Transforming the Plastic Production System Presents Opportunities to Tackle the Climate Crisis
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Modelling Framework
- Plausible—interventions are adopted at an ambitious but realistically vigorous rate,
- Ambitious—the adoption of interventions is increased to the high range of the projections thus representing an advancement of the Plausible scenario
- Maximum—represents the highest adoption estimated.
2.2. Total Adoption Market
2.3. Interventions and Adoption Scenarios
2.4. Emissions Factors
2.5. Climate Impact
2.6. System Integration
3. Results
4. Discussion
4.1. The Potential to Transform the Global Plastic System
4.2. Opportunities and Challenges
4.3. Wider Benefits on Transforming the Plastic System
5. Conclusions
Author Contributions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
Appendix A
Appendix A.1. Modelling Framework
Appendix A.2. Total Adoption Market
Appendix A.3. Interventions and Their Adoption Cases
- Plastic Reduction: Non-durable goods by definition end up in waste quickly, and the potential reduction of this waste has a host of environmental benefits, from prevention of landfill gasses as well as environmental leakage [8]. These benefits are amplified in low-income countries and communities that may lack robust waste management infrastructure.In practice, some part of this solution would take the form of reuse models both at the level of producer (new delivery models such as take-back services) and at the level of consumer. However, these models all depend on continued-use items, and large-scale items that per single-use are negligible when compared to the number of single-use plastic items that they would currently replace. Following sources were used in as adoption in Plastic Reduction intervention:
- Ref. [4] assumed reducing growth in plastics demand from the 4% current annual growth rate of global plastics demand to 2% by 2050. Their analysis does not consist of any specific solution but rather assumes the reduced demand to limit CO2-eq emissions from the global plastics system.
- Ref. [25] published an estimate of plastics reduction using a scenario assuming reduced plastics use (or consumption). In the ambitious scenario, plastic waste generation is reduced from predicted waste generation levels at a linear rate to reach target reductions in 2030 of 10% in high income, 5% in upper-middle-income and low-middle income, and no increase in plastic waste generation in low-income countries. The solutions to reach assumed reduction targets include: reducing virgin plastic products made from fossil feedstocks; education, public awareness campaigns leading to behavioral change and reductions in a personal plastic waste generation; legislative level bans, levies, or taxes on ‘single-use’, ‘disposable’ or ‘unnecessary’ products, such as thin-film shopping bags; replacement with alternative feedstocks that are easily compostable; and requirements for producers to report information regarding quantity and types of designated products and packaging supplied.
- Ref. [30] report finds that in a business-as-usual scenario, plastic packaging production quadruples by 2050; but in a best-case scenario with increased closed-loop recycling and innovation to reduce plastic packaging at the source, the market would double. This slower growth is used as a reduced consumption scenario as well.
- Ref. [7] analysis suggest a reduction of 30% of plastics consumption by 2040. Their reduction solutions include eliminating unnecessary items and over-packaging (an 8% reduction in plastic); expanding reuse options that can replace the utility currently provided by plastic, including products intended for consumers to reuse (4% reduction); and new delivery models such as refill systems (18% reduction).
- Ref. [31] estimated that as much as 60% of single-use plastics can be reduced by 2050. Their solution includes dematerialization and reuses including banning single-use plastics, deposit schemes, incentivizing consumers to reduce single-use plastics, and self-dispensing and refill schemes.
- Paper Replacement—replacement of plastic non-durable goods with paper products is prioritized first among the replace solutions. This is principal because paper products on average have a lower emissions footprint for production, and they are typically compostable or biodegradable, offering better options for end-of-life management, as opposed to plastics that do not decompose. Additionally, the infrastructure for paper collection and recycling is much better developed than the one for plastics [65]. The quantity of the Reduced Plastics TAM that can be replaced with paper or the coated paper is based on estimates from [9], which identifies the technical feasibility for paper substitution as 110 Gt by 2050. A time series is derived based on interpolation to this value (110 Gt) in 2050, which is then used as the paper replacement scenario and due to lack of other sources is kept constant for all three scenarios.
- Recycled feedstock Replacement—The next prioritized solution is the replacement of conventional plastics with recycled plastics. Recycled plastics, defined as plastics produced from post-consumer waste, have a significantly lower carbon footprint than virgin plastics; thus increasing the number of plastics recycling through the increased collection, reduced yield losses, and incentivization or switching feedstocks from virgin to recycled, could have a significant impact on the global carbon budget of materials. Though currently, virgin plastic production tends to be cheaper, recycled polymers also can be cheaper than virgin materials due to energy savings and volatile oil prices. The number of plastics that are technologically and economically feasible for production from recycled plastics in non-durable goods is compiled from [2,9,27,31], the Plastics Pact and new EU regulations. Based on an average derived from these sources, about 55% of the Reduced Plastics TAM can be supplied by recycled plastics by 2050. Replacement with Recycled Plastics was based on historical adoption trends in the US for the Plausible Scenario [83] feasible adoption of recycling estimates from [84] for the Ambitious scenario, and an optimistic recycling scenario from [84] for the Maximum Scenario, all feedstock limited by the availability of plastic waste, as described in Section 2.2.
