The Climate Consequences of Plastics

Reduce and Reuse: How to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Building Materials, Plastics, and Food

Find out more about the briefings in this series below:

Building Materials: From Production to Reuse

The Climate Consequences of Plastics

Reducing Emissions by Reducing Food Waste

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) invites you to view a briefing series about the climate impacts of producing building materials, plastics, and food. Panelists explained the upstream greenhouse gas emissions generated from the production of these materials and discussed solutions designed to reduce those emissions at scale.

Plastic production is expected to account for an increasing portion of global oil consumption and its resulting greenhouse gas emissions as plastics become more ubiquitous worldwide. Panelists discussed findings from Beyond Plastics’ new report, The New Coal: Plastics and Climate Change; how emissions associated with plastic production affect communities across the country; and potential policy solutions.

Highlights

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The New Coal: Plastics and Climate Change report takes a detailed look at ten ways greenhouse gases are released through the manufacturing, use, and disposal of plastics, from “fracking to cracking to incineration.” The U.S. plastics industry is responsible for at least 232 million tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions per year. The report also looks at where plastic production is happening: 90 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from plastic production facilities come from just 18 low-income, minority communities, mostly in Texas and Louisiana. The Reuse Wins report looks at the life-cycle analysis of food packaging, evaluating environmental impacts from creation to disposal. The report found that reusable food packaging generally beat single-use for each of the 14 environmental measures studied. Reusable packaging also saves businesses money. Organizations have worked together to create a model extended producer responsibility (EPR) bill, a model comprehensive food waste reduction policy, and Upstream’s Reuse Policy Playbook to provide policy ideas on how to reduce the use and quantity of single-use products, including single-use plastics.

 

Dick Ottinger, EESI Board Chair Emeritus; Dean Emeritus, Pace University School of Law; former U.S. Representative (D-N.Y.)

• Plastics are a major climate threat. Plastics are created by cracking oil or gas, and the process releases greenhouse gases at every stage of production.
• If the plastic industry was a country, it would be the world’s fifth largest greenhouse gas emitter.
• The plastic industry plans on tripling U.S. plastic production by 2050, which would undermine efforts to remain below 1.5 degrees Celsius of global temperature rise.
• Fossil fuel companies are banking on plastic production to make up for declining demand for fuel as alternative energy and electric vehicles become more available.
• Preventing the expansion of plastic production should be a top climate priority.

 

Judith Enck, President, Beyond Plastics; Visiting Professor, Bennington College; former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Regional Administrator

• Plastics are known to pollute waterways and create waste management problems on land.
• Recycling has failed to effectively address plastic waste issues; plastics achieve only an 8.5 percent recycling rate.
• Plastics also are an environmental justice issue. The plants where plastics are manufactured as well as the locations where they are buried or incinerated are typically in low-income communities and communities of color. Toxic chemicals created during these processes cause health issues.
• Our focus is on plastics as a climate issue, explored in a new Beyond Plastics report: The New Coal: Plastics and Climate Change.
• The report takes a detailed look at 10 ways greenhouse gases are released through the manufacturing, use, and disposal of plastics, from “fracking to cracking to incineration.”
• The report also looks at where plastic production is happening: 90 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from plastic production facilities come from just 18 low-income, minority communities, mostly in Texas and Louisiana.
• Some communities, such as St. James Parish, Louisiana, are fighting back against plastic production by blocking the creation of ethane cracker facilities.
• An increase in fracking has turned the United States into the global engine of plastics production, following this process:
  • Oil and gas wells are hydrofracked for resources.
  • Ethylene gas from fracking is sent to ethane cracker facilities, where it is heated at high temperatures and “cracked.”
  • This process creates plastic pellets called “nurdles” or plastic powder, which is then shipped around the world to make plastic products.
  • From beginning to end, the process creates air toxins, greenhouse gases, and water pollution.
• The U.S. plastics industry’s contribution to climate change is on track to exceed the greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants in the United States.
• Plastic, created from fossil fuels, is expected to make up for the decline in oil and gas used by the electricity and transportation sectors; 42 plastic facilities have opened or expanded in the United States since 2019, and more are under construction.

