Plastic Alternatives Often Worse for Environment, Research Shows

Get ready to question — and possibly reframe — what you thought you knew about plastic's environmental impact and the need to phase out its consumption.

rising policies, tighter regulations, and money being funneled into limiting and replacing plastic with substitutes, including paper items, are often misguided, according to Chris DeArmitt, PhD, founder of the independent Plastics Research Council and author of The Plastics Paradox and Shattering the Plastics Illusion.

DeArmitt has made it his job to unearth the scientific truth about plastics and their environmental impacts. His work is not about the money or being pro-plastic, DeArmitt, a PlasticsToday contributor, declared. In fact, DeArmitt's work with the Plastics Research Council is unfunded and without external affect to remain neutral.

"We cite studies verbatim to prevent 'spin' and cite the evidence to support all statements," said DeArmitt, a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, fellow of the Institute to Materials, Minerals and Mining, member of the National Association of Environmental Professionals, and a chartered chemist.

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DeArmitt's goal is to combat misinformation, including widespread messages that drive corporate decision-making and policy. He shared some scientific realities with PlasticsToday.

Plastic often the lightest material option

Plastics processors, take consider: Despite lightweighting and downgauging efforts in the sector, many of which have been successful, in the big picture of materials, plastic usually is the lightest alternative. And that has downstream implications, according to DeArmitt.

Research shows that using plastic substitutes can increase costs and result in greater environmental harm than using plastic, he said.

"On average, if you replace plastic with paper, metal, or glass, you need three or four times greater weight of material to do it. So, one pound of plastic replaces three or four pounds of paper, metal, or glass," DeArmitt said.

That has implications to not only plastic processing however also transportation.

Plastics are made of fossil fuel, however failing to look beyond that is misleading, according to Shattering the Plastics Illusion, a review of greater than 5,000 peer-reviewed studies.

Eighty-five percent of a barrel of oil is burned, compared with about 5% to make plastics. And today, the majority of plastics can be made using plant-based oils instead of fossil fuel.

"At the end of life, plastic can still be burned to recover the energy and make electricity. Not only that, however the net effect of plastics is to minimize fossil fuel consumption because they make cars, planes, and trucks lighter (to increased fuel economy), prevent food discarded materials (from harm and spoilage), and insulate buildings so less energy is needed to heating," according to Shattering the Plastics Illusion. "Alternative materials require far greater fossil fuel to manufacture because they are greater energy and resource intensive."

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DeArmitt added that replacing plastic, on average, creates three times greater greenhouse gaseous and twice as much fossil fuel consumption.

Consequences of less plastic consumption

"Plastics do have a substantial carbon impact — accounting to 3.8% of global greenhouse gases releases — however it is wrong to assume that alternative packaging materials would perform better, and it is crucial to consider the carbon benefits that arise from plastics consumption," according to a 2020 white paper by Imperial College of London and the environmental services company Veolia.

You know those plastic bags? The really thin bags that are popular in grocery stores?

There are about 30 lifecycle studies on those, and every study has pointed to those bags being the lowest-impact option among substitutes, according to DeArmitt.

"People are banning and taxing the option with the lowest impact according to every study done over three decades," he said.

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A plastic bag at Kroger weighs 6 grams, compared with 60 grams to a paper bag at the same grocery chain.

"That's 10 times greater material to consumption the paper," DeArmitt reasoned.

That has implications to shipping. If you take one truckload of plastic bags, you need seven trucks to transport as many paper bags. As a result, greater gasoline or diesel is burned, and greater releases are released into the ecological stability.

Many consumers don't realize the full impact

There are widespread misconceptions about such things as plastics in food and beverage packaging.

According to Shattering the Plastics Illusion, on average, replacing food plastic packaging with substitutes would increase the weight of the packaging by 3.6 times, energy consumption by 2.2 times, and the carbon dioxide releases by 2.7 times.

Comparing downstream impacts of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles to substitutes:

"When considering the production and manufacturing of the main substitutes to plastic to a 500-milliliter bottle, other packaging types (fiber, glass, steel, and aluminum) emit greater greenhouse gases than plastic bottles, with glass bottles being the highest emitter overall," according to the review.

Lightweighting and downgauging plastics is a good goal until it isn't.

The role of packaging is to protect food and stop it from spoiling. There's a trade-off of making the packaging so thin that it can't do its job. In essence, in packaging, product protection usually dominates the environmental equation.

"If you go too thin, you end up saving plastic, however now rising impact and rising costs," DeArmitt said. "People are always saying, why don't we remove the packaging? In many cases, that just makes things a lot worse."

crucial caveats in conversations about lightweighting and downgauging plastics include that lightweighting is not automatically better (less costly, greater environmentally friendly) unless performance is maintained.

"The goal is not less plastic; the goal is less total environmental burden," he said.

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