Plastics — Inflection Point or Fata Morgana?
Simply, is the Plastic Sector at a significant turning point or staring at a highly distorted mirage?
Last July, The Pew Charitable Trusts and SYSTEMIQ collaborated to publish, “Breaking the Plastic Wave: A Comprehensive Assessment of Pathways Towards Stopping Ocean Plastic Pollution”.
That landmark publication along with a number of others indicated that 2020 worldwide production of Oil & Gas derived petrochemical plastics reached 380 Million Metric Tons (MMT), yet, tragically, the vast majority of that will end up as plastic pollution mainly in landfills or aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.
In 2015 a team led by Jenna Jambeck, calculated that the amount of plastic entering the ocean in 2010 ranged from 4.8 to 12.7 million MMT. In 2017, Roland Geyer, Jambeck, and Kara Lavender Law produced “Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made” saying that as of 2015, approximately 6300 Mt of plastic waste had been generated, around 9% of which had been recycled, 12% was incinerated, and 79% was accumulated in landfills or the natural environment.
In September 2020, “Evaluating scenarios toward zero plastic pollution” by Lau et. al., created a time series scenario of all plastic pollution to 2040 showing Business as Usual (BAU), Collect and Dispose scenario (CDS), Recycling scenario (RES), Reduce and Substitute scenario (RSS), and System Change scenario (SCS).
Pew and SystemIQ created a similar “Plastic Fate” wedges analysis.
If any of these are scenarios are even close, how does this Oil & Gas sector get to Net Zero?
And, whoa, wait a minute, given the wide variety of all of the components that go into the making of plastics, do we have a clue as to the GHGs produced by plastics. Until now, the best guesses stem from the industry itself — such as this indication from BP last September.
Fortunately, thanks to research published on an unusually slow news day — January 20th — we do. Entitled: “Manufacturing energy and greenhouse gas emissions associated with plastics consumption” a research team led by lead contact Gregg T. Beckham has done that. Gregg also leads the BOTTLE™ Consortium.
A key step to displace petroleum-based plastics is the need to benchmark traditional manufacturing practices in order to track individual energy flow types throughout the supply chain. That NREL group measured both energy and GHG emissions by using “Materials Flows through Industry” (MFI), allowing a detailed accounting of supply chain energy requirements reported as carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e).
One of the key differences between MFI and traditional LCA methods, is that the “technology mix” (that is, weightings of production processes for the plastics and all upstream inputs, including monomers and electricity) reflects how these inputs are currently produced in the US. Energy and GHGs analysis comprise the cradle-to-gate portion of polymer life cycle. Expect the additional energy requirements and GHG emissions from the use-phase and end-of-life to be captured soon in reports by this group or BOTTLE™.
Significantly, before that tail addition, four US-only polyesters account for 11.5 MMT CO2e of GHGs.
In our next installment, we’ll dive into “Chemical Recycling” championed by the American Chemical Council, yet in California, there is no statutory mention, definition, or even direction related to it.
So, for now, the answer to our title question will have to wait.