Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Anthropocene Science https://doi.org/10.1007/s44177-022-00021-5 NEWS & VIEWS The United Nations General Assembly Passes Historic Resolution to Beat Plastic Pollution Amit Kumar Bundela 1,2  · Krishna Kumar Pandey 1,2 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 “If we get this right—if we win the battle against plastic pollution—it will not only be a tangible victory for people and planet, but a clear example of how the United Nations is relevant to the lives of citizens around the world”. –María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, President of The U. N. General Assembly, March 2, 2022. While there is an ongoing debate regarding the naming of this present epoch as the ‘Anthropocene’ (Luciano 2022), it is undoubtedly proven that anthropogenic interventions are continuing to alter the functioning of our critical life supporting systems and ultimately the resilience of our planet Earth itself. The industrial revolution coupled with rapid progress in urbanization, transportation, as well as in the agricultural sector have transformed our green planet as a toxic, chemical one (Cribb 2017; Lim 2021; Liu et al 2021). Anthropogenic activities are responsible for the dumping of more than 250 billion tons of chemical substances a year and thereby threatening the wellbeing of both people and planet (Cribb 2017; Woolston 2020). This indiscriminate chemi- cal loading in our biosphere is posing an exposure risk of chemical toxicants to 4.2 billion people worldwide (Liu et al. 2021). The poisoning of our planet Earth through rampant, injudicious and unscientifc usage of chemical entities is considered as one of the ten major survival risks confronting humanity (Hale et al. 2001; Qiu 2013, 2016; Cribb 2017). The chemical pollution and the release of novel entities is also regarded as one of the nine planetary boundaries postu- lated by Rockström et al. (2009) for reminding humanity to take apposite strategies for limiting our ecological footprint within the safe operating limits. According to the United States Department of Health & Human Services (www.hhs.gov), 2000 new chemicals are being released every year and it has been estimated that more than 144,000 synthetic chemicals are already in exist- ence in various compartments of the environment (www. echa.europa.eu). Nevertheless, the carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic implications of the vast majority of these chemicals are yet to be ascertained (Rhind 2009) and neces- sary action plans are yet to be framed for restoring already degraded systems while preventing the future contamina- tion of these toxic chemicals. Furthermore, most of these chemicals are persistent in nature and, therefore, resistant to biological, hydrolytic, and photolytic means of degrada- tion (Hale et al. 2001; Qiu 2013, 2016). Hence, once these chemicals are released into the environment, they will be there for a very long period of time and can be re-enter and partition into diferent environmental compartments, such as soil, air, and water, through various processes, such as vola- tilization, leaching, global atmospheric and marine transport etc. (Hale et al. 2001; Qiu 2013, 2016). Plastic is also one of such widely used anthropogenic substances having a ubiq- uitous presence on this planet and polluting almost all types of ecosystems (Rochman and Hoellein 2020; Brahney et al 2021; Lim 2021). Though human activities have resulted in the production of thousands of chemical substances every year (Cribb 2017), most surprisingly, only 21 chemicals have so far been enlisted under the Stockholm Convention on Per- sistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), an international treaty for banning the global production and usage of POPs (www. pops.int). Therefore, it is the need of the hour to list more and more chemicals under the relevant national and inter- national treaties to prevent their unscientifc and indiscrimi- nate production and usage and also to prevent the future contamination of our planet due to the unwanted heaping of such toxicants. In this context, we wholeheartedly welcome the recently adopted draft resolution of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to beat plastic pollution * Amit Kumar Bundela amitbundela@bhu.ac.in 1 Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh 221005, India 2 Agroecosystem Specialist Group, IUCN-Commission on Ecosystem Management, Gland, Switzerland