Brief: Counting Carbon – An LCA Guide for Plastic Fuels
Bellona Europa, Zero Waste Europe and Rethink Plastic Alliance launched the brief ‘Counting Carbon: a lifecycle assessment guide for plastic fuels’ in January.
Since the 1950s, when plastic resin production first began, we’ve produced approximately 9.2 billion tons of it. More than 70% of it has been discarded in landfills or the environment. In 2019, the entire plastic value chain, including its production, use and disposal added more than 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Converting fossil plastics to fuels is sometimes marketed as a part of the solution to the environmental and waste problems the plastic industry is currently facing. The climate performance of these fuels, along with other environmental impacts, will be evaluated under a delegated act by 2021.
Some manufacturers have claimed that these fuels could be labelled as low-carbon, effectively using plastic fuels to greenwash CO2 coming from fossil oil and gas. To prevent gaming and selective accounting, robust guidelines for a full LCA are needed. This report demonstrates that the fossil carbon embedded within plastics needs to be traced from the extraction of the fossil carbon to its emission into the atmosphere.
Read more at: https://bellona.org/publication/brief-counting-carbon-a-lifecycle-assesment-guide-for-plastic-fuels