Plastic may soon trump coal as climate killer in US: study
By Sharon Udasin | October 21, 2021 | The Hill
The U.S. plastics industry’s contribution to climate change is on course to surpass that of coal-fired power plants by 2030, a new study has found.
Plastics are responsible for generating at least 232 million tons of carbon-based emissions per year — an amount equivalent to the average emissions from 116 average-sized coal-fired facilities, according to the report, published by Bennington College’s Beyond Plastics initiative.
In 2020, the plastic industry’s reported emissions rose by 10 million tons over 2019, the authors found. Meanwhile, construction is underway on another 12 facilities and 15 are in planning stages — meaning that altogether, the new sites could emit more than 40 million additional tons of greenhouse gases annually by 2025, according to the study.
“The fossil fuel industry is losing money from its traditional markets of power generation and transportation,” Judith Enck, former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator and president of Beyond Plastics, said in a statement.
“They are building new plastics facilities at a staggering clip so they can dump their petrochemicals into plastics,” she added. “This petrochemical buildout is cancelling out other global efforts to slow climate change.”
Praising the recent closure of 65 percent of the nation’s coal-fired power plants, the authors stressed that the increase in plastics production is outweighing those gains.
Although the U.S. plastics industry reported releasing 114 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2020, an analysis by the Maine-based firm Material Research identified “a severe undercounting of plastics’ climate impacts,” said a news release from Beyond Plastics.
That analysis examined data from federal agencies, including the EPA, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Energy, and identified an additional 118 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions generated from other stages of plastics production — the equivalent of another 59 average-sized coal-fired power plants, the report said.
“This report represents the floor, not the ceiling, of the U.S. plastics industry’s climate impact,” Jim Vallette, president of Material Research and the report’s author, said in a statement.
Federal agency calculations, Vallette explained, do not yet count releases in their entirety because regulations do not require the industry to report them. For example, no agency follows how much greenhouse gases are released when plastic waste is burned or when fracked gas is exported across the world to manufacture single-use plastics.