The chemical industry and a pro-science consumer group are pushing back on a CNN story that warned most plastic chemicals threaten human health.
CNN ran the story, headlined “Over 90% of common household items contain hazardous plastic chemicals” on Sept. 30. It was based on a report by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), a London-based environmental nonprofit, that was “provided exclusively to CNN,” according to its text.
Critics say the report’s headline figure rests on a narrow slice of the chemicals it studied and leaves out major U.S. regulations.
“It’s disappointing that a major news organization like CNN chose to amplify such a deeply flawed study in the first place,” Matthew Kastner, senior director of media relations at the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the chemical industry’s trade group, said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The report’s finding that 92.8 percent of chemicals pose a high risk covers only the 738 chemicals that had both toxicity and exposure data, out of 3,552 analyzed, Josh Bloom, director of chemical and pharmaceutical sciences at the American Council on Science and Health, which describes itself as a pro-science consumer advocacy organization, wrote in an Oct. 9 article on the group’s website. The 685 chemicals the report labeled high risk make up 19.3 percent of the full list, he wrote.
“If CNN set out to scare the hell out of people, its recent plastics report was a spectacular success,” Bloom wrote.
Most of the chemicals with exposure information were counted as having only a “potential for exposure,” not evidence that they leach from plastics, Bloom wrote.
“But presence isn’t exposure. Exposure isn’t absorption. Absorption isn’t dose. And dose isn’t harm,” he added.
Bloom has not heard from CNN or EJF since his article, he said in a statement to the DCNF.
“This is a typical example of science reporting. The writers do not have the time nor expertise to dig into a study to understand what it really means. In health studies, the headline rarely matches the findings,” Bloom added.
CNN and EJF did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
The report “uses California Proposition 65 as its only U.S. regulatory benchmark while omitting EPA oversight under TSCA and FDA oversight of food-contact substances and medical devices,” Kimberly Wise White, the ACC’s vice president of regulatory and scientific affairs, said in a statement the council provided to CNN and the DCNF. TSCA is the Toxic Substances Control Act, the 1976 law that gives the EPA authority over chemical substances, according to the agency’s website.
“From that highly selective subset, the report mistakenly equates the mere presence of an additive in plastics as a risk and then claims that 92.8% of these substances are ‘high-risk,’” White added.
CNN’s story quoted part of the ACC’s criticism. It also quoted pediatrician Philip Landrigan of Boston College, who said “the report does a brilliant job of presenting information on everyday plastics in a very user-friendly form.”
CNN followed up on its report on Oct. 15 by posting a video on “The Plastic Detox,” a Netflix documentary that followed five couples with unexplained infertility while they cut plastics from their homes. The video’s description says the documentary was “not a scientific study” and that “the link between reducing plastics and improving fertility remains to be proven.”
The plastics story was not the first time the outlet’s health coverage drew pushback. A May 19 CNN story reported that only 597 of the 2,990 sunscreens in the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) 2026 guide met the advocacy group’s standard for safe and effective protection.
New York City dermatologist Shereene Idriss responded the next day on Instagram with a post captioned “@cnn: do better.”
The Personal Care Products Council, which represents cosmetics makers, argued to CNN at the time that casting doubt on sunscreens runs against decades of research. EWG chief science officer David Andrews told CNN that “the FDA itself, not EWG, determined that 12 of the 16 chemical filters currently on U.S. shelves lack sufficient safety data to be classified as safe and effective.”
“EWG has always urged people to wear sunscreen. The introduction to this year’s guide says it plainly: ‘The best sunscreen is one that you will wear.’ We say the same thing on social media, and we have long warned against making sunscreen at home,” Andrews said in a statement to the DCNF.
“We don’t assume current regulations are fully protective. Chemical regulation often lags the science by years,” he added.
EJF’s report drew on PlastChem, a database of chemicals found in plastics that international researchers built in 2024, according to CNN.
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