Each step contributes millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly methane, which is considered to be 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. To create plastic food packaging and drink bottles that have become ubiquitous with daily life, gases need to be fracked from the ground, transported, and processed industrially. While there has been widespread media coverage on plastic waste and microplastics, less attention has been paid to the environmental impacts of plastic production. “Unless you live in the communities where this is taking place, people just don’t know this.” “What’s quietly been happening under the radar is the petrochemical industry - the fossil fuel industry - has been ramping up investment in the production of plastics,” Enck said. But this number is expected to rise as dozens of plastics facilities are currently under construction across the country, mainly in Texas and Louisiana, according to the report. It found that the US plastics industry alone is presently responsible for at least 232 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year, the equivalent of about 116.5 gigawatts in coal plants. The report, “ New Coal: Plastics and Climate Change,” draws on public and private data sources to analyse 10 stages of plastic production in the US, including gas acquisition, transportation, manufacturing and disposal. “But plastics’ contribution to climate change is not on the agenda.” “There’s a little discussion on waste, but not much,” Enck told Mongabay in a video interview. Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former regional administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), says the report was intentionally released in the lead-up to the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, when world leaders will gather to discuss strategies for tackling climate change.
Yet policymakers and businesses are not currently accounting for the plastics industry’s full impact on climate change, allowing the industry to essentially fly “under the radar, with little public scrutiny and even less government accountability,” the report says.
21 by Beyond Plastics, a project at Bennington College in Vermont.
Plastics will outpace coal plants in the US by 2030 in terms of their contributions to climate change, according to a new report released Oct.