Impact of a Plastic Ban and Pathways to Achieve a Circular Plastic Economy

Consumption of packaging material has quadrupled over the past 30 years and is an important contributor to climate change.Hence, the choice of packaging material is highly debated.With increasing prominence of adopting sustainable solutions and curbing climate change, several initiatives like imposing a tax levy and ban on plastic, which is the de facto choice for packaging bottles and bags, are being adopted by the Japanese government and companies.However, before phasing out the use of plastic packaging, it is important to confirm if such measures truly benefit the environment and achieve the desired objectives.Towards achieving this goal, the study majorly evaluates the effect on climate change and environmental impacts of different packaging materials popular in the Japanese market.Specifically, plastic packaging products, i.e., polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) bags, has been quantified and compared against other widely used alternatives in Japan such as paper and textile bags, and aluminum and glass bottles, to find a product that does the least environmental damage.This is achieved by conducting a life cycle assessment (LCA) from a cradle-to-grave environmental impact approach, i.e., the complete lifecycle -extraction, production, transportation, and end of life treatment processes.Sixteen environmental impact categories including climate change, acidification, aquatic toxicity, etc. is evaluated and damage on endpoints is assessed for each packaging material.The study revealed that replacing plastic bags with alternatives in Japan would result in an order-of-magnitude higher carbon emissions.The characterization results also broadly focused on all environmental impact categories and show that a paper bag emits 11.6, 15, and 131967 times more and textile bag emits 40.6,346, 355737 times more GHG, CFC11, PO 4 during