Synthetic chemicals in food system creating health burden of $2.2tn a year, report finds

Key Highlights

• There are also potential consequences for human demographics, with the report concluding that if exposure to endocrine disruptors such as bisphenols and phthalates persists at current rates, there could be between 200 million and 700 million fewer births between 2025 and 2100. High levels of ‘forever chemical’ found in cereal products across Europe – studyRead moreThe report is the work of dozens of scientists from organisations including the Institute of Preventive Health, the Center for Environmental Health, Chemsec, and various universities in the US and UK, including the University of Sussex and Duke University.
• It was led by a core team from Systemiq, a company that invests in enterprises aimed at fulfilling the UN sustainable development goals and the Paris agreement on climate change. The authors said they had focused on the four chemical types examined because “they are among the most prevalent and best studied worldwide, with robust evidence of harm to human and ecological health”. One of the team, Philip Landrigan, a paediatrician and professor of global public health at Boston College, called the report a “wake-up call”.
• He said: “The world really has to wake up and do something about chemical pollution.
• I would argue that the problem of chemical pollution is every bit as serious as the problem with climate change.”Human and ecosystem exposure to synthetic chemicals has surged since the end of the second world war, with chemical production increasing by more than 200 times since the 1950s and more than 350,000 synthetic chemicals currently on the global market. Three years ago, researchers from the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) concluded that chemical pollution had crossed a “planetary boundary”, the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the past 10,000 years, the period in which modern human civilisation has developed. Unlike with pharmaceuticals, there are few safeguards to test for the safety of industrial chemicals before they are put into use, and little monitoring of their effects once they are.
• Some have been found to be disastrously toxic to humans, animals and ecosystems, leaving governments to pick up the bill. This report assesses the impact of four families of synthetic chemicals endemic in global food production.