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Monday, January 24th, 2022

We’ve Breached Earth’s Threshold for Chemical Pollution, Study Says

Author:     Elizabeth Claire Alberts
Source:     Mongabay
Publication Date:     19 January 2022
Link: We’ve Breached Earth’s Threshold for Chemical Pollution, Study Says
Stephan:   No nation in the world, and certainly not the United States, is taking the human pollution of the earth seriously enough. We need to undergo a massive change in the technologies we employ. Now humans treat the earth as an exploitable bank account left to us by a rich uncle. As this report spells out it is literally destroying the earth's ecosystems. We need to enter a new epoch where every technology is considered first from the perspective of its impact on the matrix of life.
Plastic pollution in the ocean. Credit: Naja Bertolt Jensen / Unsplash.
  • A new study has found that the release of novel entities — artificial chemicals and other human-made pollutants — has accelerated to a point that we have crossed a “planetary boundary,” threatening the entire Earth operating system, along with humanity.
  • The study authors argue that the breach of this critical planetary boundary has occurred because the rate at which novel entities are being developed and produced by industry exceeds governments’ ability to assess risk and monitor impacts.
  • There are about 350,000 different types of artificial chemicals currently on the international market, with production of existing and new synthetic chemicals set to substantially increase in the coming decades.
  • While many of these substances have been shown to negatively affect the natural world and human health, the vast majority have yet to be evaluated, with their interactions and impacts poorly understood or completely unknown.

Many thousands of human-made chemicals and synthetic pollutants are circulating throughout our world, with new ones entering production all the time — so […]

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1 Comment

  1. Albus Eddie on Tuesday, January 25, 2022 at 5:19 am

    A self inflicted wound of massive proportions. Many of the modern medical ills, social and physiological can be traced directly to this trend.