The use of plastics has led to a number of environment-related problems. For this, which one of the following statements is correct?

The principal environmental problem with plastics is their non-biodegradability — they persist for hundreds of years in soil and water, accumulating as solid waste and microplastics. Microplastics do get released into water and food chains (so option b is false), plastics affect biochemical processes by leaching toxic chemicals (so option c is false), and plastics are increasingly shown to cause harm to humans through endocrine-disrupting additives and microplastic ingestion (so option d is false). Hence option (a) is the correct statement.