Plastic: The New Asbestos?
Key Takeaways
The Biological Frontier: Nanoplastics are now shown to cross the blood-brain barrier and the placenta, reframing plastics from environmental waste to human health hazard.
The Litigation Pivot: Claims are moving beyond cleanup into public nuisance, deceptive marketing, product liability, and personal injury.
Financial Risk: Insurers are beginning to exclude microplastics from liability coverage, leaving companies exposed to long-tail losses.
This article was written in collaboration with Loes van Dijk, Founder of Climate Court.
Why 2026 Is An Inflection Point for Plastic Liability
Plastic is everywhere in the modern economy: in packaging, products, and supply chains. The question facing corporate risk teams in 2026 is no longer whether plastic exposure creates liability, but how much, and for whom.
Plastics are following the same trajectory as asbestos and PFAS. Once celebrated as a “wonder material,” plastic is now understood as a pervasive, bio-persistent risk with direct implications for corporate liability across production, use, and disposal.
Recent studies confirm that nanoplastics (<0.1 μm) penetrate cell membranes, and have even been detected in fetal tissue. This evidence shifts plastic from an environmental issue to a toxic exposure issue, opening the door to personal injury and mass tort litigation.
Lessons from Asbestos and PFAS
The asbestos crisis demonstrated that liability does not arise solely from toxicity, but from failure to act on early warnings. Over time, courts imposed strict liability across the value chain, holding even downstream users responsible for failure to warn. Asbestos ultimately drove more than 100 bankruptcies and over $100 billion in liabilities.
The more recent PFAS crisis has refined this model. In the US, the “forever chemicals” crisis has already produced multi-billion-dollar settlements: 3M’s $10.3 billion agreement with water authorities in 2023 and major payouts by DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva. These cases confirm that chemical mismanagement is now a top-tier solvency risk.
The financial sector is reacting to these risks with increased urgency. Insurers are introducing explicit exclusions for PFAS, and increasingly for microplastics – forcing companies to self-insure against long-tail risks. This creates a widening gap between organizations that view plastic as a legacy operational externality and those that integrate it into enterprise risk management. As disclosure obligations under the CSRD and other financial regulations face closer scrutiny, a company’s plastic composition and safety data are becoming primary indicators of fiduciary and asset-valuation risk.
Why Plastics Are Next
Advances in science could allow researchers to trace micro- and nanoplastics and associated additives back to specific products, processes, and corporate sources. This would close the causation gap that historically constrained plastics litigation.
At the same time, plastics are increasingly framed as a human health issue rather than a waste issue. Plastic particles are now detected throughout the body, including in blood, organs, and the brain. Health risks associated with larger microplastics are often linked to toxic additives, such as PFAS, phthalates, and endocrine disruptors, while emerging evidence points to heightened risks from nanoscale particles capable of crossing biological barriers.
Together, these developments make claims viable not only for environmental harm, but also for bodily injury, property damage, economic loss, and public nuisance, closely mirroring earlier stages of asbestos and PFAS litigation.
Although it is still too early to say plastics are the new asbestos in a strict doctrinal sense, it is no longer speculative to say that plastics litigation is beginning to follow the same structural path: early scientific uncertainty, widespread commercial reliance, internal knowledge disputes, and a gradual shift toward system-wide liability.
No Longer A Niche Risk
Courts are increasingly being asked to assess plastics not as a waste management problem, but as a product design and disclosure problem. This shift is visible across three categories of cases. Companies should be aware that these claims are increasing, and evolving rapidly to close the traditional legal gaps around causation, responsibility, and consumer awareness.
Upstream producer cases
The most significant recent development is the push to hold petrochemical and fossil-fuel-linked companies responsible not just for producing plastic, but for engineering the system that made plastic pollution inevitable. This is a familiar playbook from tobacco, asbestos, and climate litigation, and it is now being applied to plastics at scale.
In People v. Exxon Mobil Corp. (California, 2024), the complaint goes beyond waste and frames plastic pollution as a crisis built on decades of deliberate deception: “The plastics industry, through its deceptive public messaging regarding plastic recycling, is responsible for one of the most devastating global environmental crises of our time: the plastic waste and pollution crisis.” It further alleges that ExxonMobil “not only promotes and produces the largest amount of plastic that becomes plastic waste in California, it has also deceived Californians for almost half a century by promising that recycling could and would solve the ever-growing plastic waste crisis.”
This is not just a complaint about litter or landfills. It is a direct challenge to the story the industry has told for decades, that recycling was a credible solution to a plastic crisis the industry itself was accelerating. Microplastics feature explicitly in the complaint, described as posing threats to the environment and human health alike.
