How Plastic is more Sustainable than its Alternatives
How Plastic is more Sustainable than its Alternatives
… and why you’re not supposed to know that.
This is the second part of the Firebreak series on the war on plastics.
The next time someone asks you: Will that be paper or plastic? think twice before you torch the planet by choosing the paper option.
A recent study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology shows than in 15 out of 16 applications, plastics have proven to have lower greenhouse gas emissions than their alternatives (paper, steel, copper, glass, aluminum …). The differences range from 10% to 90% lower emissions.
The study, headed by Dr. Fanran Meng from Sheffield University's Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, with researchers from the University of Cambridge and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, performed life cycle assessments (LCAs) on the most widely used plastic products (comprising 90% of global production volume) in comparison to their non-plastic alternatives. The LCAs looked at greenhouse gas emissions from the production, transport, use and post-use phases.
Common sense
For those not fully immersed in the environmentalist dogma, these findings make perfect sense. Plastic products, historically, have always been introduced as sustainable solutions to address negative environmental consequences of human consumption. Plastic bags were introduced to stop the increased deforestation from excessive paper use. Many soft plastics reduced the environmental waste from the overuse of animal products. The energy costs of producing, transporting and recycling glass were prohibitive to say the least. And in a recent Firebreak article, the introduction of plastic bank notes in place of paper is increasingly being adopted by central banks due to their more favorable sustainability advantages.
Plastic is lighter, uses less energy to produce, is often stronger and lasts longer. Even in the field of waste management, across different processes, plastic fared much better (especially in regions with waste to energy systems). In many cases, like food packaging, there is simply no viable alternative, and removing plastics without providing alternatives merely accelerates food waste. One has to wonder what the French government officials were thinking of when they introduced legislation to ban plastic packaging from the fresh food sector.
The LCA approach is basic common sense: products should be evaluated throughout their entire life cycle. But this common sense seems to be lacking in today’s politically-charged environmental debates (which focuses the evaluation merely on a substance’s natural vs synthetic origins). It is amusing that phys.org had to explain this common research tool in simple, almost juvenile terms:
To understand the environmental impacts, the Sheffield academics used a tool called life cycle assessment (LCA). This method helps compare how different products affect the environment.
The study, however, did not include reusable bioplastics and compostable and biodegradable alternatives because of the small emerging markets and a lack of reliable data about reuse. One can only imagine how much more favorably these bioplastics would fare in an LCA against non-plastic alternatives.
It was Never about the Environment
The war on plastic was never about protecting the environment. Environmental activists attack plastic because it represents industrial production, chemicals and fossil fuels. It is a reflection of what they believe is excessive Western consumption and this offends them. Plastic is an affront to the zealots' post-capitalist, naturopathic ideology so they would rather lie than acknowledge the consistent environmental advantages of plastics over any alternatives.
Rather than enter into an ecological hornet’s nest where they would have to consider the facts on the sustainable advantages of plastics, activists prefer to play the emotion card, focusing on the relatively few cases of poor consumer or municipal post-use management. The images they use are extreme, alarmist and, in many cases, falsified. For example, they won’t tell you that 78% of microplastics in the environment come from car tire dust or that between 75 and 86% of the plastic waste in the great ocean garbage patch come from abandoned fishing nets.
As solutions to plastic waste are being more widely implemented in developing countries, where the problems were more evident, and with better stewardship along the manufacturing value chain, these activists deflect and simply demand a plastic-free world … and with it, all of the environmental destruction from their alternatives.
This is not surprising. Almost all activist campaigns are not about saving the environment at all, but rather to push their anti-capitalist political agenda.
The 60 year-long attack on nuclear power has resulted, to this day, in more coal-fired plants polluting the environment.
The campaigns promoting organic farming over conventional agricultural techniques will lead to more deforestation and diminished food security.
The relentless attacks on GMOs is resulting in increased loss of lives and peasant livelihoods, lower yields and more pesticide use.
But these well-fed cosmopolitan elites are more concerned about propagating their political ideology than having a sustainable ecology. They never cared about the environment but saw such campaigns as a better way to oppose capitalism (given that any attempt to challenge capitalism on its economic and developmental success stories would be doomed to certain failure). Such is the case with their war on plastics: although it is a more sustainable product on almost all of the 16 use cases, the activists would rather see the planet burn.
What horrible little creatures.
These campaigns were never about the environment but rather were an activist ruse to advance their anti-industry, post-capitalist political agenda. Unfortunately the media bought into this anti-plastics campaign and have served very well as the activist’s useful idiots.
Where was the Media?
This article, Replacing Plastics with Alternatives Is Worse for Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Most Cases, was published in January, 2024. But to my knowledge, its research has only been covered in packaging trade media, one article and discussed with a feisty group of anti-consumption moaners on Reddit. The Western mainstream media ignored it. Why is that?
A good part of the media has an anti-industry, environmentalist bias. Such a counterintuitive article would run too hard against their narrative. Imagine an editor of a large news company seeing this study’s title on the wire. It wouldn’t even get a second glance. They blast us with images of rivers with plastic sludge or a straw up a turtle’s nose and soon after, decision-makers are pressed into banning plastic without any ecologically viable alternatives.
More ominously, news organizations like the Guardian, are mostly financed by foundations, and in particular, programs funded to run articles on the campaigns against plastics, fossil fuels and other excesses of industry. If the Guardian dared report factually on how plastics are better for the environment, they would risk losing millions in foundation funding for programs like Seascape: The State of our Oceans or Big Oil Uncovered. So these media mercenaries don’t.
The truth does not matter in today’s media, especially given how largely entrenched they have become in the activist / foundation campaign objectives. The public buys into the lies since they hear no other perspectives, trying to go plastic-free and suffering from poorer-quality and more expensive consumer products that are ultimately worse for the environment.
Today, we no longer are given the choice between paper and plastic. Mission accomplished.