 

Jim Vallette, Co-Founder and President, Material Research L3C

• The New Coal: Plastics and Climate Change finds that the U.S. plastics industry is responsible for at least 232 million tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions per year.
• The cornerstone of the report is a spreadsheet detailing information on plastic industry facilities in the United States.
• This information is organized by the location of the facilities. It also includes what kind of resin the plants make and in what quantities and their estimated greenhouse gas emissions, including methane emissions. The estimates are based on 10 stages of plastics production, use, and disposal.
• On the report's website, there is an interactive map of ethylene cracker facilities that reported greenhouse gas data to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2020; they are color coded by the amount of climate pollution reported (Appendix 5).
  • There is a substantial cluster of facilities between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana. Understanding this geographic distribution can be helpful in assessing public health responses to toxic chemicals generated by the facilities.
  • On average, 67 percent of residents near plastic plants are people of color and have below average per capita income.
• Chemical plants also are a major source of plastic-related climate pollution. They make chlorine and combine it with ethylene to make vinyl plastics and methanol, which are in turn used to produce the formaldehyde resins used in engineered wood products.
• Another trend highlighted in the report is how much of the U.S. plastics industry is export-oriented: 44 percent of the resins made in the United States are exported.
• In the last five years, a new category of ships has been launched—very large ethane carriers—to move ethane, a plastic feedstock, from the United States around the world.
• Fluorochemicals such as hydrofluorocarbons are another source of emissions from the plastics industry. One year's production of fluorochemicals for use in plastic insulation in the United States will have the climate impact of at least 13 coal-fired power plants.
• Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are used to coat some plastic products, such as dental floss. When burned, these plastics form extremely potent gases, some of which are 10,000 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.
• Most waste incineration facilities in the United States were built decades ago when plastics made up far less of the total waste stream. Plastics are now 20 percent of total municipal waste by weight, but regulations for incinerating them have not changed with the increase.

 

Miriam Gordon, Policy Director, Upstream

• Upstream is a national non-profit organization focused on reducing waste by redesigning delivery systems to eliminate or move from throwaway to reusable packaging.
• Recycling will not solve the plastic waste problem. Most materials that are recycled are down-cycled, which does not reduce the need for plastics in foodware because plastic that is being created for foodware must use virgin petroleum feedstocks.
• Compostable products are also a challenge. In California, for example, only 14 of the 182 commercial compost facilities will accept or process compostable plastic.
  • Even when facilities do accept compostable plastic, it creates a separate and contaminated compost stream that is less valuable and has limited uses.
• Most compostable products are never composted and end up in landfills, where their greenhouse gas emissions are 30 times higher than products that are composted.
• Banning disposable plastics is not necessarily a solution either. Many substitutes also have regrettable environmental impacts. Single-use products in general are the main problem, no matter the material.
• Upstream’s Reuse Wins report looks at the life-cycle analysis of food packaging, evaluating environmental impacts from creation to disposal.
• The report found that reusable food packaging generally beat single-use for each of the 14 environmental measures studied.
• Reuse also saves businesses money. The ReThink Disposable program has worked with about 300 food businesses primarily in California, all of which have saved money. Small businesses have saved between $3,000 and $22,000 a year. Businesses save money by reducing the amount of waste they must dispose of and the number of single-use products they have to buy.
• Focus needs to be moved away from managing waste once it is created and towards reduce and reuse programs. Two policy approaches are recommended:
  • Eliminate unnecessary packaging as much as possible through bans and sector-wide targets built into extended producer responsibility and bottle bills.
  • Make the rest of the packaging reusable and refillable by setting sector-wide targets, requiring only reusable foodware for on-site dining, mandating consumer charges for throwaway cups and containers, and implementing reuse at government events and workplaces.
  • More specifics can be found in Upstream’s Reuse Policy Playbook.
• Dispatch Goods is a company currently helping restaurants deliver food in reusable containers.
• The Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act (S.984/H.R.2238) features some spending on infrastructure for refillables and targets for refillables.

 

Q&A

 

Can you elaborate on the environmental and climate justice concerns related to plastics policy?

 

Enck: Plastic pollution and extended producer responsibility legislation, whether at the state or federal level, is closely linked to environmental justice. I am always horrified when I personally use the term and I hear other people use the term Cancer Alley, a long geographic stretch along the Mississippi River in Louisiana, which is the petrochemical center of the nation—if not the world—where people suffer every day because of the air toxins and the water pollution from those facilities. If they were located in more affluent communities, they probably would not have been built or would have been shut down long ago.

We know that plastic recycling is abysmal, clocking in at about 8.5 percent, so that means the rest of that plastic is either going to be littered, buried, or burned. If it goes to a landfill or incinerator there is a good chance that it is in an environmental justice community.

People should realize that a massive amount of plastic is exported to Asia and Africa where it becomes a headache in those communities. The film, The Story of Plastic, follows the journey of plastic to other countries, and it really opens your eyes to the global environmental justice implications of single-use plastic packaging.

