Plastic: the story of a billion elephants in the room
Is it possible to completely untangle our modern lives from the daily use, and misuse, of plastic? For a substance that has only been widely manufactured for around 65 years, the statistics of plastic are staggering.
A landmark paper published in 2017 in the journal Science Advances by industrial ecologist Dr Roland Geyer, from the University of California, estimated the total volume of all plastic ever produced at 8.3 billion tonnes. (BBC News calculates that to be the equivalent weight of 1 billion elephants).
Half of this material was made over the past 13 years and only 30% of the historic production remains in use today. The great majority of it is discarded plastic, some 79% ending up either in landfills or littering the wider environment, including the oceans. Current trends point to 12 billion tonnes of waste by 2050.
These numbers, while alarming, don’t really give us a perspective on our individual contributions to the problem. In a unique experiment, Daniel Webb decided to store all the plastic waste he threw in the bin for 12 months. A year later, he unpacked 4,490 items onto a warehouse floor. Only 4% of these were recyclable.
The 2017 report and Webb’s experiment are helping us grasp the enormity of the problem. The first part is the obvious adverse effect that discarded plastic has on the environment. The second, and often overlooked part is that the majority of substances used to make plastics are derived from fossil fuels. Roughly 4% of the world’s oil goes directly toward their production, with another 4% being used to supply the necessary energy to produce plastic and then transport the finished products.
The manufacturing process for each tonne of polypropylene plastic is estimated to emit 3.075t CO2e, which is the equivalent of an average medium size petrol car in the UK driving approx. 10,300 miles, or slightly more than a return flight from London Heathrow to Tokyo (this is only 2.9t CO2e), or approx. 272 pairs of shoes, or 3075 loaves of bread, or 34 people being cremated!
The indisputable conclusion is that plastic has a significant carbon footprint and its continued production and use adversely contributes to climate change.
As always, we want to focus on what individuals can practically do with this information. It is possible to make more informed decisions about the types of plastic products we use, and to understand exactly what the cost of their production is on the environment. If the sum of all individual choices adds up to market demand, then, in theory, the result should be companies and corporations delivering more sustainable products.
Ecoingot is proposing a system with the ability to calculate the carbon impact of everything. By creating algorithms powered by AI & Machine Learning, the result will be an application-based metric, that will make the carbon impact information of individual plastic products (and anything else) readily available. Think of it as an environmental fitness tracker with the added ability of being able to offset that specific carbon cost by spending the asset-matched cryptocurrency token — called the EGT — within the app.
The problem of plastics can ultimately be reduced to choices — and good choices require reliable information. Informed decision-making underpins consumer power, which in turn acts as a pressure point for change. The scale of this problem can feel overwhelming and seemingly insurmountable — however, better decisions taken every day bring us one step closer to reducing this cost.
Here’s a last thing to think about: if we all reduced our plastic usage by 20% and encouraged retailers to listen to our demands, as an interim, we could reduce the emission of approximately 21.2 million tonnes CO2e. This is equivalent to taking over 5 million cars off the road.
Join Ecoingot’s #makeachange movement and read more about the Internet of Carbon at ecoingot.com
