Self-preservation or valid warning? Plastic bans will result in greater environmental damage, BP stresses

18 Feb 2019 --- Oil and gas “supermajor” BP has released a report suggesting that the global trend of banning single-use plastics and replacing them with alternative materials, such as glass and paper, will lead to drastically increased energy consumption and carbon emissions. Although BP anticipates that overall demand for oil will remain strong, the report speculates that by 2040 there could be a worldwide ban on single-use plastics, which accounted for over a third of plastics produced in 2017.

Spencer Dale, BP Chief Economist, claims that swapping a plastic bottle to a glass bottle would result in 80 percent more energy use, as well as increased carbon emissions.

Speaking on the BBC, he said, “Yes, we should be concerned about plastics, but before we start whacking that mole, we should worry about where it pops up somewhere else. The [glass] bottle is a lot heavier, so it takes an awful lot more energy to transport it.”

The BP report assumes that the regulations on plastics will invariably tighten more quickly than in the past due to growing anti-plastic sentiment. However, it also speculates that in one potential scenario, this could result in the possibility of a complete worldwide ban on single-use plastic packaging items by 2040.

In this total-ban scenario, “growth in liquid fuels used in the non-combusted sector is reduced to just 1 Mb/d – 6 Mb/d lower than in the ET (Evolving Transition) scenario, and the overall growth of liquids demand is limited to 4 Mb/d, compared with 10 Mb/d in the ET scenario,” the report indicates.

However, as the report suggests, this total-ban scenario does not account for the energy consumed to produce the alternative materials used in the place of the single-use plastics. These speculations instead represent an “upper-bound” of the impact of liquid fuels.

“Indeed, without further advances in these alternative materials and widespread deployment of efficient collection and reuse systems, such a ban could lead to an increase in overall energy demand and carbon emissions, and raise a number of other environmental concerns, such as increasing food waste,” the report concludes.

The international “tightening” of regulations to which BP refers is exemplified by the December 2018 agreement between the European Parliament and the Council of the EU to ban 10 single-use plastic items by 2021.

“Well, they would say that”
There have been some suggestions that BP is highlighting the downside of single-use plastic bans out of self-interest as one of the world’s biggest oil producers. BP itself stresses that “a substantial tightening in the regulation of plastics could significantly reduce the growth of oil demand.”

“Fossil fuel giants will make countless billions in the future if the production of single-use plastic continues at current rates,” says Louise Edge, Greenpeace UK. “It's no wonder they are keen for the world to keep using more and more of it.”

“While it's true that it takes less energy to produce and transport plastic than glass, a glass bottle can be reused dozens of times and is infinitely recyclable, unlike plastic. Plus, materials like glass when they escape collection don’t go on polluting our oceans and rivers for hundreds of years,” she adds.

Conversely, a team of 40 academics at Heriot-Watt University, UK, published a study in November 2018, which found that a ban on plastics could actually increase damage to the planet.

“In many cases there is no credible alternative to using a plastic, so we need to move towards a ‘circular economy’ for plastics, rather than the largely ‘make-use-dispose’ model we currently adopt,” notes Professor David Bucknall of the research team.

“For instance, replacing plastics with alternative materials such as glass and metals would cost more to manufacture due to the energy consumed and resources – including water – required to process them,” he adds.

A December 2018 North American report supports these findings, claiming that plastics are more sustainable than the material alternatives in terms of energy use, water consumption, solid waste, greenhouse gas emissions, ozone depletion, eutrophication and acidification.

At the same time, a study conducted last month by IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute for Iggesund Paperboard (Iggesund) found that switching material from plastic to paperboard can reduce the climate impact of packaging by 99 percent in some instances, such as the packaging of lightbulbs.

“A knee jerk reaction”
Speaking to PackagingInsights, Trewin Restorick, Founder & CEO of UK environmental sustainability charity Hubbub, explains that although plastic pollution has become a massive global concern, the public should not lose sight of the environmental benefits of the material.

“I think there’s been a real knee jerk reaction against plastics. The public has become obsessed with the end of the production line without thinking about the full carbon impact. The fact that people are moving away from plastic bottles to aluminum cans to store water just seems absolutely crazy to me when you consider the impact of mining and the amount of energy used to create the aluminum – so yes, I do think there has been a knee jerk reaction which sometimes leads to poorer environmental outcomes,” he says.

“The reason plastic is so ubiquitous is because it has many fantastic qualities as packaging material – it’s light, keeps food fresher for longer and is easy to transport. Obviously, its very durability means that, when it escapes into the natural environment, it becomes very problematic. We certainly need to phase out certain types of plastic because it is just excessive.”

“We also need to look more at reduction and reuse for drinks containers like coffee cups, but crucially, we need to make sure that the recycling part of the process works, that plastics aren’t shipped all around the world, that there are better packaging facilities in localities and that we create a truly closed loop economy for it,” Restorick adds.

By Joshua Poole