Plastic pollution is no longer just an environmental issue – it is entering the human body at scale, with growing evidence of serious health risks.

Aside from taking down humanity by baking the Earth or sparking nuclear war, the oil industry is now advancing the human end-game by poisoning everyone with plastic – a crime increasingly known as plasticide.

The horrific toxicology of ingested plastics has become more apparent with the release of a  scientific paper about their impact on wildlife.

The researchers, led by Erin Murphy of the Ocean Conservancy, investigated 10,000 deaths covering 1,300 ocean species. Among these, 35 per cent of seabirds, 12 per cent of marine mammals, and 47 per cent of sea turtles had swallowed plastic. They found 23 pieces of plastic were enough to kill a bird and 29 pieces a mammal.

Humans are far more heavily exposed to plastics than sea-life through food packaging, bottled drinks, cutlery, clothing, furniture, cars, city air etc. Less than 0.5 per cent of human plastic waste ends up in the ocean – the rest stays in our living environment. What this study basically says is: it doesn’t take a lot of plastic to add up to a lethal dose for any living creature, ourselves included.

Next time your credit card expires, don’t just cut it up. Imagine eating it. That will give you a fair idea how much  plastic you consume every week. This amounts to 250 grams of plastic per person per year – the equivalent of two whopper burgers made up from 52,000 pieces of minced plastic.

In total, humans now eat at least two million tonnes of petroleum-based plastics annually – and that’s on top of all the pesticides, mineral oils, paraffins, preservatives, synthetic dyes and other petrochemical ingredients that are now a legalised part of the filthy modern food chain (and incorporated in  most so-called ‘snack foods’).

Reflect on this: a significant part of the human diet now consists of processed petroleum.

The oil industry  makes vast profits by getting you to eat its toxic output, and getting parents to feed it to their kids. And there is very little the average person can do to avoid it.

Plastics fall into two main categories – microplastics, where the pieces are 5mm or less and which generally pass through the human digestive tract depositing their toxins on the way, and nanoplastics, fragments a few microns or less in size which can easily slip through the skin and into the bloodstream, brain, liver, kidney and unborn babies.

Plastics can be toxic in themselves – many  contain ‘forever chemicals’ - but also act as  delivery vehicles for other toxic substances, which can thus enter parts of the human body they would never normally reach. Ultrafine plastic particles  can penetrate the body at cell level, and so  damage your genes – meaning the harm caused by plastics is both immediate and may also last for generations.

Food that has been wrapped or packaged in plastic or in plastic bottles is a primary source of plastic fragments in the diet – but so too, increasingly, are the actual  meat, seafood and plants we consume which have all, in their turn, absorbed plastics from water, soil and air during their life cycle. You inhale microfibres shed by synthetic clothing every minute of your day like a poison gas and, if small enough, they pass directly into your  bloodstream and brain. Household dust, office furniture and city air are also major sources of airborne plastic pollution.

Once it became clear the world was moving to electric transport, the international oil industry panicked. The loss of their fuels business to EVs has led vast refineries worldwide rapidly  switching production from fuels to plastics.

Fossil fuels were bad enough,  killing an estimated eight million people a year through urban air pollution. Plastics will be worse, as they infect the entire global food chain – and some never go away – they can just go on killing and killing and killing. Those that do break down, turn into CO2 and contribute 4 per cent to global warming.

The death toll from plastics is unknown, because no credible scientific body has yet attempted to estimate it. Global oil is  seeking to corrupt scientific inquiry to hide the toll and risks of plastics. It is mounting a huge effort to  sabotage the Global Plastics Treaty, the same as it is mounting to sabotage all climate progress.

Essentially, Big Oil is fighting for the right to kill more people.

“Plastics are a grave, growing, and under-recognised danger to human and planetary health. Plastics cause disease and death from infancy to old age and are responsible for health-related economic losses exceeding US$1·5 trillion annually,” states The Lancet’s latest  report on human health and plastics. The World Health Organization adds plastics are of “ intense public concern” from a health perspective.

World industrial plastics production started in the 1950s at two million tonnes a year. Today it is approaching 500 million tonnes a year – and is forecast to explode to 1.3 billion tonnes a year by 2060. This is in spite of the Global Plastics Treaty, tabled in 2022 and still being negotiated, which was intended to restrain the monster. Total world plastics output since the start is estimated at  8.3 billion tonnes. An estimated 95 per cent of it is still in circulation.

Optimistically, The Lancet considers “Plastics’ harms can be mitigated cost-effectively by evidence-based, transparently tracked, effectively implemented, and adequately financed laws and policies,” but cases of countries passing such laws are few and far between. As things stand the oil industry has unfettered access to every human brain and body, to all our babies and to the health of each person and every living creature on Earth.

The term ‘plasticide’ has not yet achieved a legal definition – the law remains decades behind the advance of human technology in this, as in so many other developments. Without such a definition, the killing of humans by plastic will remain a non-issue. Most countries still see plastics as an inconvenient waste disposal problem – not as the mass poisoner of their citizens and wildlife that they truly are.

Plasticide is death by plastic. It is a crime as much as any other premeditated form of murder. But it is being perpetrated at global level for earnings of  $1 trillion a year.

The shareholders of Big Oil are making a killing that, quite likely, will exceed all the wars in history.