— January 26, 2026 · Plastics’ Life Cycle Could Cost 83 Million Healthy Years

Table of Contents

1. At a Glance
2. Life-Cycle Models and DALYs Explained
3. What Was Done
4. What Was Found, Number by Number
5. Where the Modelled Harm Comes From
6. How It Fits With Earlier Research
7. What It Cannot Show
8. What the Authors and Coverage Said
9. What Remains Unknown
10. Sources and Primary Documents
11. Key Research Papers
12. Connections

At a Glance

• Paper: Deeney M, Hamelin L, Vialle C, Yan X, Green R, Yates J, Kadiyala S. “Global health burdens of plastics: a lifecycle assessment model from 2016 to 2040.” The Lancet Planetary Health 10(1):101406, published online January 26, 2026, open access.
• Who: seven researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, research institutes of the Université de Toulouse (with France’s national research bodies CNRS and INRAE) and the University of Exeter.
• Design: material flow analysis (the published Plastics-to-Ocean model) combined with lifecycle assessment, comparing six global scenarios year by year from 2016 to 2040.
• Scope: plastics commonly found in municipal solid waste, about 64% of global plastics production. Product manufacturing, consumer use, chemical exposure during use and microplastic pollution were outside the model.
• Health pathways counted: global warming, air pollution (fine particles and ozone), toxic chemicals (cancers and other non-communicable diseases), ozone-layer damage, ionising radiation and water use.
• Main result: 83 million DALYs cumulatively under business as usual; 2.1 million DALYs in 2016 (95% CI 2.1–2.2 million) rising to 4.5 million in 2040 (95% CI 4.4–4.7 million).
• Best scenario: the “system change” scenario, which combines every measure, cut annual DALYs in 2040 by 43% compared with business as usual, still leaving 2.6 million DALYs that year.
• Largest single lever in the model: reducing primary (new) plastics production without swapping in other materials.
• Funding and interests: public development and research funders in the UK and France and a private philanthropic foundation; the paper states that the funders had no role in the study, and the authors declare no competing interests.

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Life-Cycle Models and DALYs Explained

A lifecycle assessment works like an accounting ledger for a material. For each step in a product’s life, analysts list the inputs (energy, raw materials, transport) and the outputs (greenhouse gases, fine particles, metals and other chemicals released to air, water and soil). That list is called an inventory. A published impact method then converts each release into an estimated health effect, using factors drawn from earlier research on how, for example, a tonne of a given air pollutant translates into heart and lung disease across a population. The method used here follows the international ISO 14040 and 14044 standards.

For plastics, the steps in this model were:

• Extraction of the oil and gas that supply the raw materials. The paper notes that oil and gas extraction provides the feedstocks for more than 90% of global plastics.
• Production of monomers and new (“primary”) polymers, including steam cracking of hydrocarbons.
• Waste handling: collection, sorting, mechanical recycling and chemical recycling (pyrolysis).
• Disposal: incineration, engineered landfills, dumpsites, open burning, and plastic left in land and water environments.

The steps in which plastic is shaped into products and then used by consumers were not part of the underlying flow model, so they sit outside this study’s boundary.

A material flow analysis supplies the other half: how many tonnes of plastic move through each step each year, in each kind of region, under each future scenario. The team multiplied those tonnages by their estimated health damage per million tonnes to get a health total for every year.

A DALY (disability-adjusted life-year) is a standard measure of disease burden. In the paper’s words, “one DALY represents 1 year of healthy life lost in a population due to the sum of morbidity and premature mortality associated with a given disease.” It adds together years lived with illness or disability and years lost to early death, so a figure of 83 million DALYs means an estimated 83 million years of healthy life lost across the world’s population. It is not a count of people or deaths. The impact method used, called ReCiPe 2016, applies no age weighting or discounting and looks 100 years ahead from the moment of each release. A given year’s DALYs therefore include future harm from that year’s releases, such as cancers linked to substances that leak from landfills over very long periods.

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What Was Done

The study builds on the Plastics-to-Ocean (P2O) model, published in Science in 2020, which tracked the flow of municipal solid-waste plastics from production to end of life between 2016 and 2040. P2O covers plastic packaging, single-use products, nappies and sanitary waste, cigarette butts, durable consumer products, household products and business-to-business packaging. It excludes medical, hazardous, electronic, textile, agricultural, transport and construction waste and other industrial waste. It sorts plastic into three broad categories (rigid single materials, flexible single materials, and multilayer or mixed materials) and the world into eight regional “archetypes” by income level (high, upper-middle, lower-middle, low) and by rural or urban setting.

