Making Plastics Emissions Transparent

Plastics represent one of the biggest environmental challenges to society. Ubiquitous in our daily lives, from food packaging to clothing, from healthcare to homes and beyond, plastic is the most common human-made material. Its widespread use has enabled many aspects of modern life but has also created an unprecedented pollution crisis—nearly 80% of the 8,300 million tons of plastic made since 1950 remains intact in our landfills, rivers, and oceans.

Further, because more than 99% of plastic is made from, and produced using energy derived from, fossil fuels, it is implicated as a large and growing contributor to global climate change. Plastic was responsible for 1.7 gigatons (Gt) of CO2 equivalent (CO2 e) in 2015, a number that is expected to grow to 3.5 Gt by 2050 if we continue producing plastic as we do today.

For companies and consumers that rely on plastics, there is a growing imperative to source options with a lower climate impact, higher post-consumer content, and widespread recyclability. In this study, we focus on climate impact, aiming to show that not all plastics are created equally. Many companies rely on industry average values to estimate the climate impacts of their plastic products, but this practice can easily result in an overrepresentation or underestimation of the real impact. In fact, we find that variations along the life cycle of plastic can significantly affect the ultimate carbon footprint of a plastic product.

This paper will explain some of these variations across the different stages in plastic’s life cycle, which we hope will be useful in a few ways. First, we hope to provide a pathway for companies to employ tailored information to gain more resolution on the material’s carbon footprint, increasing the accuracy of scope 3 carbon emissions accounting for plastic. Second, we hope to shed light on how companies can use carbon emissions data in the procurement process, gathering information on the key supply chain steps that have the biggest effect on the final carbon footprint value. Third, we hope to propagate a mechanism by which sourcing based on life-cycle carbon emissions can serve to grow the market for more sustainably produced plastics circumventing the predicted four-fold growth in emissions by 2050.