Plastics. What was once the pithy career advice memorably offered in the movie “The Graduate” has some potentially noteworthy similarities to one of today’s most significant toxic torts: PFAS.
Executive Summary
Microplastics and PFAS. Increasingly, the two are talked about together. How are they similar? How are they different? And what should liability insurance underwriters know about emerging litigation that could impact their insureds? Verisk's Andrew Blancher provides an overview.It’s not just any old plastics that are at issue here but their smaller, sometimes microscopic constituents: microplastics. These substances share some potentially important similarities with PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals, but important differences as well.
A Brief Introduction to Microplastics
Microplastics are generally defined as any plastic smaller than 5 millimeters in length. Even smaller microplastics, commonly referred to as nanoplastics, can measure between 1 and 1,000 nanometers across—thousands of times smaller than a human hair.