The P2O model defines six global scenarios, which this study carried over unchanged:

• Business as usual: no change to plastics policy, economics, infrastructure, materials, cultural norms or consumer behaviour.
• Current commitments: all major public- and private-sector commitments made in 2016–19, such as product bans and recycling targets, are implemented and enforced.
• Collect and dispose: a global expansion of waste collection, engineered landfills and incineration.
• Recycling: expanded collection, sorting, mechanical recycling and plastic-to-plastic chemical conversion.
• Reduce and substitute: less plastic through elimination, reuse, new delivery models and substitutes such as paper, coated paper and compostables.
• System change: all of these measures applied at once.

To turn P2O’s product categories into chemistry, the team estimated which polymers make up each product type from published literature. They then compiled inventories of short-term and long-term releases for each polymer at each step, mainly from the Ecoinvent database (versions 3.8 and 3.10), adjusted each region’s electricity mix (its reliance on fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables), and converted the releases into DALYs with the ReCiPe 2016 method, updated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2021 warming factors.

Substitutes were modelled as illustrations. Paper, coated paper and polylactide (a bio-based plastic) were assumed to replace plastic at a 1:1 ratio by weight, with paper recycled at 75% and polylactide fully incinerated, choices the authors made to show the larger potential gains. Because published replacement ratios vary widely, they repeated the 2040 calculation with ratios from 0.4 to 9.0 for paper-based substitutes and 0.8 to 1.4 for compostables. They also designed two reusable-glass systems for food packaging: reuse inside the home, and door-to-door refill delivery.

On uncertainty, the paper states that “statistical evaluation of summative uncertainty was not feasible or meaningful for these illustrative analyses.” The confidence intervals it reports come from 300 earlier P2O simulations of plastic flows. They describe uncertainty in how much plastic goes where, not in the health conversion factors or the inventories.

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What Was Found, Number by Number

The starting year, 2016

• Total: 2.1 million DALYs (95% CI 2.1–2.2 million).
• Global warming: 0.83 million DALYs (0.79–0.86 million); air pollution: 0.68 million DALYs (0.65–0.70 million).
• Toxic chemicals across the stages assessed: 0.41 million DALYs from cancers (0.40–0.43 million) and 0.22 million DALYs from other non-communicable diseases (0.21–0.22 million).
• Ozone-layer depletion, ionising radiation, ozone formation and water use together: 0.5% of the total (0.012 million DALYs).
• By stage: primary plastics production accounted for 82% (1.8 million DALYs) and open burning for a further 15% (0.32 million DALYs). Without the credits the model gives recycling and waste-to-fuel for replacing other production, these shares were 76% and 14% of a total of 2.3 million DALYs.

Business as usual, 2016 to 2040

Under business as usual the model gave a cumulative 83 million DALYs over 2016–2040, rising each year to 4.5 million DALYs in 2040 (95% CI 4.4–4.7 million). The paper attributes the rise to the projected growth in plastics demand, with no change in policy, infrastructure, economics, materials or behaviour, and states that health effects “more than doubled” over the period. The shares from each stage and each health pathway were similar in 2016 and 2040.

The six scenarios, cumulative 2016–2040

• Business as usual: 83 million DALYs.
• Current commitments: 79 million (4% lower).
• Collect and dispose: 76 million (8% lower).
• Recycling: 74 million (10% lower).
• Reduce and substitute: 69 million (17% lower).
• System change: 65 million (21% lower; 18 million DALYs fewer, as the discussion puts it).

The year 2040

• Every scenario showed rising health effects over time. Compared with 2016, annual DALYs in 2040 doubled under current commitments (+2.2 million), rose 84% under collect and dispose (+1.8 million) and 75% under recycling (+1.6 million).
• Only reduce and substitute and system change turned downward, after a peak between 2030 and 2032. By 2040 they had returned to the levels of 2026–27 and 2021–22 respectively.
• Across the alternative scenarios, the 2040 burden was 0.2 to 2.0 million DALYs (4% to 43%) lower than business as usual.
• System change in 2040: 2.6 million DALYs (95% CI 2.4–2.7 million), a 43% cut compared with business as usual.
• Sensitivity to substitution ratios: 2.7–3.6 million DALYs for reduce and substitute in 2040 and 2.4–3.3 million for system change. The abstract gives the resulting range for system change’s 2040 reduction as 46% to 23%; the results section gives it as 46% to 28% (2.1 to 1.3 million DALYs). Both figures appear in the paper.

