Mismanaged Plastics and Measures for Mitigation: Comparison
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Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Rita Xu and Version 1 by Tony R. Walker.

The mismanagement of plastic materials has grown to become a mounting global pollution concern that is closely implicated in unsustainable production and consumption paradigms. The ecological, social, and economic impacts of plastic waste mismanagement are currently transboundary in nature and have necessitated numerous methods of government intervention in order to address and mitigate the globalized and multifaceted dilemmas posed by high rates and volumes of plastic waste generation.

  • plastic pollution
  • marine litter
  • food packaging
  • single-use plastics (SUPs)
  • recycling and reuse

1. Introduction

Plastics have become ubiquitous in the global economy and are integrated into the functioning of many industrial sectors [1]. Many plastic applications are added to long-term stocks, while in contrast, plastic packaging materials have a very short life cycle and are currently discarded as waste in large volumes [1,2][1][2]. Large volumes of primary plastics are produced and discarded within the same year, resulting in millions of tonnes of primary industrial resources that are not recovered and reintegrated back into the economic market [1,3][1][3]. Growth in the production and consumption of disposable packaging materials currently contributes to most domestic waste streams internationally, as packaging waste accounts for an estimated 15–35% of household solid waste around the world [4].
Improper management of waste packaging materials is an increasingly burdensome task for communities and citizens to address. The material complexity of the packaging waste stream restricts the efficient functioning of secondary recycling markets, and the pace and scale of primary plastics production has hampered the capacity of recycling industries to produce substantial feedstock at a quality and scale necessary to compete with virgin plastics, inhibiting a thriving secondary market for plastic packaging [1,5,6][1][5][6]. Furthermore, inadequate plastic recycling has caused the leakage of land-based plastic waste into terrestrial and aquatic environments, through insufficient or nonexistent waste management infrastructure [7]. Since the introduction of plastic material to the consumer market, a burgeoning plastic pollution crisis has been occurring on land and at sea [8].

2. Impacts of Plastic Production

The global value chain for plastics spans numerous industries and complexifies the total life cycle of plastics production, use, and disposal. The value chain consists of a complex network of stakeholders operating in the following industrial sectors described by Barrowclough & Birkbeck [9]:
  • Raw material extraction and provision of material feedstocks;
  • Refining raw inputs to produce feedstock for production of plastics;
  • Converting plastics into plastic resins or fibers;
  • Manufacturing intermediate and final plastic products;
  • Plastic use by all final consumers including brands, institutions, retailers, and distributors;
  • Collection, sorting and transportation of plastic waste;
  • Plastic waste treatment in landfill, incineration, recycling, or dumping;
  • Plastic reuse as secondary materials or in waste-to-energy approaches.
According to the International Energy Agency, the production of virgin plastics has increased over tenfold globally since 1970 and has exceeded the growth of any other group of bulk materials produced by the chemical sector, including steel, cement, aluminum, and ammonia [10]. According to estimates by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) [3], plastic consumes between 4 and 8% of global oil production, equal to the oil consumed by the global aviation industry. Oil demand for plastic production is expected to outpace that for road passenger transport by 2050, and the projected combined CO2 emissions from both production and embedded carbon amounts to 287 billion metric tonnes (Bt) annually by the end of this century, comprising more than one third of the allotted carbon budget under a 2 °C climate warming scenario [10]. The production of plastics has grown at an exponential rate, permitted by a highly government-subsidized petroleum industry since the mid-20th century.
Plastic dominates consumption choices and prevails across the global supply chain [1,10][1][10]. In response to the currently decreasing demand for oil and gas for energy for transportation, and the decarbonization of electricity generation, the fossil fuel industry has been expanding investments in plastic production [11,12][11][12]. Investments in new refineries and ethane-cracking facilities are now on the rise across the United States, to increase its domestic capacity to produce chemical feedstock for the production of plastic materials [12,13][12][13]. The United States currently holds approximately 40% of the global capacity to produce ethane-based petrochemicals, and its market share of steam cracking facilities is projected to rise to 22% by 2025 (20% higher than 2017 levels) [10]. Ethane is considered a preferable, lower-cost domestic alternative to other plastic feedstocks such as naphtha, originally accessed from stocks in India and China [13]. These facilities are known to emit high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in their production of plastic feedstock and are of concern for public health regarding air quality, water contamination, and environmental degradation surrounding production facilities [12,14][12][14]. Virgin plastics production is thus projected to rise amidst a backdrop of a plastic mismanagement crisis.
An estimated 9.2 Bt of virgin plastic was produced between 1950 and 2017, and an estimated mere 9% of the quantity produced has been recycled within that time period, leading to a crisis of overproduction as well as of resource loss and waste mismanagement [1]. Based on global estimates from Geyer [1], around 36% of plastic production is employed for packaging, accounting for 158 million metric tonnes (Mt) of the total plastic resin produced in 2017. The production rates of plastic resins in 2017 are shown in Table 1 based on analysis by Geyer [1].
Table 1. Estimated primary plastic production in 2017 by resin type (by mass) [1].
Polymer Resin Type Estimated Primary Plastic Production in 2017 (%)
#1 Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) 8%
#2 High-density polyethylene (HDPE) 13%
#3 Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) 9%
#4 Low-density (LDPE) and linear low-density polyethylene (LLDPE) 16%
#5 Polypropylene (PP) 17%
#6 Polystyrene (PS) 6%
Other plastics and additives 31%
Alongside the 158 Mt produced in 2017, a total of 152 Mt or 46% of plastic waste generated during the same year was packaging [1]. Plastic production reached a total of 368 Mt in 2019 [15] and production rates have increased annually. Rates of plastic waste generation are projected to continue to increase during the next decades due to projected growth in plastic production, in human population, and in plastic consumption, but they are also dependent on global waste generation rates, improvements in overall waste management, recycling technology and governance, material reduction and substitution, and progress towards circular economy goals for plastic materials [16,17][16][17]. Currently, the high rates of virgin plastic production have outpaced development of adequate recycling infrastructure and technologies, which are out of step with increasing demands for plastic packaging.

