Catch up on Plastic Free July with our second article highlighting the dangers of plastic. (Photo by Thomas Asselin via CBC News)
Climate change is here, it has done a lot of damage to us, and it’s poised to do more. There are a lot of things people here in Manitoba, as well as in the rest of the world, can do to mitigate and adapt to us. One of those things is reducing the production and consumption of single-use plastic. In a previous article, I discussed how single-use plastic affected the tangible “environment” for the worse. You may not know that it also does a lot of harm to the climate, the suite of temperature and precipitation patterns that we can’t poke, per se, but that are no less real. Xia Zhu in Canadian Geographic notes that “plastic is part of the carbon cycle.”
Most plastics are made from petrochemicals, so they emit greenhouse gases at all stages of their lifecycles, from their creation to their disposal. At a global level, the extraction of fossil fuels that are turned into plastics can produce between 1.5 million and 12.5 million tons of greenhouse gases; refinement into plastics adds 184 to 213 million tons of greenhouse gases.
In each year between 2015 and 2019, according to the OECD, both the production-conversion and end-of-life treatments of plastics saw associated emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide rise year on year, coming to nearly 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2019. Aggregate worldwide data after 2019 aren’t available yet from the OECD, but Australia’s Minderoo Foundation estimates that in 2021, about 450 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent came from the production of single-use plastic alone. It stands to reason that there are even more emissions associated with the production and disposal of “multi-use” plastics each year. Furthermore, just because, as Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data puts it, “Emissions from the end-of-life [stage] tend to be relatively small” at under 200 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year doesn’t mean they are not worth stopping. We must pick every fruit we can.
Ironically, despite their small relative contribution to emissions from plastic, it is easiest for us to see the end-of-life emissions. This is what comes from incineration: About 4 per cent of the plastic produced in Canada per year gets incinerated. Another 86 per cent goes to the landfill. In other words, 90 per cent of our plastic production leads to active or passive production of greenhouse gases. In Canada in 2020, an estimated 3,916,862 metric tons of plastic waste and scrap was landfilled or incinerated without plans to recover its potential energy, while 107,577 metric tons of the same were incinerated or gasified with energy recovery. No data are available for how much of this activity happened in Manitoba or later than 2020 yet.
Landfills are bad for the climate because they create methane, a greenhouse gas with 86 times the potency of carbon dioxide over twenty years. Twenty-three per cent of all methane in Canada comes from municipal landfills like the one at Brady Road in southwest Winnipeg. Capturing methane, as was implemented at Brady Road in 2018, is a step forward but not foolproof: the necessary infrastructure has already broken down at least once before.
Randall Denley, writing for the Macdonald–Laurier Institute, says, “The issue isn’t how to keep plastics out of landfills, it is how to get rid of landfills. Incineration is the obvious solution to that problem.” It has an intuitive ring to it: it would liberate space for potentially more ecological uses of land. (Remember that because plastic comes from petroleum, it is part of the carbon cycle. Climate change amounts to humans making the carbon cycle go more rapidly.) Landfilled plastic itself exists jointly with organic matter that also gives off methane in the fourth stage of its decomposition (after aerobic biodegradation, anaerobic biodegradation, and acid formation; before stabilization). But evidence from the United States suggests that incineration actually produces 1.7 to 711 times more greenhouse gas just at that stage of plastic’s life cycle than any other form of electricity generation in that country. It also costs much more every year to operate an incinerator in the U.S., Europe, or China, per unit of solid waste processed, than it does to operate a landfill for its entire life. Existing public and private investment regimes may bear some responsibility for this situation. (And this doesn’t even get into the environmental classism or environmental racism of which people bear the burdens of incinerators in their communities.)
Again, the most important thing is to campaign for plastic, especially flimsy single-use plastic, to be discontinued and replaced by reusable alternatives. So-called bioplastics offer an only partial solution: they might derive from plant matter, but this doesn’t mean they will break down quickly. They can’t break down in home composters, but they will break down if you are signed up to a service like Compost Winnipeg. Furthermore, “plantations” for plastic crops convert land. This can release up to 170 times as much carbon dioxide as whatever the bioplastic would have emitted relative to the conventional alternative—and does great harm to biodiversity too.
For the good of the climate, we need a strategy to deal with plastic.
—
This blog was written by Mike Bagamery, an Environmental Researcher residing on Treaty 1 Territory.
Recent Comments