What drove the differences

• Reducing primary plastics production delivered two-thirds of the health gain (0.2–1.6 million DALYs) in the current commitments, reduce and substitute, and system change scenarios in 2040; less open burning added a further 22–28% (0.1–0.7 million DALYs).
• In the recycling and collect-and-dispose scenarios, which kept primary production high, the gains came mainly from less open burning (39–68%, 0.4–0.5 million DALYs).
• Trade-offs added burden back: chemical recycling (+0.1 million DALYs in the recycling scenario and in system change), more incineration (+0.1 million) and landfill (+0.07 million) in collect and dispose, and plastic substitutes, above all polylactide (+0.4 million in reduce and substitute and in system change).
• The system change scenario modelled primary production 45% below business as usual in 2040 (227 versus 416 million tonnes, from the original P2O data).

What remained in the best case

In the 2040 system change scenario, primary petrochemical plastics production was still the leading source (63%, 1.9 million DALYs), followed by polylactide alternatives (12%, 0.4 million), open burning (5%, 0.2 million), chemical recycling (5%, 0.1 million) and industrial incineration (4%, 0.1 million). Paper, coated paper and the two reusable-glass systems each contributed 1–2% (0.03–0.05 million DALYs), though at higher substitution ratios paper-based substitutes could reach 11% (0.4 million). In the household glass-reuse system, home washing accounted for 94–98% of its health effects.

The paper’s summary of the scenarios: “Reducing primary plastics production, without material substitution, was the most effective single lever for reducing emissions and alleviating associated health burdens.”

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Where the Modelled Harm Comes From

The paper found that every stage of the plastics life cycle generated releases linked to harm, mainly through three routes:

• Global warming. Greenhouse gases raise global temperature. In the impact method this shows up as illness and death from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and flooding. In the 2040 system change scenario, electricity (mostly from fossil fuels at the global level) produced a quarter (0.2 million DALYs) of the greenhouse-gas burden of plastics production, steam cracking 14–21% (0.1 million) and natural-gas venting during raw-material extraction 11–12% (0.1 million). Direct carbon dioxide was the main warming source from incineration and open burning.
• Air pollution. Releases of nitrogen oxides, ammonia, sulphur dioxide and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) are counted as deaths from heart and lung disease and lung cancer. Open burning was a notable source of fine particles and nitrogen oxides.
• Toxic chemicals. Releases that raise chemical levels in the environment are counted as cancers and other non-communicable diseases, from diabetes and heart disease to neurological conditions and birth defects. In the model, groundwater contamination with hexavalent chromium (chromium VI) from treating residues of primary plastics production was the leading driver of cancer-related toxic effects. Zinc, vanadium and arsenic, linked to landfilled plastic and to landfilled residues and ash from production, pyrolysis and incineration, were the top drivers of non-cancer toxic effects, although the paper notes that these releases might occur over long timeframes. Open burning also produced dioxins, particularly from multilayer plastics, which in the model contain proportionally more polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

The same amount of plastic produced different health totals in different regions, largely because of differences in regional electricity mixes. The paper reports greater adverse effects in lower-middle-income archetypes for the same processes.

What the model does not trace is the route most people picture: chemicals such as phthalates, bisphenols, PFAS and flame retardants moving from plastic products into food, drink, dust and the body, and particles of plastic lodging in tissues. The authors write that it is “unclear to what extent chemicals contained in plastics are captured at other stages of the plastics lifecycle because of a crucial absence of transparency in available data inventories.”

