Plastic waste in a circular economy

Abstract

Plastic is a commodity that supports our modern lifestyles. Its remarkable range of properties (e.g., durability, lightweight, good barrier properties) combined with the ease of processing make plastic a sustainable alternative over other materials (e.g., glass, metals, and paper), of which production, use, and management can be more resource intensive. Owing to these attributes, plastics are considered to have an important role to play in promoting sustainability as part of a circular economy (CE). CE is a concept that seeks to promote a sustainable way of living, where resources are used more efficiently and are retained in the economy for as long as possible. The latter can be achieved by creating loops that feed resources back into the system for use in same or new components and products with the same or lower functionality. Paradoxically, plastics present also one of the biggest challenges to achieving a CE. This is because, in spite of their great potential to promote resource efficiency upstream, i.e., at the production stage, a vast amount of the plastic that becomes waste escapes into the environment and/or is largely mismanaged at the consumption and management stage. This highlights the urgent need for scrutiny in the way plastics are designed, produced, used, and managed, to better understand how to improve their ability to circulate back into the system, recovering maximum value from them. In this chapter, we present a framework for plastic waste management placing emphasis on their circularity potential via existing processes. Given the rapid emergence of bioplastics in the plastic industry, it would be an omission not to discuss their opportunities and implications in promoting circularity. Consideration of all aspects in the plastic and plastic waste system and of the processes that go beyond end-of-pipe solutions highlights that sustainable management necessitates a combination of an integrated solid waste management strategy with a renewed focus on designing out plastic waste.