Published : 01 Oct 2026, 02:11 PM
Updated : 01 Oct 2026, 02:11 PM
Plastic touches daily life at nearly every turn, and a new investigation has found that almost all the known chemicals in it pose a high risk to human health, CNN reports.
The report, “Poison Plastics: How Chemicals in Everyday Plastics are Harming Your Health”, was released on Wednesday and provided exclusively to the American outlet.
It finds that nearly 93 percent of known plastic chemicals used to wrap food and make clothes, toys and other household and personal care products carry that risk.
Lead author Naima Fenderl says the potential harms include cancer, genetic changes, and endocrine, reproductive and organ toxicity.
“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 (EJF), the London-based environmental nonprofit behind the report.
The report examined five categories of plastics people use almost daily:
• Food-contact plastics: Almost 92 percent of chemicals were considered high risk.
• Children’s toys: Nearly 89 percent contained high-risk chemicals.
• Textiles and clothing: Some 93 percent contained high-risk chemicals.
• Household products: Over 92 percent, including bottled water, kitchenware, gardening tools, toilet articles and office supplies, contained high-risk chemicals.
• Hygiene and medical plastics: Nearly 93 percent, including dental floss, tampons, other menstrual products, pill casings, patches and syringes, contained high-risk chemicals.
Paediatrician Philip Landrigan, director of the Global Observatory on Planetary Health and the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College, praised the report. He was not involved in the research.
“The report does a brilliant job of presenting information on everyday plastics in a very user-friendly form,” he said. “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 realise.”
What science does not know is equally disturbing, the report says. Nearly 80 percent of the 3,552 chemicals in commonly used plastics lacked enough 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 manufacturers, told CNN that the report should be viewed with “considerable caution”.
It says the analysis omits key data sources such as the publicly available plastic additives database of the International Council of Chemical Associations.
The report also ignores regulatory databases in the United States and the European Union, said Kimberly Wise White, the council’s vice president of regulatory and scientific affairs.
“The report’s selective framing misleads and dubiously characterises 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.”
CNN said more than 80 percent of produce sold in US supermarkets comes wrapped in single-use plastics, while about 60 percent of clothing is made from synthetic fabrics.
An estimated 90 percent of toys children play with and put in their mouths are also made of plastic, many containing chemicals linked to health harms.
Add pots, pans, utensils, food-storage containers and furniture, plus personal care and medical products, and the potential exposure is mind-blowing, it added.
In 2024, international scientists built PlastChem, a database of all known chemicals in plastics.
Of 16,000 identified, 4,200 were considered “highly hazardous” to human health and the environment. Another 10,000-plus had no available data.
EJF drew on PlastChem, repackaging the information in a “policy-relevant, real-world context”, coauthor Jane Muncke said in an email. Muncke, managing director and chief scientific officer at the Zurich-based Food Packaging Forum, a nonprofit science research foundation.
PlastChem bundles chemicals into 15 priority groups that could be targeted for regulation.
They include bisphenols such as BPA, linked at high levels to premature death, and phthalates, linked to thousands of deaths worldwide from heart disease. Also listed are “forever chemicals” known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which research has tied to billions of dollars in US healthcare costs.
Many are also endocrine disruptors, interfering with hormones and contributing to obesity, low birth weight, gestational diabetes, birth defects and neurodevelopmental disorders, said Martin Wagner, PlastChem project lead 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.
More than 50 percent of the known high-risk chemicals are unregulated by major jurisdictions such as the European Union or by international treaties targeting key chemicals, Fenderl says.
These include the Basel, Minamata, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions and the Montreal Protocol.
“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.”
The problem has been brewing for decades, the report says. Manufacturers made roughly 2 million tonnes of plastic a year in 1950, against more than 430 million tonnes today. Production is projected to more than double by 2050, along with 2 billion tonnes of chemical plastic additives.
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 percent of them.”