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How It Fits With Earlier Research

The paper draws on, and sits beside, several lines of earlier work:

• The Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health (2023). This 48-author review concluded that plastics cause harm at every stage of their life cycle, from extracting the coal, oil and gas that are their main feedstocks to final disposal. It reported that over 98% of plastics are produced from fossil carbon, that annual production grew from under 2 million tonnes in 1950 to 460 million tonnes in 2019, and that single-use plastics make up 35–40% of current production. It named phthalates, bisphenols, PFAS and brominated and organophosphate flame retardants among the added chemicals of concern. It also noted that the harms had not been systematically assessed or fully quantified, a gap the new paper set out to narrow.
• The Lancet Countdown on health and plastics (2025). Launched in The Lancet in August 2025, it describes plastics as “a grave, growing, and under-recognised danger to human and planetary health,” estimates health-related economic losses exceeding US$1.5 trillion a year, reports production of 475 million tonnes in 2022 (projected to reach 1,200 million by 2060) and recycling of less than 10%, and sets up an indicator-based system for tracking plastics’ health effects over time.
• The Plastics-to-Ocean model (2020). The flow model behind this study found that implementing all feasible interventions cut plastic pollution by 78% compared with business as usual in 2040. Even so, 710 million tonnes of plastic waste entered land and water ecosystems over the period. The new study adds a health layer on top of those same flows.
• Pollution and health (2022). An update of the Lancet Commission on pollution and health estimated that pollution remains responsible for about 9 million deaths a year, one in six deaths worldwide, with deaths from ambient air pollution and toxic chemical pollution rising.
• Plastic chemicals in human studies. A 2024 umbrella review pooled 52 systematic reviews with 759 meta-analyses. It found associations between bisphenol A (BPA) and type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, polycystic ovary syndrome, obesity, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, and between phthalates and outcomes including pregnancy loss, insulin resistance and asthma. It found no meta-analyses at all on plastic polymers or microplastics. These are associations from observational research. Burden-of-disease studies have since put figures on them: one estimated US$249 billion in plastic-attributable disease costs in the United States in 2018 from four chemical groups, and another attributed 356,238 cardiovascular deaths worldwide in 2018 to the phthalate DEHP, 349,113 of them to its use in plastics. Both are models with their own assumptions.
• Microplastics in the body. In a 2024 study in The New England Journal of Medicine, polyethylene was found in the carotid artery plaque of 150 of 257 patients followed after surgery (58.4%), and PVC in 31 (12.1%). Over about 34 months, patients with detectable particles had a higher risk of heart attack, stroke or death from any cause (hazard ratio 4.53, 95% CI 2.00–10.27). The study was observational, so it shows a link rather than proof that the particles caused those events. A 2024 review in Science marking twenty years of microplastics research reported that microplastics have been detected throughout the human body, “with emerging evidence of negative effects.” See the site’s pages on microplastics in food and water and atherosclerosis.

The paper notes that an earlier lifecycle analysis built on economic projections from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimated toxic effects and ozone-related health effects of the global plastics system for 2019 and 2060, but did not compare alternative scenarios or include fine particles and climate change. The authors present their study as the first to bring all the relevant health indicators of lifecycle assessment together at global scale.

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What It Cannot Show

The authors are direct about the status of their numbers: “Our results should not be interpreted as predictions but as quantitative illustrations of potential health effects across plastics lifecycles and global scenarios.” The main limits they list are these:

• Missing exposures. Chemical exposure while products are in use, and micro- and nanoplastic pollution across the life cycle, were not modelled for lack of inventory data. The authors write that hazardous chemicals contained in plastics might cause their results, and those of other lifecycle studies, “to underestimate the human health impact of plastics by at least an order of magnitude.” They cite estimates that more than 16,000 chemicals have been identified in plastics, about a quarter of them known to be hazardous, and that most are missing or appear only as generic entries in lifecycle databases.
• A partial slice of plastics. Only municipal-waste plastics (about 64% of production) were included; covering all sectors would mean roughly a 53% increase in volume and would include sectors with more harmful polymers, such as PVC in construction. Product manufacturing and consumer use were outside the boundary.
• Likely undercounted emissions. The model’s greenhouse-gas estimate for primary production (0.7–0.8 billion tonnes of CO₂-equivalent a year in 2016–19) was less than half the figures from two other global studies (1.9 billion for 2015 and 2.24 billion for 2019). Open-burning air pollution was estimated conservatively, and black carbon from incomplete burning was not counted. The paper estimates that plastics lifecycles could cause more than 0.7% of global deaths from outdoor particulate matter and calls this likely “a substantial underestimation globally.”
• Data gaps and geography. Inventories were extrapolated from data collected in Europe and North America, which could understate emissions in regions with fewer controls; chemical-recycling data came from a single European pyrolysis plant; there were no data on informal recycling. The authors also note that industry-derived inventory data do not reflect the raised cancer risk they describe among people who work in or live near petrochemical plants.
• Fixed assumptions. The scenarios reflect stakeholder consultations held in 2018–2020. Shifts to renewable energy over time were not modelled, and polymer mixes were held constant. Substitution ratios, reuse frequency, washing practices and transport distances strongly influence the substitute results.
• No benefits counted. The model does not credit plastics with any beneficial functions. It compares scenarios on the basis of equivalent function, for example packaging the same amount of food.
• Long horizons and the DALY itself. Long-term releases are included, sometimes over thousands of years from landfills and dumps, which gives a maximum burden. The authors also note that DALYs have been criticised for built-in value judgements and for blurring the difference between illness and death, and that the 100-year horizon carries significant uncertainty.
• Uncertainty not fully quantified. The confidence intervals cover only uncertainty in plastic flows; uncertainty in inventories and impact factors was discussed in words rather than calculated.

