Despite clear evidence that plastic is clogging oceans and beaches and breaking down into microplastics that enter our bodies, humans are continuing to produce the material at accelerating rates.
The result: Global plastic pollution will hit 280 million metric tons per year by 2040, or a dump truck’s worth every second.
That is one of the alarming statistics from Breaking the Plastic Wave 2025, a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts with ICF International. It offers a comprehensive assessment of plastic pollution and its effect on human health and the environment.
In August, talks to forge an international treaty to rein in plastic pollution collapsed as countries that produce the majority of the material blocked proposals to limit the amount of new plastic created. Meanwhile, recycling rates have remained low.
The new report is a bit of a hybrid. It compiles data from recent research and then runs it through a model to predict outcomes under different policy scenarios. Winnie Lau, director of Pew’s Preventing Ocean Plastics project and one of the authors, said the team “wanted to pull it all together in one integrated analysis to look at impacts across the board.”
Pew published a similar report in 2020, but it limited the scope then to pollution from consumer-facing plastics like packaging that end up in solid waste systems. This report looks far beyond that to include “hidden” plastics, including those used in the construction, agriculture and transportation sectors.
If the world continues on the current trajectory, the outlook for 2040 is bleak, the report warns. Global production of new plastic is set to increase by 52%, twice as much as waste-management systems. Plastic-related greenhouse gas emissions are expected to surge by 58%, to 4.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year — enough that, if plastic production were a country, it would be the current third-largest emitter. At the root of the problem is the fact that plastics are mostly derived from fossil fuels.
There are some 16,000 different chemicals in plastics and scientists have identified more than one fourth of those as possibly harmful to human health. In the five years since the last Pew report, a wave of research has attempted to understand in particular how a class of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors, widely used in makeup and cookware, may affect digestive, reproductive and cognitive function.
Pew also modeled the global health impacts associated with the making and disposal of plastic (excluding microplastics) and related pollution. The authors estimate the world’s population will lose 5.6 million total years of healthy life in 2025 and 9.8 million years in 2040. Primary plastic production accounts for the majority of this via links to cancers and respiratory diseases.
Countries and communities already have tools at their disposal to reduce the manufacture and use of plastics drastically. They could mandate better product and packaging design and invest in infrastructure to support reuse. (Think of how milkmen would once deliver bottles of milk while carting away the used ones for cleaning and refilling.)
In Pew’s ideal scenario, subsidies for plastic production would be eliminated and waste collection would be greatly expanded. If that happened, nearly 100% of consumer packaging could be collected and recycling rates could double, the authors write.
But even under perfect conditions, they concede, microplastics would be much harder to control. The main sources of microplastics are vehicle tire dust, paint and agriculture-related products — for example, fertilizer sold in plastic pods that dissolve into soil and plastic sheeting that is used for mulch. There are few straightforward substitutes for these materials.
Among Pew’s recommendations are decreasing overall plastic production, using safer chemicals and taking targeted actions to reduce the shedding of microplastics. One anti-plastics group welcomed the report. “We need laws that require fewer toxic chemicals in plastic and less plastic production, and we applaud Pew for prioritizing those measures,” said Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator.
However, Enck said the authors were overly optimistic in projecting that plastic recycling would grow substantially with different policies in place.
“There’s a good reason why the plastics recycling rate has never reached double digits,” she said. “It’s because its chemical and polymer complexity makes large-scale recycling technically and economically infeasible. We’re wasting valuable time by relying on a system that has not worked for decades.”
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
Published on December 3, 2025