- Bioplastic Replacement—Bioplastics represent a broad array of technologies to produce many different types of materials such as packaging, textiles, durable goods, and disposable products. The many different types of bioplastics can and are made using a wide variety of feedstocks with a significant portion of the current research being dedicated to identifying and expanding available feedstocks. There are several categories of materials that encompass bioplastics. Some plastics are bio-based, or part bio-based and part fossil-based, but not biodegradable, such as Bio-PET (polyethylene terephthalate) which contains plant-derived ethylene. Other plastics that are bio-based but not biodegradable are bio polyethylene, bio polypropylene, polyamides, and more. There are additionally bio-based and biodegradable plastics, of which some examples are polylactic acid (PLA) and polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA). The final category is other biodegradable plastics, such as polybutylene adipate terephthalate (PBAT). This class of plastics can have lower life cycle CO2-eq footprints due to a lower energy requirement for production and some potential carbon sequestration in their growing and production. The remainder of the Reduced Plastics TAM after allocation to minimum virgin feedstock requirements, Paper Replacement, Recycled Feedstock Replacement are allocated to Bioplastics. Replacement with Bioplastics is based on conservative estimates from [58] reports, [85] market projections, [32], and [59] constrained by biomass availability.
Appendix A.4. Scenarios and Climate Variables
- Reference scenario, adoption was fixed at the percent adoption in the specified current year (2018). The percent of intervention adoption was kept constant throughout the study period (until 2060). This serves as the baseline for comparison that the Plausible, Ambitious, and Maximum scenarios were compared against (Figure A1).
- Plausible scenario represents the situation in which interventions are adopted at a realistically vigorous rate over the time period under investigation. A complete analysis was performed for the Plausible scenario, where the rate of TAM adoption (in MMt) was an average of all adoption cases for a specific intervention (listed in Appendix A.3).
- Ambitious scenario represents the situation in which the adoption of interventions is optimized to be more ambitious than Plausible scenario. The same analysis was performed for the Ambitious scenario as for the Plausible scenario; however, the rate of TAM adoption (in MMt) was a high of all adoption cases for a specific intervention (listed in Appendix A.3).
- Maximum scenario represents the single highest adoption of intervention (listed in Appendix A.3).
Appendix A.5. Climate Impact Results
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Intervention | Definition |
---|---|
Plastic Reduction (via e.g., elimination and reuse). | Reduction of plastic production by eliminating unnecessary items and over-packaging, expanding reuse options that can replace utility currently provided by plastic, including products intended for consumers to reuse, and new delivery models such as refill systems and deposit schemes. |
Replace with paper-based materials (e.g., paper, coated paper). | Substitution of plastic used in non-durable goods with recyclable paper or other fiber-based material ensuring the new material delivers the same quality as plastic. |
Replace with recycled plastics (from post-consumer waste). | Substitution of virgin plastic used in non-durable goods with plastic coming from recycling. |
Replace with bioplastics (defined as bio-based or biodegradable plastics). | Substitution of virgin plastic used in non-durable goods with bioplastic or other bio-based compostables ensuring the new material delivers the same quality as plastic. |
Units MMt CO2/MMT of Production | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Interventions | Emissions | Stdev | Number of Data Points | References |
Conventional Plastics | 2.51 | 0.71 | 27 | [4,27,31,34,35,36,37,38,39] |
Plastics Reduction | n/a | n/a | n/a | - |
Paper Replacement | 1.53 | 0.84 | 49 | [27,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52] |
Recycled Feedstock Replacement | 0.704 | 0.48 | 17 | [39,43,44,53] |
Bioplastics Replacement | 0.829 | 0.38 | 53 | [35,37,38,39,54,55,56] |
Adoption | Plausible Scenario | Ambitious Scenario | Maximum Scenario | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2020–2050 | MMt plastic eliminated | Gt CO2-eq reduced | MMt plastic eliminated | Gt CO2-eq reduced | MMt plastic eliminated | Gt CO2-eq reduced |
Plastic Reduction | 1592 | 4.00 | 3103 | 7.79 | 3786 | 9.51 |
Paper Replacement | 1471 | 1.44 | 1471 | 1.44 | 1471 | 1.44 |
Recycled Feedstock Replacement | 5615 | 2.36 | 4731 | 3.61 | 4332 | 3.01 |
Bioplastic Replacement | 3024 | 1.70 | 2548 | 2.97 | 2333 | 0.94 |
Total | 11,702 | 9.50 | 11,853 | 15.81 | 11,922 | 14.90 |
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Jankowska, E.; Gorman, M.R.; Frischmann, C.J. Transforming the Plastic Production System Presents Opportunities to Tackle the Climate Crisis. Sustainability 2022, 14, 6539. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14116539
Jankowska E, Gorman MR, Frischmann CJ. Transforming the Plastic Production System Presents Opportunities to Tackle the Climate Crisis. Sustainability. 2022; 14(11):6539. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14116539
Chicago/Turabian StyleJankowska, Emilia, Miranda R. Gorman, and Chad J. Frischmann. 2022. "Transforming the Plastic Production System Presents Opportunities to Tackle the Climate Crisis" Sustainability 14, no. 11: 6539. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14116539