along with exposure levels to calculate overall health risk,” said Fenderl, a researcher at the Environmental Justice Foundation, or EJF, a London-based environmental nonprofit which produced the report.

The report analyzed exposure to five categories of plastics people use nearly every day :

Almost 92% of the chemicals found in food-contact plastics were of high risk to human health

Nearly 89% of children’s toys contained high-risk plastics

Some 93% of textiles and clothing were made with dangerous chemicals

Over 92% of common household products — such as bottled water, kitchenware, tableware, gardening tools, toilet articles and office supplies — contained high risk chemicals

Nearly 93% of hygiene and medical plastics also contained dangerous chemicals. Those products include dental floss, tampons and other menstrual products, pill casings, patches, and syringes, to name a few

“The report does a brilliant job of presenting information on everyday plastics in a very user-friendly form,” said pediatrician Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Global Observatory on Planetary Health and the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College.

“All of a sudden people can get a sense of immediacy about how these plastics are infiltrating their lives in ways that they didn’t realize,” said Landrigan, who was not involved in the report.

Yet it’s what science doesn’t know about the plastic chemicals in everyday products that is equally disturbing, according to the report. Nearly 80% of the 3,552 chemicals in plastics people often use lacked sufficient data to determine toxicity or exposure risks.

“We simply do not have a clue what harm those chemicals might be causing us and our kids,” Landrigan said. “We don’t even know the names or composition of a lot of the chemicals that are in consumer products — the chemical industry presumably has that information, but it’s not publicly available.

“We’re like the drunk and the lamppost, right? We’re looking for the keys under the lamppost because that’s where the light is, and we don’t know what the hell is out there in the rest of the world.”

The American Chemistry Council, an industry trade association representing chemical manufacturing companies, told CNN in an email that EJF’s report should be viewed with “considerable caution” because it omits key data sources such as International Council of Chemical Associations’ publicly available plastic additives database .

The report also fails to consider regulatory databases in the United States and the European Union, said Kimberly Wise White, vice president of regulatory and scientific affairs at the American Chemistry Council.

“The report’s selective framing misleads and dubiously characterizes chemicals as unregulated by excluding major regulatory frameworks from the analysis,” White said. “Without them, this report does more to generate headlines than to advance the science.”

There are plastics in nearly every aspect of our lives. More than 80% of the produce sold in US supermarkets comes wrapped in single-use plastics. About 60% of clothing is made from plastic-based synthetic fabrics, while an estimated 90% of the toys children put in their mouths and play with are created out of plastics — many of which are laced with chemicals known to cause health harms.

Add in the thousands of common household items made with plastics — pots, pans, kitchen utensils, food-storage containers and even furniture — as well as the myriad plastic chemicals in personal care and medical products, and the potential exposure is mind-blowing.

In 2024, a group of international scientists created PlastChem, a comprehensive state-of-the-art database of all known chemicals in plastics. Of the 16,000 chemicals the researchers could identify, 4,200 were considered “highly hazardous” to human health and the environment. Another 10,000-plus had no available data at all.

The Environmental Justice Foundation used the PlastChem database for its analysis, repackaging the information in a “policy-relevant, real-world context,” said PlastChem coauthor Jane Muncke, managing director and chief scientific officer at the Food Packaging Forum, a nonprofit science research foundation based in Zurich, Switzerland, in an email. She was not involved in the new report.

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PlastChem bundles chemicals into 15 priority groups that could be targeted for regulation. Those include bisphenols such as BPA, which at high levels have been linked to premature death ; phthalates, which are linked to thousands of deaths worldwide from heart disease; and “forever chemicals” called PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances , which research has linked to billions of dollars in healthcare costs in the United States alone.

Many of the plastic chemicals are also endocrine disruptors , interfering with the body’s hormones and contributing to obesity, low birth weight, gestational diabetes, birth defects and neurodevelopmental disorders, said Martin Wagner, project lead of PlastChem and professor of biology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

“The chemicals of concern we identified are also persistent, in that they don’t easily degrade in the environment; bio-accumulative, meaning they build up in the body over time; and mobile, which means they spread easily in drinking water or in the aquatic environment,” Wagner previously told CNN .

Yet more than 50% of the known high-risk chemicals of concern are not regulated by major jurisdictions such as the European Union or any of several international environmental treaties that have targeted key chemicals, including the Basel Convention, the Minamata Convention, the Montreal Protocol, the Rotterdam Convention and the Stockholm Convention, Fenderl said.

“The United States has not ratified several of these international agreements that other countries have ratified, including the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions,” she said. “That actually leaves US consumers particularly vulnerable to these health risks.”

It’s a huge problem that has been brewing for decades, according to the report. In 1950, manufacturers made roughly 2 million metric tons of plastic annually; today, more than 430 million metric tons are created each year. Scientists project plastic production will more than double by 2050, along with 2 billion metric tons of chemical plastic additives as well.

Globally, “there are now 325,000 synthetic chemicals in the hands of the chemical industry,” Landrigan said. “Not all of them are on the market, but that’s how many have been invented and made since chemical manufacturing took off after World War II. At most, generously speaking, we have toxicologic information on maybe 20% of them.”

