Study: Plastic, chemical pollution beyond planet's safe limit

Children playing in piles of plastic waste collected for recycling in Makassar, Indonesia. Photo: Andri Saputra/AFP

The torrent of man-made chemical and plastic waste worldwide has massively exceeded limits safe for humanity or the planet, and production caps are urgently needed, scientists have concluded for the first time.

There are an estimated 350,000 different manufactured chemicals on the market and large volumes of them end up in the environment.

"The impacts that we're starting to see today are large enough to be impacting crucial functions of planet Earth and its systems," Bethanie Carney Almroth, co-author of a new study told AFP in an interview.