Plastic could be even worse for the environment than previously thought owing to processes such as the use of coal in production being greatly underestimated, researchers from ETH Zurich have suggested.
Plastic air pollution. Credit: WitthayaP / Shutterstock
While a decent amount of greenhouse gas emissions come from plastic disposal (pictured here), the new data suggests far more may come from the production of plastics. Credit: WitthayaP / Shutterstock
The team analysed the global value chains of the plastics industry over a 20 year period and have hinted demand could continue to climb - demand has quadrupled in the last 40 years - despite global movements to limit plastic pollution and its effects on the environment and human health.
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Published in the Nature Sustainability journal, the study aimed to look at the issues with plastic across its life cycle, including the production stage.
"Plastics are useful, cheap and extremely popular", the report's authors state. "The public is aware of the environmental harm caused by plastics, particularly at the end of their life cycle, such as when they release greenhouse gases and air pollutants when burned, or pollute water and soil in the form of microplastics", it adds, but states they do not expect them to disappear any time soon.
Commonly used in plastic bottles, carrier bags and in children's toys, much of the global problem of plastic pollution is down to a handful of companies.
Research into plastic pollution primarily attempts to tackle the issue at the disposal stage - preventing people from littering and adding to the massive amount of plastic waste entering the world's oceans each year or from disposal methods like incineration.
With the Pacific Ocean currently home to a giant plastic island a little larger than Mongolia, dealing with plastic pollution has become one of the key topics of our time and has become one of the leading causes of environmentalism.
According to one analysis from May 2021 by BBC Future Planet, only 16% of the world's plastic is recycled. A National Geographic report from three years' earlier claims only 9% of plastic was recycled at that time.
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Thankfully, however, the energy transition has spurred some creative uses for existing plastic waste in a bid to create green energy from existing sources, ranging from converting them back into their raw materials to converting it into hydrogen.
It has also spurred a revolution in bioplastics - plastics created using alternative materials or technologies.
“So far, the simplistic assumption has been that the production of plastics requires roughly the same amount of fossil resources as the amount of raw materials contained in plastics – particularly petroleum,” says Livia Cabernard, a doctoral student at the Institute of Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP) at ETH Zurich, adding that weighing up production versus disposal had been severely underestimated.
For the study, the team determined the greenhouse gas emissions across plastic's life cycle, from fossil fuel extraction to disposal, varying from recycling, incineration and being dumped in a landfill.
The research found that newly-industrialised countries, such as China, India, South Africa and Indonesia, are currently the leading cause for the growing "carbon footprint" for plastics - reportedly having increased 50-fold on average since 1995.
Globally, coal-based emissions have quadrupled since 1995, now accounting for nearly half of plastic's emissions, the report suggests.
When coal is burned, it not only releases greenhouse gases, but also particulate matter, which can cause other issues associated with air pollution, such as respiratory diseases.
Another revelation in the study is that twice as many fossil fuels are used in the production of plastics than is contained in the raw material. If true, this could mean previous environmental estimates for plastic pollution could be insufficient.
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Cabernard claims the production phase of plastics contains the "lion's share" of emissions, even in the "worst-case scenario" where all plastic produced is incinerated at the end of its life.
The study was able to conclude its findings thanks to the discovery of new methodology, based on another study into the effects on production on plastic greenhouse gas emissions, though the study reportedly misjudged its emissions output, in part to it not acknowledging the effects of outsourcing plastic production to coal-heavy countries.
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