Technology

Ronald Bailey | From the August/September 2024 issue

"Plastics are the new coal," declares Beyond Plastics. "Pollution from the plastics industry is a major force behind the heating of the planet," reports The Hill. The Natural Resources Defense Council says "reducing plastic production is critical to combatting climate change."

Producing plastics from fossil fuels emits a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which contributes to warming the planet. An April study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that in 2019 "global production of primary plastics generated about 2.24 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent," which represents 5.3 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. So switching to plastic alternatives would help slow man-made global warming, right?

Not so fast, says a new study in Environmental Science & Technology, which finds that "replacing plastics with alternatives is worse for greenhouse gas emissions in most cases." The European researchers report that in "15 of the 16 applications a plastic product incurs fewer greenhouse gas emissions than their alternatives."

The researchers considered emissions from production,........

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