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Since the 2015 launch of the Rockefeller Foundation Lancet Commission on planetary health,1 an enormous groundswell of interest in planetary health education has emerged across many disciplines, institutions, and geographical regions. Advancing these global efforts in planetary health education will equip the next generation of scholars to address crucial questions in this emerging field and support the development of a community of practice. To provide a foundation for the growing interest and efforts in this field, the Planetary Health Alliance has facilitated the first attempt to create a set of principles for planetary health education that intersect education at all levels, across all scales, and in all regions of the world—ie, a set of cross-cutting principles.

We examine polyvinyl chloride (PVC) as one example of the ethical challenges that the chemical industry faces when putting green chemistry into practice. Green chemistry has emerged as a powerful new philosophy for designing molecules, reactions, and products to be intrinsically non-toxic and sustainable. We consider three issues: Should the chemical industry overcome the inertia of path dependent technologies and introduce safer, more sustainable technologies? What will motivate companies and their employees to practice green chemistry under conditions where changing technologies and businesses can create substantial economic, market, and technical risks? How should the precautionary principle be applied in terms of the real-world complexities of manufacturing chemicals? To do so, we look at examples of environmental and health harms in the feedstock and PVC manufacturing lifecycle stages, along with green chemistry solutions that could be employed. PVC suggests how difficult it could be to adopt green chemistry solutions; nonetheless, these solutions may make significant contributions across the chemical industry generally.

We examine Bisphenol-A (BPA) as a case that illustrates key challenges in addressing the public health risks of consumer products in the 21st century. First, we trace growing concerns about the effects of BPA on human health, showing how regulatory approaches can exacerbate the difficulty of dealing with the unforeseen risks of chemicals in consumer products. Second, we highlight the question of who should bear the responsibility – and the cost – of rectifying or preventing unforeseen chemical risks in consumer products. Third, we discuss the challenge of substituting out a potentially hazardous chemical from consumer products in the context of well established global production chains and consumption patterns. Utilitarian and deontological ethical frameworks have influenced societal debates surrounding each of these three challenges, creating moral dilemmas for actors with different forms of moral agency – both those implicated in the production of harmful chemicals and those pursuing remedies.

Fish can bioconcentrate complex mixtures of xenobiotics arising from exposure\ud to wastewater effluents discharged into surface waters. Wastewaters contain a complex\ud mixture of organic compounds and little is known about their uptake into fish and their\ud health effects. In this study, a chemical profiling approach was used to characterize the\ud profile of xenobiotics and their metabolites (the xenometabolome) in biofluids (bile and\ud plasma) of juvenile rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) exposed to a wastewater\ud effluent. Metabolite profiles of effluent-exposed fish were compared with that from\ud control fish exposed to uncontaminated river water. Samples were analysed by ultra\ud performance liquid chromatography-time-of-flight mass spectrometry and data analysed\ud by multivariate statistics. Exposure to effluent resulted in accumulation in trout bile of\ud alkylsulfophenyl and alkylpolyethoxy carboxylates, as well as glucuronide conjugates\ud of nonylphenol ethoxylates, alcohol ethoxylates, naphthols, chlorinated xylenols and\ud phenoxyphenols, chlorophenes, resin acids, mefenamic acid and oxybenzone. Nonconjugated or sulphate conjugates of many of these contaminants were also detected in plasma of effluent-exposed trout. In addition, changes in the concentrations of endogenously derived metabolites were also detected in trout plasma, and these included an increase in blood bile acids, methylbutryolcarnitine and a decrease in\ud sphingosine levels. These observations were verified in a further exposure of sexually mature roach (Rutilus rutilus) to concentrations of the same effluent. Exposure to 50%\ud or 100% effluent resulted in dose dependent increases in blood concentrations of xenobiotics, taurocholic acid, syprinol sulphate and lysophospholipids and decreases in\ud sphingosine levels. This work reveals the complex nature of xenobiotics accumulating in effluent-exposed fish together with the identification of changes in concentrations of\ud lipid metabolites associated with hepatotoxicity. These results reveal, for the first time, that metabolite profiling techniques can be used to screen for uptake of complex mixtures of contaminants into fish and also for the detection of natural metabolite pathways in the organism that are disrupted due to exposure to multiple xenobiotics.