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What the Authors and Coverage Said

The paper’s interpretation states that “adverse health effects are associated with emissions throughout plastics lifecycles, particularly from production, though the non-disclosure of plastics chemical composition is severely limiting LCA capacity to inform effective policy.” The authors call for deep reductions in primary production within plastics roadmaps, for assessments that include use-stage exposure, chemicals, microplastics and nanoplastics, and for “mandatory transparency and reporting,” and conclude that “globally coordinated policy that addresses these upstream impacts through a full lifecycle approach is crucial to protecting human health.” The paper notes that the UN Environment Assembly adopted resolution 5/14 in March 2022 to develop a legally binding instrument to end plastics pollution, and that “as of 2026, the future Global Plastics Treaty is under negotiation by more than 175 member states.”

In a report by Agence France-Presse dated January 26–27, 2026, lead author Megan Deeney said of the estimate: “This is undoubtedly a vast underestimate of the total human health impacts.” The same report says she referred to the problem as a “global public health crisis” and said the most effective measure in the model was reducing the amount of “unnecessary” plastic made in the first place.

The AFP report gave the 83 million, 2.1 million and 4.5 million figures, and all three appear in the paper. Some of the coverage checked for this report went further than the paper:

• A research-institute news item (February 23, 2026) said that 83 million years of healthy life “will be lost” by 2040 if production and use continue on the current trajectory. The paper’s total begins in 2016, and the authors present their figures as illustrations rather than predictions.
• One outlet (January 27, 2026) split the business-as-usual burden into percentages for warming, air pollution and toxic chemicals. The paper reports these as absolute numbers for 2016 (0.83, 0.68, 0.41 and 0.22 million DALYs), not as those percentages. The same outlet cited a national recycling rate that does not come from the paper.
• The AFP report said recycling “made little difference.” In the paper the recycling scenario lowered cumulative DALYs by 10%, and the authors describe waste-management and recycling-only scenarios as “substantially less effective” than those that cut primary production.

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What Remains Unknown

• The use phase. How much disease comes from chemicals that migrate out of plastic products into food, drink and dust while they are in use. The model could not include it, and the authors name it as a priority.
• Micro- and nanoplastics. Whether particles found in human tissues cause disease, and how much. Their emissions across the life cycle “have yet to be fully assessed,” the paper says, which might also change the comparison between waste strategies.
• What plastics contain. The chemical make-up of specific polymers, bio-based plastics and substitutes is largely undisclosed. The authors list mandatory access to transparent, geographically representative composition data as the first priority for improving the model.
• Plastics in other sectors. Health effects of plastics in textiles, construction, vehicles, electronics, agriculture and medicine, which were outside this model.
• The people closest to the waste. The paper notes that the informal waste sector includes as many as 10–20 million people worldwide working in unsafe conditions, whose exposures are not captured in lifecycle databases.
• Other effects. The authors cite emerging evidence linking plastic build-up in the environment to lower crop yields, worse flooding and higher infectious-disease risk, effects lifecycle methods do not yet measure.
• Future energy and policy. How a shift to renewable electricity, national rules introduced since 2019 and the outcome of treaty negotiations would change the totals. The authors describe the model as a flexible framework that can be updated as data and methods improve.

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Sources and Primary Documents

Every figure attributed to the study above was taken from the open-access full text, not from press coverage. The identifiers were checked against PubMed and Crossref.

