On December 3, 2025, The Pew Charitable Trusts published “Breaking the Plastic Wave 2025: An Assessment of the Global System and Strategies for Transformative Change.”
This report is a follow-up to their 2020 report “Breaking the Plastic Wave: Top Findings for Preventing Plastic Pollution,” which aimed to advance public discourse on plastic pollution by identifying a credible roadmap to address the problem using existing solutions (FPF reported). The 2025 update draws on improved data from the last five years to provide a better understanding of the environmental, economic, health, and social impacts of plastic.
The Pew Charitable Trusts notes that, while researchers are paying more attention to the human health and environmental impacts of plastic, global efforts to address the associated risks have fallen behind. The goal of the 2025 report is to “support and encourage decision makers as they respond to critical global issues, evaluate trade-offs and implement solutions.”
Key findings from the report include that, without action, plastic pollution will double over the next 15 years, plastic production will outpace waste management capacity, greenhouse gas emissions will surge, and microplastic pollution will remain a challenge. The authors conclude that ambitious global action can reduce plastic pollution, reuse can help eliminate packaging pollution, and system transformation can create new job opportunities.
One of the key findings that was outside the scope of the previous report is that plastic can harm human health at every stage of its life cycle, including during production, use, and disposal. The authors cite that “[t]o date, more than a quarter of the more than 16,000 chemicals used in plastic products have been identified as possible sources of harm to human health” (FPF reported). Importantly, they state that because of data gaps, they could not include the health impacts of plastic use or microplastics in their analysis. Instead, they performed an illustrative modelling exercise using USEtox, which showed that exposure to 30 chemicals identified in PET bottles leads to approximately one second of healthy life lost per bottle.
In addition to acknowledging the challenges, the report also outlines opportunities to reduce the human health and environmental impacts of plastic. These include establishing measures to reduce production and use, rethinking the design of chemicals, plastic products, and systems, requiring producers to demonstrate the safety of their products, expanding participatory waste management systems, and improving transparency within the plastic supply chain. The authors state that one of the key solutions is to lower the production of primary plastic to more sustainable levels, relying primarily on reuse instead (FPF reported).
Reference
The Pew Charitable Trusts (December 3, 2025). “Breaking the Plastic Wave 2025: An Assessment of the Global System and Strategies for Transformative Change.”
