Plastics industry is overlooked as a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, global report finds

20 May 2019 --- The production and incineration of plastics will add more than 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in 2019 alone – equal to the pollution caused by 189 coal-fired power plants. That is according to a new report: Plastic & Climate: The Hidden Costs of a Plastic Planet. To avoid these emissions, the study authors are calling for an end to single-use plastics, a discontinuation of new oil, gas and petrochemical infrastructure and the implementation of an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme.

The rapid global growth of the plastic industry – fueled by cheap natural gas from hydraulic fracturing – is not only destroying the environment and endangering human health but also undermining efforts to reduce carbon pollution and prevent climate catastrophe.This is the conclusion of a sweeping new study of the global environmental impact of the plastic industry by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), Environmental Integrity Project, FracTracker Alliance, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, 5 Gyres and Break Free From Plastic.

The new report gathers research on the greenhouse gas emissions at each stage of the plastic lifecycle – from its birth as fossil fuels through refining and manufacture to the massive emissions as (and after) plastic’s useful life ends – to create the most comprehensive review to date of the climate impacts of plastic.

With the ongoing, rapid expansion of the plastic and petrochemical industries, the climate impacts of plastic are poised to accelerate dramatically in the coming decade, threatening the ability of the global community to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5°C degrees. If plastic production and use grow as currently planned, by 2030, emissions could reach 1.34 gigatons per year – equivalent to the emissions released by more than 295 500-megawatt coal power plants. By 2050, the production and disposal of plastic could generate 56 gigatons of emissions, as much as 14 percent of the earth’s entire remaining carbon budget.

“Humanity has less than twelve years to cut global greenhouse emissions in half and just three decades to eliminate them almost entirely. The massive and rapidly growing emissions from plastic production and disposal undermine that goal and jeopardize global efforts to keep climate change below 1.5 degrees of warming,” says Carroll Muffett, President for CIEL.

“This report is yet another example of why the corporate throwaway culture must end. Not only are plastics killing marine animals, endangering our health and creating a global pollution crisis, they are contributing to catastrophic climate change. It is clearer than ever that companies and governments must take strong action to phase out single-use plastics immediately and move toward systems of reuse,” adds Graham Forbes, Global Plastics Project Leader for Greenpeace.

US ignores the warnings 
Driven by cheap natural gas from the hydraulic fracturing boom, the rapid growth of the plastics industry over the last decade has been most dramatic in the US. It is witnessing a dramatic buildout of new plastic infrastructure in the Gulf Coast and in the Ohio River Valley.

For example, in western Pennsylvania, a new Shell natural gas products processing plant, currently being constructed to provide ingredients for the plastics industry (called an “ethane cracker”), could emit up to 2.25 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution each year (carbon dioxide equivalent tons), according to the Plastic & Climate report.

A planned ethylene plant at ExxonMobil’s Baytown refinery along the Texas Gulf Coast will release up to 1.4 million tons, the report also indicates. Annual emissions from just these two new facilities would be equal to adding almost 800,000 new cars to the road. Yet they are only two among more than 300 new petrochemical projects being built in the US alone, primarily for the production of plastic and plastic additives.

The US was one of the few countries to recently refuse the opportunity to restrict the global exports of unrecyclable plastic waste to foreign shores. A total of 187 countries voted to add hard-to-recycle plastic waste to the Basel Convention, a UN-led treaty that controls the movement of hazardous waste from one country to another. Exporters will now be required to obtain consent from recipient countries before shipping plastic waste that cannot be readily recycled. It is a strategy designed to curb the overwhelming buildup of plastic waste in Global South nations, particularly in Southeast Asia.

Is incineration the lesser of the evils?
Last week, Dr. Mikko Paunio of the University of Helsinki warned that the UN’s decision to regulate waste plastic as hazardous and restrict exports will unleash a “surge of waste” on many EU countries. Contrary to the Plastic & Climate report, Paunio has actually urged a rapid expansion of waste incineration capacity to stop the plastic waste problem turning into a public disaster.

“The cost of annually recycling tens of millions of tons of dirty plastic scrap in EU will be astronomical, while still producing a very large proportion of reject material, which will have to be incinerated anyway,” Paunio notes.

“Either way, EU member states are going to have to quickly increase incineration capacity. If they do not they will bring about an environmental disaster that will make the Campania crisis look like a walk in the park,” he adds.

The Campania crisis, which took place in Naples, Italy, was caused by the decision by the local authorities to adopt an anti-incineration waste policy in the late 1990s, Pauniov explains. The theory was that waste should be mechanically separated into a combustible fraction of mixed waste for co-incineration with traditional fuels, and an organic fraction for composting or anaerobic digestion. However, the 2000 EU Waste Incineration Directive, with its costly regulatory demands, made it uneconomic to co-incinerate “ecoballs.”

Solutions to the plastic gas emissions problem
Plastic in the environment is one of the least studied sources of emissions and a key missing piece from previous studies on plastic’s climate impacts. Oceans absorb a significant amount of the greenhouse gases produced on the planet – as much as 40 percent of all human-produced carbon dioxide since the beginning of the industrial era. Plastic & Climate highlights how a small but growing body of research suggests plastic discarded in the environment may be disrupting the ocean’s natural ability to absorb and sequester carbon dioxide.

The Plastic & Climate report uses conservative assumptions to create a projection of plastic’s climate impacts under a business-as-usual scenario, meaning that the actual climate impacts of plastic are likely to exceed these projections.

The report identifies a series of actions that can be taken to reduce these climate impacts, concluding that the most effective way to address the plastic crisis is to dramatically reduce the production of unnecessary plastic, beginning with national and global bans on nearly all single-use, disposable plastic.

The proposed solutions include:

• Ending the production and use of single-use, disposable plastic;
• Stopping development of new oil, gas, and petrochemical infrastructure;
• Fostering the transition to zero-waste communities;
• Implementing extended producer responsibility as a critical component of circular economies; and
• Adopting and enforcing ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from all sectors, including plastic production.

“This report demonstrates that plastic, like the rest of the fossil economy, is putting the climate at risk as well. Because the drivers of the climate crisis and the plastic crisis are closely linked, so too are their solutions: humanity must end its reliance on fossil fuels and on fossil plastics that the planet can no longer afford,” Muffett concludes.

Edited by Joshua Poole