THE Stockholm Resilience Centre’s planetary boundaries are a set of limits within which human activities must operate to keep the planet habitable. These boundaries relate to biodiversity loss, climate change, land use, freshwater use, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, and chemical pollution.
Last year, the centre concluded that the planetary boundary relating to “novel entities” (chemicals and plastics to you and me) was breached – meaning that we are releasing more chemicals and plastics into the environment than the planet can process.