The Plastic Pollution Challenge
A global crisis demanding immediate attention and innovative solutions.
The Paradox of Plastics
Plastics are an irreplaceable part of modern life due to their unique, versatile material properties. Plastic production is growing and is an important economic driver in many countries. However, as an undesirable side effect, plastics and plastic particles are emitted to the environment during production, use, and end-of-life, accumulating for centuries due to their outstanding persistence. Today, plastics are found in every place on Earth!
Urgent Need for Research
Although the impact of plastic pollution is not fully understood yet, following a precautionary principle, more information about plastic emissions and its behavior in the environment is urgent and essential.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Limitations
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a methodology used to estimate potential environmental impacts of products and processes. However, plastic pollution is often not well considered in LCA studies, because no impact category exists so far which "measures" plastic pollution adequately – often making plastic products appear more sustainable than they are.
Our Mission
This website follows two primary aims:
- Information Collection: We aim to collect information and data about plastic pollution and the behavior of plastics in the environment. We invite people to actively contribute data, models, etc., to build a unique, comprehensive, and reliable source of information about plastic pollution. We want to address scientific colleagues as well as provide reliable information to the public.
We are looking forward to your comments and contributions!
- New Impact Category Development: We want to develop and establish a new impact category "Plastic pollution" so that plastics can be adequately considered in LCA calculations. Therefore, we define the so-called plastic pollution equivalent (PPe) to compare different plastic pollutions.
Plastic Pollution Calculator
With our plastic pollution calculator, you can explore our database and calculate the plastic pollution equivalents of various plastic emissions. You can compute different emissions simultaneously to directly compare the effects.
Key Features
- The calculator shows the value of PPE for the given emissions which are compared to typical emissions from our database.
- Furthermore, it shows a graph of the decay of the emission to emphasize the longevity effect of today’s emissions.
- A third graph shows accumulation of plastics in the environment, if the emission is not a single event, but a constant flow.
Methodology
Describing the fate of a particulate matter, like plastic emissions, is much more complicated than describing molecular substances (e.g. greenhouse gases in the atmosphere), because it is a multi-dimensional problem. A plastic emission is characterized by the following properties
- Polymer type
- Shape
- Size
- Environmental compartment released to
Furthermore, the redistribution of the emissions must be considered because the emission may behave differently in different environmental compartments.
This means that for example a small sized emission of a very persistent polymer type may have the same impact as a larger sized emission of a less persistent polymer type.
Publication
Methodology to address potential impacts of plastic emissions in life cycle assessment
Journal: The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment: Volume 27, pages 469–491, (2022)
Published: 22 March 2022
Authors:
- Daniel Maga
- Christina Galafton
- Jan Blömer
- Nils Thonemann
- Aybüke Özdamar
- Jürgen Bertling