 

Vallette: In researching The New Coal report, we saw these geographic patterns emerge. Many of us have been doing work trying to stop toxic pollution in the United States for many decades. Some of my earliest work was in Baton Rouge, which showed up in this report as a major center of climate pollution. A lot of these plants have shifted production from one toxic chemical to another over the decades—these same plants may have been making organochlorine pesticides like DDT decades ago. The industry adapts with the times and now their adaptation is with this flow of cheap natural gas from hydraulic fracturing. The history of plastics is intertwined with the history of injustices that the plastics industry has relied upon for decades. As the build-out continues, as the amount of plastic increases, these injustices will just continue to increase as well.

 

Gordon: Communities that live on the fence line or next to sites of extraction, production, disposal, and incineration are directly impacted. In California, which is also a big gas-producing state, many of those communities also are impacted by other forms of single-use production like agricultural products (for example growing all the corn to make bio-based plastics). These communities are living and working next to these industrial agricultural farms and are heavily impacted by pesticides and all the chemicals used, but also all the oil and gas that goes into growing those products. So, we have to think about not just plastic, but environmental justice considerations for single-use products in general.

There is also the issue of exposure to chemicals in our single-use food and beverage packaging. Our website unwrappedproject.org reveals that there are over 12,000 chemicals being used in food and beverage packaging and other food contact materials. It is the people who live in food deserts and in low-income communities of color who do not have access to fresh food and produce who are more heavily impacted by this toxic chemical exposure.

 

Do any U.S. states or other countries have a single-use plastics ban and how are they enforced?

 

Gordon: The European Union and also countries within the European Union are moving forward on bans on single-use plastic packaging, and many countries are establishing targets to increase the amount of reusable packaging that is put into the marketplace. The European Union is specifying that by 2030, 10 percent of packaging products have to be reusable. Romania is setting a 30 percent target by 2025, and Germany is saying 70 percent of their bottles have to be reusable by 2023. Certain regions in Spain are setting very high targets.

 

Enck: There are hundreds, if not thousands, of plastic bans around the world. Some are narrowly focused on one product; for instance, New York state banned plastic bags last year. In 2020, New Yorkers used 23 billion single-use plastic bags, so that is a big change. On January 1, 2022, New York's ban on polystyrene foam for food packaging and its ban on plastic peanuts went into effect. In the European Union, 10 different types of plastics have already been banned.

What I am seeing happen is a real movement from the grassroots up. It starts with city or county policies and then often it will lead to the state. The U.S. federal government is missing on this issue. How about a national bottle bill? How about looking at the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act? There are also different proposals at the federal level to prohibit single-use plastic beverage bottles in national parks. I think the recent report from the National Academies will be a catalyst for the federal government to look at this issue.

Each policy measure presents an opportunity to drive towards what we want. When we have plastic bans, we are talking about what we do not want. We should be using policies to drive different business sectors towards what we do want. We want things unpackaged, and, if it is packaged, it should be in something durable and reusable.

 

What other state or local policies or initiatives are in place that reflect solutions you are working towards?

 

Enck: Maine and Oregon have adopted extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws. I think they are really good first laws out of the gate, but both laws could be much stronger on requiring reuse design standards and reducing toxics in packaging. A small group of NGOs, including Beyond Plastics, have drafted a model EPR bill mostly for the state level, but it is relevant federally. 2022 is the 40th anniversary of the New York bottle bill, and nine states have effective bottle bills. A bottle bill would be effective at the national level.

 

Vallette: There are huge gaps in accounting for the amount of climate pollution that the plastic industry generates. A lot of the data that people rely on for policymaking is based on the industry's own data. It is outdated—10-20 years old. EPA's strategy of counting as much as possible as recycling runs counter to efforts to prohibit some single-use packaging. In Maine, for example, you can turn plastic waste into a briquette and send it to a cement kiln, and that is called recycling. I do not think that is what consumers think is happening with recycling when we put things into bins. We need to get rid of loopholes in waste management, including the chemical recycling loophole.

 

Gordon: We are seeing a lot of groundbreaking work at the local level. We put out a model comprehensive food waste reduction policy in 2019, and Berkeley, California, was the first city that enacted it. It basically says it will only allow reusables for on-site dining, and even McDonald's is now rolling that out. For take-out cups, the policy does not allow businesses to give them out for free-–if you want a disposable cup, you have to pay for it. The choices become bring your own reusable cup, the business lends you one on deposit, or you enjoy your beverage on site. The Berkeley ordinance also says that accessories like utensils, straws, napkins, and condiment packs can only be provided when a customer specifically requests them. Every one of the components of this legislation is being replicated in communities across the country.

The Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act also has a provision that puts a three-year pause on the construction of new plastic production facilities. I think that is really essential and would match up with President Biden's commitment on environmental justice. Texas and Louisiana are so overburdened with air pollution and water pollution; we need that three-year pause for the regulators to catch up.

 

Compiled by Amber Todoroff and edited for clarity and length. This is not a transcript.