This opinion article is in response to Environment Minister Dion George’s announcement on 6 November 2025 of his intention to regulate single-use plastics and bring about waste management reform.
Imagine we’re having this conversation in the smokers’ lounge. Yes, with that tarry fog catching in your throat, and your delicate pink lung tissue soaking it all up.
Imagine our kids are in here with us.
While we’re here, let’s consider this one simple question: what is a lethal dose of plastic poisoning?
Today, we know something about passive smoking. That’s why we don’t light up in the car with the kids, the way our folks did when we were little.
Because of legislation from our Health Department, based on evidence-based science relating to the health impacts of passive smoking, this form of pollution is kept to discrete places. You and I can decide if we want to go into the smokers’ corner or not.
But when it comes to inhaling plastics pollution, we can’t see it, we can’t taste it, we can’t smell it. Many of us don’t even know it’s there. But it is.
The evidence is telling us that airborne micro-plastics are pretty much everywhere: we’re turning the entire planet into a smokers’ lounge. A smokers’ lounge that none of us can leave – not even our kids.
It’s not just about picture-postcard beaches
Environment Minister Dion George’s announcement to tackle single-use plastics with decisive regulations is a step in the right direction. But the Health Department needs to come on board because this new form of pollution isn’t just about keeping tourists on our beaches or sparing fish from a dystopian diet of the all-you-can-eat plastics buffet swirling about in our rivers and oceans.
Plastics never break down. They seem to disappear, but really they just get milled down into particles so small that we forget they’re there. These microscopic pieces are in our water, our food, and in the air we breathe.
Now they’re turning up in our livers, our kidneys, placental tissue and breast milk, and our testes. They’re in our blood, our bone marrow, our arteries and our hearts. They’re now so small that they can even slip through our body’s most sophisticated defence: the blood-brain barrier.
While they’re sitting there, they’re leaching out the toxic chemicals that are baked into their DNA.
Manufacturers have thousands of different chemicals that they can add to plastics so that the final product holds its shape, can tolerate some temperature changes, is colour-stable and fire-resistant. We know many of these are cancer-causing, and can mess with our endocrine systems.
By exposing ourselves to this form of pollution, we’re running an uncontrolled experiment – one that none of us connected – in which our bodies are the lab rats.
With any poison, how dangerous it is depends on the dose. The dose, in this case, depends on what kind of plastics are in our bodies, which organs they’re trapped in, how long they stay there, and how efficient our system is at flushing it away.
Lots of question marks.
We may not know, yet, what a lethal dose of plastics poisoning is. But we will, soon enough.
Closing the tap on plastics pollution
In the 70 years since industrial-scale plastics pollution started, some of this waste has ended up fossilising in landfills. Some has been burned. Nearly six billion metric tonnes of it has spilled out of the waste system and become pollution in the environment. Even though we can’t see it, it’s still there, and now it’s washing up inside our bodies like toxic sludge on a beach.
The same thing will happen with future plastics pollution as we continue business as usual: much of it will wash up in our children’s and grandchildren’s bodies.
The most recent UN effort to finalise a global plastics treaty failed, leaving us rudderless at a global level. More than half of the countries at the September meeting in Geneva wanted a robust agreement that would reduce the amount of virgin plastics entering the value chain, and ban many of the toxic chemicals that are added during manufacture. But this effort was thwarted by a few petrostates, such as Russia and Saudi Arabia.
If a global unilateral agreement won’t steer us onto the right course, then it is up to individual states to put their hands on the tiller and realise our constitutional right to a healthy, safe environment, both inside and outside our bodies.
Making this happen needs more than just the Environment Department at the helm. Our body’s health and a healthy environment are as inseparable as inhaling is from exhaling. We need both to live.
Let’s imagine ourselves back inside that smokers’ lounge for a few more minutes, as we contemplate this issue. Only, in this imaginary case, there is no outside to escape to once we’ve had a lungful. DM