Reducing our Environmental Footprint through Innovation

This Earth Day, global attention is rightly focused on climate change and how we can reduce our impact on the environment.

While it may sound counterintuitive, plastic plays a pivotal role in helping us all do more while lowering our carbon footprint. Plastic is a vital material for combatting climate change because it lowers greenhouse gas emissions… by enabling us to do more with less. Meaning less material, less energy, and less greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, solar panels and wind turbines use plastic to produce sustainable energy more efficiently, and electric vehicles can go longer without charge because of lightweight plastic car parts.

Plastic pipes help transport water more efficiently than old-fashioned pipes (and they won’t rust). Plastic packaging helps deliver the food and products we need with less spoilage and a smaller carbon footprint, typically using 50 % less energy than alternatives. And foam plastic insulation in our homes can save an enormous amount of energy and money – up to nearly $750 per household per year, which also means saving a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.

Plastics play an underappreciated but crucial role in these technologies and innovations, and can help us address some our greatest global sustainability challenges. Again, because plastics enable us do more with less.

But plastic waste in our environment is a problem. Plastic makers are committed to the goal of recycling/recovering/reusing 100% of plastic packaging by 2040. We have identified a set of six Guiding Principles that will help us achieve a more circular economy for plastics, and we have created a Roadmap to achieve these goals. To get there, we are working to accelerate advanced recycling technologies, which complement traditional recycling systems, to be able to recover more used plastic so it can be remanufactured into new products.

Plastic waste is solvable, and together we can create a greener, more sustainable world.