A related California case, Sierra Club et al. v. Exxon Mobil Corp. (2024), pushes that theory further. Plaintiffs argue that ExxonMobil misrepresented landfilling, mechanical recycling, and incineration as viable solutions for single-use plastic, despite knowing these materials cannot break down. In September 2025, the court allowed the case to move forward, finding the argument credible. Notably, the court did not treat this as a failure by the companies or consumers who handled the plastic downstream, but as a defect built into the product from the start, framing ExxonMobil's conduct as a hazardous activity: producing indestructible plastics for single-use purposes while disguising their true nature by promoting them as recyclable.
A separate case in Kansas, Ford County v. Exxon et al. (2024), extends the same logic, alleging a coordinated, decades-long campaign of fraud conducted through industry trade associations and front groups. This is structurally identical to how tobacco and fossil fuel companies suppressed evidence of harm.
What unites these cases is a deliberate reframing: plastic pollution is not an accident of poor waste management. It is, plaintiffs allege, the predictable outcome of a system that upstream producers designed, promoted, and actively misrepresented to the public.
Midstream product and packaging cases
This second category targets companies not because they produce plastic, but because they choose to use it at scale – and misrepresent what that means.
In People v. PepsiCo (New York, 2023), plaintiffs alleged the company failed to warn consumers and the public about the risks of single-use plastics. The court dismissed the case, finding that holding PepsiCo responsible depended too heavily on what consumers did with the packaging after purchase. This drew a clear line: liability requires corporate control over the harm, not just corporate contribution to a system where consumers make the final choices. That boundary would define how subsequent cases were built.
In Los Angeles County v. PepsiCo and Coca-Cola (California, 2024), the theory was rebuilt on stronger ground. Rather than focusing on consumer behavior, plaintiffs alleged that both companies had spent decades running disinformation campaigns to convince consumers that their products were environmentally responsible, while knowing that plastic recycling would never operate at a scale meaningful enough to offset the harm. The shift mattered legally; it was no longer about what consumers did, but about what companies knew and said.
A health dimension enters more sharply in Miller et al. v. Philips North America LLC (California, 2024), where plaintiffs alleged that Philips failed to disclose that its products “leach toxic microplastics when used as directed.” The court rejected the argument that "BPA Free" labeling was itself misleading, but allowed the case to proceed on a more significant basis, that Philips had materially omitted a known safety hazard. The numbers cited in the complaint are striking: polypropylene bottles potentially releasing millions of microplastic particles per litre, with infants possibly ingesting “between 14,600 and a staggering 4.55 million microplastic particles every single day.” On that basis, the court agreed that plaintiffs had made a credible case for an unreasonable health hazard.
This is where midstream liability is heading. Not just that plastic is used, but that firms continue to use it despite foreseeable harm and actively misrepresent that reality to the people buying products with plastic.
Downstream marketing and greenwashing cases
The third category targets companies at the point of sale – not for making or using plastic, but for what they claimed about it.
In Earth Island Institute v. The Coca-Cola Company (California, 2021), the complaint accuses Coca-Cola of marketing itself as a “sustainable and environmentally responsible company, despite being one of the largest contributors to plastic pollution in the world.” The case explicitly links that misrepresentation to threatening human health as well as environmental damage on a massive scale.
What makes this theory legally significant is the consumer behavior argument. The complaint notes that consumers actively choose to support companies that share their values, creating incentives for companies to market themselves as environmentally responsible even where their underlying business models remain unchanged. This means that false sustainability claims are not just linked to reputation. They sustain demand for products tied to a system that carries large-scale environmental and human health consequences.
Meanwhile, European law is already providing a firmer foundation for these claims. In PlasticsEurope v. European Chemicals Agency (EU, 2023), the Court of Justice of the European Union upheld the classification of Bisphenol A (BPA) as a substance of very high concern due to its endocrine-disrupting properties. This was not a marketing case, but its implications for greenwashing are direct. Certain plastic-related substances are now legally recognized at the highest judicial level as human health risks. For any company still making broad safety or sustainability claims about plastic packaging, that ruling significantly raises the bar for what those claims need to demonstrate.
Strategic Implications for Business
As plastic follows the trajectory of PFAS, tobacco, and asbestos, ignorance is no longer a defense. For business leaders, the strategic pivot in 2026 requires moving beyond circularity metrics and into active liability management:
Treat Plastic as Financial Risk: Plastic is no longer just an environmental metric; it is a potential toxic tort exposure with deep-tail implications. Audit the value chain to identify where products shed micro-materials (asbestos-like) or use chemical additives (PFAS-like).
Align Safety and Sustainability Claims: Scrutinize every recyclable or safe claim against 2026 toxicological thresholds. In the current legal climate, a false or unsubstantiated green claim today is effectively a signed confession in a future liability trial.
Reallocate Capital: Shift investment from plastic efficiency to material exit. The survivors of the asbestos era were those who diversified their material portfolios before the regulatory and legal floodgates opened.
The companies that succeed in the post-plastic era will be those that recognize this moment not as a compliance challenge, but as a fundamental redefinition of their license to operate.
