Over 90% of common household items contain hazardous plastic chemicals

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN

(CNN) — 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.

Not enough data to measure potential harm

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.”

Plastics are everywhere

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.

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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