3. The Reality of Plastic Recycling

The origins of the term and concept of recycling are rooted within the oil processing industry, to describe the process of re-refining petroleum materials to reduce the quantity of waste [18]. Once the term was popularly re-employed in the 1960s and 1970s, it became a descriptor for general material reuse and reclamation, and eventually became a commonplace term for the collection of separated waste streams [18].
The packaging industry is dependent on extractive industries to produce steel, aluminum, glass, paper and cardboard, and plastic. Metal and glass packaging materials often do not require the addition of primary materials into their recycling processes and are therefore suitable for repeated recycling that retains the original material properties intact, while plastic packaging recycling processes usually require the inclusion of additional primary materials to produce secondary materials [19]. While recycling technologies have been developed to decrease the quantity of virgin resources necessary to produce packaging materials, current economic and technical dynamics are significant in shaping resource flows within the packaging industry.
Currently, the goal of plastic recycling is to reduce the need for primary plastic production, as well as to recover the value in materials that have fulfilled their functional purpose. The variety of many plastic types makes recycling difficult, largely due to multi-material configurations. Recyclability can be restricted by a range of product features, including product format, material, size, color, and transparency, as well as the surface presence of inks, adhesives, and labels [20,21][20][21]. Due to their perceived low or inconsistent quality, recycled plastics can trade at discounts of up to 50% lower than the price of some corresponding primary plastic categories [5]. The myriad types of plastics on the market with a range of chemical and physical properties inhibits the functioning of efficient plastic recycling. Additionally, recycled plastics are continually in economic competition with the virgin plastics market, which has a higher relative material efficiency compared with secondary plastic production, due to the ongoing availability of lower-cost feedstock [6]. Enkvist and Klevnäs [5] describe the contradiction at play in improving secondary plastics where “a fragmented and small-scale recycling industry cannot produce the consistent quality and volumes required for large-scale use, even as lack of demand holds back the investment that would enable such production in the first place” (p. 84).
Various methods are used to treat plastic waste. Two main methods of recycling are available in mechanical and chemical form. Mechanical recycling, also termed back-to-polymer recycling, allows for the recovered material to be remanufactured or downgraded into a new product with a different function. Chemical recycling, also termed back-to-monomer recycling, concerns the recovery of a product into its chemical constituents, permitting closed-loop recycling that maintains a material’s original quality. Closed-loop recycling is possible when a resin “is returned at the end of its initial lifetime in a fit state to fulfill the service for which it was originally produced” [10] (p. 23). Open-loop recycling, by contrast, remanufactures a product with a loss in physical quality and properties [10,22][10][22]. Various recycling options available for plastics are otherwise categorized into primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary recycling by Bocken et al. [23], and are further described in Table 2.
Table 2. Overview of plastic recycling methods [23].
Recycling Description
Primary recycling

(mechanical recycling)		 Employs the mechanical recycling process to retain original quality of material properties (known as closed-loop recycling within a circular economy)
Secondary recycling

(mechanical recycling)		 Employs the mechanical recycling process resulting in lower-quality material properties (known as downgrading within a circular economy)
Tertiary recycling

(chemical recycling)		 Employs the chemical recycling process to the material’s chemical constituents to retain original chemical properties (known as depolymerization and repolymerization in a circular economy)
Quaternary recycling

(energy recovery and incineration)		 Employs thermal recycling and energy recovery through incineration of materials