1. Deeney M, Hamelin L, Vialle C, Yan X, Green R, Yates J, Kadiyala S (2026). Global health burdens of plastics: a lifecycle assessment model from 2016 to 2040. The Lancet Planetary Health 10(1):101406. Published online January 26, 2026. — doi:10.1016/j.lanplh.2025.101406 · PubMed PMID: 41610860 · Full text (PMC12867957)
2. Lau WWY, Shiran Y, Bailey RM, et al. (2020). Evaluating scenarios toward zero plastic pollution. Science 369(6510):1455-1461. The Plastics-to-Ocean model the study builds on. — doi:10.1126/science.aba9475 · PubMed PMID: 32703909
3. Agence France-Presse (January 27, 2026). Health threat of global plastics projected to soar. — AFP report (GMA News copy)
4. Common Dreams (January 27, 2026). Coverage of the study. — News report
5. INRAE, French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (February 23, 2026). Global impact of plastics on healthy living. — Institute news item

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Key Research Papers

Background papers on plastics and health, checked against PubMed and Crossref before they were written down.

1. Landrigan PJ, Raps H, Cropper M, Bald C, Brunner M, Canonizado EM, et al. (2023). The Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health. Annals of Global Health 89(1):23. — PubMed PMID: 36969097
2. Landrigan PJ, Dunlop S, Treskova M, Raps H, Symeonides C, Muncke J, et al. (2025). The Lancet Countdown on health and plastics. The Lancet 406(10507):1044-1062. — PubMed PMID: 40769171
3. Fuller R, Landrigan PJ, Balakrishnan K, Bathan G, Bose-O’Reilly S, Brauer M, et al. (2022). Pollution and health: a progress update. The Lancet Planetary Health 6(6):e535-e547. — PubMed PMID: 35594895
4. Symeonides C, Aromataris E, Mulders Y, Dizon J, Stern C, Barker TH, et al. (2024). An Umbrella Review of Meta-Analyses Evaluating Associations between Human Health and Exposure to Major Classes of Plastic-Associated Chemicals. Annals of Global Health 90(1):52. — PubMed PMID: 39183960
5. Trasande L, Krithivasan R, Park K, Obsekov V, Belliveau M (2024). Chemicals Used in Plastic Materials: An Estimate of the Attributable Disease Burden and Costs in the United States. Journal of the Endocrine Society 8(2):bvad163. — PubMed PMID: 38213907
6. Hyman S, Acevedo J, Giannarelli C, Trasande L (2025). Phthalate exposure from plastics and cardiovascular disease: global estimates of attributable mortality and years life lost. eBioMedicine 117:105730. — PubMed PMID: 40307157
7. Marfella R, Prattichizzo F, Sardu C, Fulgenzi G, Graciotti L, Spadoni T, et al. (2024). Microplastics and Nanoplastics in Atheromas and Cardiovascular Events. New England Journal of Medicine 390(10):900-910. — PubMed PMID: 38446676
8. Thompson RC, Courtene-Jones W, Boucher J, Pahl S, Raubenheimer K, Koelmans AA (2024). Twenty years of microplastic pollution research—what have we learned? Science 386(6720):eadl2746. — PubMed PMID: 39298564

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Plastics, life cycle assessment and human health
2. PubMed: Plastics and disability-adjusted life-years
3. PubMed: Plastic-associated chemicals, phthalates, bisphenols and health
4. PubMed: Microplastics in human tissue and cardiovascular disease
5. PubMed: Open burning of plastic waste, air pollution and health

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Connections

• News Archive
• Plastics and Packaging — the site’s section on plastics and food-contact chemicals
• Microplastics and Nanoplastics — sources, body burden and emerging health research
• BPA, Plastics, and Food Contact Chemicals — bisphenols and other plastic chemicals
• Microplastics in Food and Water — particles in what people eat and drink
• Phthalates — plasticisers and endocrine disruption
• PFAS — the “forever chemicals” in water, food and blood
• Flame Retardants — additives found in many plastics
• Air Pollution PM2.5 — fine particles and their health effects
• Dioxins — pollutants released by open burning
• Hexavalent vs Dietary Chromium — the chromium VI the model flags in groundwater
• Arsenic — one of the model’s leading non-cancer toxic drivers
• Lung Cancer — one of the outcomes counted for air pollution
• Carotid Artery Stenosis — the plaque studied for microplastics
• Atherosclerosis — plaque build-up in the arteries

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