The airline industry is known for dumping thousands of tons of greenhouse gases into the Earth’s atmosphere each year, but a new study finds the plastics industry is much worse.
Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the plastics industry releases the equivalent of 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, compared to 1 billion tons from the airline industry.
Most news about plastic concerns trash, which ends up in oceans and even the human body, but plastic creates staggering amounts of gases that warm the atmosphere long before it is used, scientists have found.
Global plastic production, which runs on oil and uses petroleum byproducts to make synthetic material, pollutes the atmosphere at up to 600 coal-fired power plants, three times more than those in the entire United States.
Plastic production, which uses petroleum products, is a major source of greenhouse gases generated in the United States.
Plastic creates pollution both at the beginning of its life, when the factories that make it produce greenhouse gases, and at the end of its life, when it fouls the natural world and infiltrates human bodies.
“The production of most plastic products is projected to increase exponentially, testing planetary limits through a triple crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution,” the researchers wrote in the government-funded study.
The impact of “plastics” on the climate will only grow in the coming decades, as industry analysts expect production to at least double by 2050.
If that happens, they predict the resulting global warming will cost $38 trillion.
“Climate change will cause enormous economic damage over the next 25 years in almost all countries in the world, including the most developed ones such as Germany, France and the United States,” said lead author Leonie Wenz of the Potsdam Institute.
However, most of the public and scientific attention on plastics focuses on what happens to them once they become trash.
However, this ignores a large part of the picture, according to the scientists behind The report.
“The rapid increase in plastics production and the continued dependence on fossil fuels for their production have contributed to numerous environmental problems and health harms,” the researchers wrote.
“As a result, plastic pollution has become an increasing threat to natural ecosystems, human health and the climate.”
However, they added, there is not enough information about how plastic manufacturing contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and the overall “carbon budget” that must be met to keep global warming below a global temperature rise. 2.7 or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
The carbon budget is the amount of carbon that can be emitted and still be below those figures.
Their project aimed to fill those gaps.
It focused on the fossil fuels used in every step of the plastic production process, including the energy used for manufacturing and the petroleum products that make up the plastic itself.
The study examined the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from nine different fossil fuel-based plastics that account for 80 percent of plastic production.
The sample included polyethylene (PE), used in plastic bags, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) found in pipes, and a plastic used in car parts, among others.
Nine types of plastic make up about 80 percent of the world’s plastic, but each type of plastic has different recycling and manufacturing requirements, making it difficult to make general recommendations.
Global plastic production emits more greenhouse gases than 600 coal-fired power plants, triple the number of coal plants in the entire United States.
What they found was that the manufacturing of these nine plastics accounted for about 2.24 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year (GtCO2e), a measure of the global warming potential of all the different greenhouse gases produced, including methane and nitrous oxide.
2.24 gigatonnes is equivalent to about 2.5 billion tons.
These emissions represented 5.3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, excluding changes in land use and forestry.
And even with a modest growth rate for the plastics industry, these numbers would skyrocket in the coming years, scientists found.
“Under a conservative growth scenario” of 2.5 percent annually, greenhouse gas emissions from plastic manufacturing “would more than double to reach 4.75 GtCO2e by 2050, representing between 21 and 26 percent of the remaining global carbon budget to keep average temperature increases below 1.5°C.” C PUT FAHRENHEIT IN ( ), the researchers wrote.
This research adds a crucial piece to the plastics landscape that much of the reporting on plastic waste omits.
And in fact, plastic waste is wreaking havoc on the environment and human health.
Scientists estimate that millions of tons of plastic float in the world’s oceans.
And this trash breaks down into microscopic fragments called microplastics that have been shown to accumulate in the brain, kidneys, liver and even placenta, reducing fertility and increasing people’s risk of inflammation-related conditions. , such as inflammatory bowel disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Air pollution is particularly worrying because it is released at high altitudes into the atmosphere, but plastic production generates 2.5 times more CO2 equivalent emissions.
Coal-fired power plants are also notoriously dirty and climate-damaging, but they produce only a fraction of the greenhouse gases produced by plastic production.
Microplastics are so ubiquitous that they have even been found in clouds.
But the damage begins long before plastic products have a chance to become waste.
It starts at the beginning, when plastic is made, and comes in the form of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, which the new study shows are significant.
The cost of all this pollution is not only paid in global warming, but also in the real financial costs of dealing with a warming planet.
and a study published this week in the journal Nature showed how high that cost is.
A team of German scientists found that continuing to use fossil fuels costs six times more than it would take the world to transition to renewable energy.
These costs include not only the costs of trying to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but also the impact of climate change on labor, agriculture, and flood damage.
Of course, there are some situations where plastics are necessary, especially in medicine: syringes, IV tubing, dressing containers… the list goes on and on.
The researchers behind the new study don’t propose banning all plastics, but they do suggest scaling back the industry.
Eliminating non-essential use of plastics without alternatives, such as microbeads in cleaning products, could lead to a reduction in global pollution. [greenhouse gas] emissions from primary plastic production due to a reduction in production volume,” they wrote.
‘However the [greenhouse gas] The impact could be different if primary plastic production was reduced through the use of alternative materials or recycling.’
