Chris De Armitt, one of the world's leading plastics experts and an advisor to major corporations (HP, Disney, CBS, Sky News, BBC), has published "The Plastic Paradox - Facts for a Brighter Future" to shed light on the real impact of plastics in people's lives and to counter some of the most widespread fake news on the subject.
To achieve his goals, De Armitt gathered more than 400 scientific articles.
To identify what is truly green, the author uses Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which takes into account every element of a product's manufacture: raw materials, energy, waste, by-products, transport, disposal. This approach makes it possible to calculate the environmental impact of each product.
What are the most common myths about plastics?
- Plastics are harmful to the environment and need to be replaced.
- Plastics produce waste and cause disposal problems, so they should be replaced by paper and degradable materials.
- Plastics take a thousand years to decompose, so degradable options are preferable.
Shopping bag: polyethylene vs paper
The classic polyethylene shopping bag is the greenest option, according to life cycle assessments of shopping bags conducted in Denmark, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and many other countries. A polypropylene bag becomes even greener after a few uses.
The production of paper bags, even those made from recycled material, actually requires more energy, releases more carbon dioxide, consumes more water and uses more chemicals.
“The paper bag has to be used four or more times to reduce its global warming potential to below that of the conventional HDPE bag” (UK Environment Agency)
Plastic Packaging
Plastic packaging has important properties: light weight, flexibility, durability and impact resistance. Therefore, if other types of packaging were used to replace plastics, the replacement packaging would have a much higher environmental impact in all categories considered.
In the beverage container sector, PET is significantly more environmentally friendly (especially when recycled) because it produces the least greenhouse gases, uses less energy and generates less waste than aluminium and glass.
Waste and disposal
Contrary to what many people think, plastic is not the largest contributor to our waste and its use has led to a significant reduction in waste.
Over the years, plastic packaging manufacturers have improved the functional weight characteristics of their products: for example, between 1970 and 1990, the average weight of a plastic yoghurt pot fell from 12g to 5g, and that of a detergent bottle from 300g to 100g. General and industrial plastic films, bags and sacks have reduced their average thickness by 400%.
The author believes that to improve recyclability one should:
- Make each product with only one material, because of the difficulties of recycling mixed materials.
- Use only three types of plastic (PE, PP and PET) to make as many items as possible to ease sorting and recycling.
- Make plastics more durable so that they can be recycled several times before they lose their physical properties.
Plastics take a thousand years to decompose, so biodegradable options are preferable
Are the plastics we commonly use stable?
One of the most popular arguments against plastics is that they last for thousands of years, so plastic waste will accumulate and be around forever.
Polypropylene, the second most commonly used plastic in the world, is extremely unstable. The scientists who discovered it found that at room temperature, polypropylene oxidises and degrades rapidly.
If left outdoors, an ordinary plastic shopping bag will be destroyed in less than a year (some plastic parts can be made to last longer, but only by adding large amounts of stabilisers).
The global market for polymer stabilisers is worth more than $6 billion a year. If polymers were infinitely stable, industries would not spend so much on additives.
Source: plasticsparadox.com