Plastics production alone will doom climate goals
Manufacturing plastics is a highly emissive process. The world needs to shrink production rapidly to stay within the 1.5 °C global temperature rise.
Even if the entire world electrifies and switches to renewable energy, that wouldn’t be enough to stop Earth from hurtling past the 1.5 °C warming limit by century’s end, as set by the Paris Climate Agreement. To meet this goal requires more than just halting the combustion of fossil fuels — the missing piece of the puzzle to rein in global warming is plastics.
Made up of the same hydrocarbons that drive the Earth’s anthropogenic pyrexia, plastics contribute to greenhouse emissions even if they’re not incinerated. A new report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, published in April, estimates that plastics release most of their greenhouse emissions during production, long before the final product reaches the consumer. The act of using plastics itself may not be directly pollutive — provided you dispose of the product properly — but their existence is a physical testament of the emissions needed to create them.
Plastics production is an energy intensive process. Per the report, 75% of plastics’ carbon footprint comes from fossil fuel extraction, chemical refining, greenhouse leakages, and making the precursor materials. Moreover, many of the production steps require high operating temperatures beyond what can be achieved by electric heating; this makes the industry reliant on nonrenewable energy sources.