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CNN独家获得的一项最新调查显示，用于包装食品、制造衣服、玩具和其他常见家居及个人护理产品的已知塑料化学品中，近93%对人类健康构成高风险。

《有毒塑料：日常塑料中的化学物质如何危害你的健康》一书的主要作者奈玛·芬德尔（Naima Fenderl）周三表示，潜在的健康危害包括癌症、基因改变以及内分泌、生殖和器官毒性。

“我们研究了这些塑料化学物质对人体的影响以及接触水平，以计算总体健康风险，”环境正义基金会（EJF）的研究员芬德尔说。EJF 是一家总部位于伦敦的环保非营利组织，该报告由其撰写。

该报告分析了人们几乎每天都会接触到的五类塑料：

在食品接触塑料中发现的化学物质中，近92%对人体健康构成高风险。

近89%的儿童玩具含有高风险塑料。

约93%的纺织品和服装都使用了危险化学物质。

超过92%的常见家用产品——例如瓶装水、厨具、餐具、园艺工具、卫生用品和办公用品——都含有高风险化学物质。

近93%的卫生和医用塑料制品也含有危险化学物质。这些产品包括牙线、卫生棉条和其他经期用品、药片外壳、贴片和注射器等等。

“这份报告以非常用户友好的方式出色地呈现了有关日常塑料的信息，”儿科医生菲利普·兰德里根博士说道，他是波士顿学院全球行星健康观察站和全球公共卫生与公共利益项目的负责人。

“人们突然间就能真切地感受到这些塑料是如何以他们之前没有意识到的方式渗透到他们的生活中的，”兰德里根说道，​​他并没有参与这份报告的撰写。

然而，报告指出，科学对日常用品中塑料化学物质的了解不足同样令人担忧。在人们常用的3552种塑料化学物质中，近80%缺乏足够的数据来确定其毒性或暴露风险。

兰德里根说：“我们根本不知道这些化学物质可能会对我们和我们的孩子造成什么危害。我们甚至不知道很多消费品中化学物质的名称或成分——化学工业大概掌握这些信息，但这些信息并未公开。”

“我们就像醉汉和路灯，对吧？我们在路灯下找钥匙，因为那里有光，我们根本不知道外面的世界是什么样子。”

代表化学制造公司的行业贸易协会——美国化学理事会在一封电子邮件中告诉 CNN，EJF 的报告应该“非常谨慎地”看待，因为它遗漏了关键数据来源，例如国际化学协会理事会公开的塑料添加剂数据库。

美国化学理事会监管和科学事务副总裁金伯利·怀斯·怀特表示，该报告也没有考虑美国和欧盟的监管数据库。

怀特表示：“这份报告选择性地呈现事实，误导读者，并通过将主要的监管框架排除在分析之外，令人质疑地将化学品描述为不受监管。缺少这些监管框架，这份报告与其说是推动科学进步，不如说是制造新闻噱头。”

塑料几乎渗透到我们生活的方方面面。美国超市出售的农产品中，超过80%都用一次性塑料包装。约60%的服装由塑料基合成纤维制成，而儿童放入口中或玩耍的玩具中，估计有90%是塑料制品——其中许多都含有已知对健康有害的化学物质。

再加上成千上万种常见的塑料制品——锅碗瓢盆、厨房用具、食品储存容器，甚至家具——以及个人护理和医疗产品中无数的塑料化学物质，潜在的接触量令人震惊。

2024年，一群国际科学家创建了PlastChem，这是一个涵盖塑料中所有已知化学物质的综合性尖端数据库。研究人员识别出的16000种化学物质中，有4200种被认为对人类健康和环境“高度有害”。另有10000多种化学物质完全没有相关数据。

环境正义基金会在其分析中使用了PlastChem数据库，并根据“与政策相关的现实背景”重新整理了这些信息。PlastChem数据库的共同作者、位于瑞士苏黎世的非营利科学研究基金会——食品包装论坛的执行董事兼首席科学官简·蒙克在一封电子邮件中表示，她并未参与这份新报告的撰写。

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PlastChem 将化学物质分为 15 个优先监管类别。这些类别包括双酚类物质（例如 BPA），高浓度的 BPA 与过早死亡有关；邻苯二甲酸酯，与全球数千例心脏病死亡病例有关；以及被称为 PFAS（全氟和多氟烷基物质）的“永久性化学物质”，研究表明，仅在美国，PFAS 就造成了数十亿美元的医疗保健费用。

PlastChem项目负责人、挪威科技大学生物学教授马丁·瓦格纳表示，许多塑料化学物质也是内分泌干扰物，会干扰人体激素，导致肥胖、低出生体重、妊娠糖尿病、出生缺陷和神经发育障碍。

瓦格纳此前告诉 CNN：“我们发现的这些令人担忧的化学物质还具有持久性，因为它们不容易在环境中降解；具有生物累积性，这意味着它们会随着时间的推移在体内积累；而且具有流动性，这意味着它们很容易在饮用水或水生环境中传播。”

芬德尔表示，超过 50% 的已知高风险化学品并未受到欧盟等主要司法管辖区的监管，也未受到包括《巴塞尔公约》、《水俣公约》、《蒙特利尔议定书》、《鹿特丹公约》和《斯德哥尔摩公约》在内的多项针对关键化学品的国际环境条约的监管。

她说：“美国尚未批准其他国家已经批准的几项国际协议，包括《巴塞尔公约》、《鹿特丹公约》和《斯德哥尔摩公约》。这实际上使美国消费者更容易受到这些健康风险的影响。”

报告指出，这是一个酝酿了几十年的巨大问题。1950年，制造商每年生产约200万吨塑料；而如今，每年的塑料产量超过4.3亿吨。科学家预测，到2050年，塑料产量将翻一番以上，同时化学塑料添加剂的产量也将增加20亿吨。

兰德里根说，全球“目前化学工业掌握着32.5万种合成化学品”。“并非所有这些化学品都已上市，但自二战后化学制造业蓬勃发展以来，已经发明和生产了这么多化学品。即便往好了说，我们最多也只掌握了其中20%的毒理学信息。”

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