(not considered recycling in a circular economy)
The OECD [20] distinguishes between two important factors that are relevant in defining recycling capacity, clarifying further the discrepancy between perceived and actual recyclability. A material’s technical recyclability is based on the currently existing recycling technologies available, while practical recyclability is subject to greater regional differences across the world, given that each country has access to different recycling and waste management infrastructure largely shaped by available public funds, market conditions, and socio-economic determinants [20].
Cognizant of the many factors hindering recovery of plastics and production of secondary plastics, it has been recognized that plastic recycling produces the lowest CO2 emissions compared to other methods of plastics production. Globally, mechanical recycling is the most available method of plastic recovery, and chemical recycling rates still remain quite low [1]. Enkvist and Klevnäs [5] determined that current primary plastic production produces 5.1 tonnes of CO2 per 1 tonne of primary plastic (both in production and embedded carbon use), compared to the production of secondary plastics via mechanical recycling, which produces 1.4 tonnes of CO2 emissions per 1 tonne of recycled plastic. Additionally, looking forward, they projected that mechanical recycling would produce only 0.1 tonnes of CO2 emissions per 1 tonne of secondary plastic produced, based on projections for 2050 regarding increased decarbonization in recycling technology [5]. From a material efficiency standpoint, plastics recycling is deemed a valuable manufacturing option, while being fraught with barriers to achieving circularity with respect to plastics.
Currently, recycling is not functioning at the scale that is necessary to adequately process the quantity of plastic waste that is currently discarded globally. Therefore, the production of plastic resin does not align production with the realistic capacities of recycling infrastructure. Contextualizing this challenge, Gordon [24] states that “the benefits of recycling [.] are based on a series of assumptions that may not match the reality of how these systems operate and the impacts of the materials that flow through them” (p. 28).

Plastic Waste Exports

Due to inhibitive technical and economic barriers impacting plastic recycling, recycling has become a substantial economic and technical matter of resource management through the 20th and 21st centuries. The economic and technological barriers currently restricting closed-loop recovery of plastic waste have placed a burden on municipal waste programs that has left communities struggling to address stockpiles of solid waste in recycling bins, due to a lack of stable and long-term end markets for recycling, as well as domestic capacity to process waste locally. As a remedy to combat a domestic issue of increased recyclable waste, many countries across the world have facilitated an international trade in plastic waste amounting to a total of USD 3.3B in trade value, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) [25].
For many years, the recycling trade in global scrap plastic materials was predominantly based in China, later sweeping across the globe to other markets that would accept designated materials to manage [26,27][26][27]. East Asia and Pacific countries imported the vast majority of plastic waste between 1988 and 2016, accounting for 75% of total imports [28]. Until the Chinese government restricted plastic scrap imports in the early part of 2018, many recycling programs relied on exports to the Chinese recycling market [29]. Through its National Sword policy, China shed its previous role as the world’s largest importer of recyclable waste by banning 24 different types of materials from foreign shipments, thereby eradicating many nations’ main export market for their recyclable materials [29,30][29][30]. Smaller recycling markets in Southeast Asia attempted to fill the void left by China and began importing larger quantities of plastics and other recyclable materials to fulfill the overseas demand, and countries including Malaysia, Thailand, and Turkey were soon inundated by waste materials [6,31][6][31]. Brooks et al. [28] estimated that the trade implications of China’s restrictions will displace a total of 111 Mt of plastic waste by 2030.
Pacini et al. [32] examined the import and export patterns of styrene, ethylene, PVC, and mixed plastics waste within the global plastic scrap trade network during 2018, which amounted to a total quantity of 2738 declared intercontinental and transcontinental transactions between a network of 111 countries. The global plastic scrap trade in 2018 dramatically declined by 45.5% from the years prior to the Chinese import ban, as many countries involved in plastic waste exports in the past turned to stockpiling their high volumes of plastic waste locally, increasing landfill usage [33]. Waste recycling capacity is lacking in many importing countries, and landfill methods are the more common waste management approach in recycling markets located in Malaysia [33,34][33][34]. Ratifications to the international Basel Convention under the United Nations Environment Programme, which regulates the transboundary shipment of hazardous wastes between countries, have attempted to limit the shipment of plastic waste overseas to countries lacking environmental protocols for effective recycling or safe operational conditions in recycling facilities [26]. Within this reality, transplanting recycling challenges by the transboundary shipment of wastes to emerging economies and recycling markets with low or inadequate access to recycling infrastructure creates ongoing social and ecological risks.
The global waste trade has resulted in profound inequities through the transfer of stockpiled plastic scrap waste from the Global North to Asian, African, and Latin American nations [35]. Many regions of the Global South do not have access to even the most basic waste collection services, especially in rural regions, creating large quantities of waste plastic that are not formally collected and managed even before foreign waste imports add to an existing stockpile [6,36,37][6][36][37]. The work of informal waste workers and cooperatives around the world has contributed to local waste management, recycling, and litter reduction in substantial ways in the face of a lack of available waste infrastructure [36,38,39][36][38][39]. Informal waste work in collection, handling, and recycling employs an estimated 15 to 20 million people globally, predominantly workers who are women, children, elderly, or migrants [34,40,41][34][40][41]. Informal waste work has been on the front line of the plastic pollution crisis since its origins. Particularly for packaging waste, informal waste workers can play a crucial role in mitigating plastic waste emissions into terrestrial and marine environments [39]. Given these challenges, the current state of waste generation and recycling is hindering the operation of a circular economy for plastics.

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