This week, Quartz’s environmental reporter, Zoë Schlanger, dove into the world of plastics—how it grew to dominate our lives, why the plastics industry is about to make a lot more of it, and why recycling it has proven to be a scam. Her field guide on the plastic boom covers a lot of ground. But for this week’s newsletter, she’ll tell you a little about how it relates to climate change. What she found may surprise you. Here’s Zoë:
We rarely talk about plastic as a climate issue. But recent research has found plastics account for 3.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s nearly twice the emissions of the aviation sector. That’s right: Plastics contribute more to climate change than flying.
How is that possible, you might ask? The answer is that virtually all plastic is made from oil, gas, or coal. That means at every stage in its life—from extraction, to refining, to disposal—plastic contributes to climate change.
Fracked gas—one of the most emissions-intensive fuels, in terms of extraction—is now one of the most popular fuels for making plastic. It’s so economical, in fact, that a European company is willing to ship it across the Atlantic for that purpose. Petrochemical company Ineos built a specially-designed fleet of ships to carry American gas from the shale fields of Pennsylvania to European ports. As Ineos gears up to build a new plastic plant in Antwerp, Belgium, local residents—fed up from the plastic pellet pollution already littering their city’s coastline—are fighting back.
By 2030, as demand for plastics surges, the petrochemical industry is set to use 56 billion cubic meters of additional natural gas—about half of Canada’s total gas consumption today, according to the International Energy Agency. And petrochemicals are projected to account for more than a third of the growth in oil demand between 2017 and 2030. Refining those fuels into plastic is extremely energy-intensive; petrochemicals, a sector dominated by plastics, uses 28% of the US’s entire industrial energy budget.
And we are on the edge of a new plastic boom: The petrochemical industry is set to triple its plastic production by 2050. At that rate, emissions from plastic production alone will account for 15% of global emissions by 2050, jeopardizing the world’s ability to stay below the 1.5-degree Celsius warming threshold considered catastrophic.
But the contribution to climate change doesn’t end after manufacturing. As plastics pile up, the practice of burning that waste is a growing source of emissions. Plastic also continues to emit greenhouse gases over its entire lifetime, according to a report from the University of Hawaii published last year. They found that all plastics continuously released ethylene and methane, two potent greenhouse gases, as they weather and age.
In other words, the climate crisis and the plastics crisis are inextricably related.
But we can’t recycle our way out of either crisis. Historically, very little plastic—only about 9%—has ever been recycled. In the US, the most recent figure is probably around 5%. Much of the single-use plastics we encounter in our daily lives can’t be recycled at all; for example, chip bags or any other plastic layered with other materials are unrecyclable, along with much plastic that’s been printed on or combined with other non-plastic parts.
So what can be done? We explore that question in our in-depth field guide on the plastic boom, available to Quartz members. Members can also join me and Quartz’s science editor Katie Palmer in a video conference call on plastics at 11am EST today, Friday Nov. 8.
–Zoë Schlanger