environmental pollutant

She said plastic bags are “one of the deadliest types of plastic to ocean wildlife,” and noted that when they break down, they become a pernicious environmental pollutant — having been detected in the air, water, plants and human bodies.

It’s a carcinogen and has been in the news lately because it’s a persistent environmental pollutant and can causebirth defects in people who drink contaminated water.

Joshua Apte, an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the lead author of the study, called that kind of particulate matter “the single most important environmental pollutant for ill health and death.”

The paper notes that artificial light emission into the environment will “continue to increase, further eroding Earth’s remaining land area that experiences natural day-night light cycles. This is concerning because artificial light is an environmental pollutant.”

“This is concerning, of course, because we are convinced that artificial light is an environmental pollutant with ecological and evolutionary implications for many organisms — from bacteria to mammals, including us humans — and may reshape entire social ecological systems,” said one of the study’s authors, Franz Holker of the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries.