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Advancing plastic release modeling: updating emission flows and extending the system boundary from Switzerland to Europe
Summary
Researchers updated a Swiss plastic release model and extended its geographic scope to the European scale by integrating improved emission pathway data from recent studies and incorporating previously excluded plastic release sources. The revised model offers higher-resolution estimates of plastic flows across European countries, enabling better-informed policy decisions on reducing plastic emissions to the environment.
Plastic has raised significant environmental concern due to the substantial release into the environment via various emission pathways. A first plastic release model has been published for Switzerland in 2019 (Kawecki & Nowack, 2019). However, many release pathways have only been parameterized based on very limited data and assumptions and therefore improvements of the model are necessary. Recent studies have focused on specific plastic emission pathways, highlighting the necessity to integrate them into an updated plastic release model. Besides, there is a need to geographically extend the system boundary from Switzerland to European countries as emission flows can vary strongly from country to country. In our study, we have enhanced the original Swiss plastic release model by integrating recent research findings on key emission processes for 7 specific polymers as macro- and microplastics separately. Our results reveal a notable lower macroplastic release and higher microplastic release in Switzerland as compared to the original evaluation. Overall, the updated emission factor for all plastics combined decreases from 0.59 ± 0.16 Also see: https://micro2024.sciencesconf.org/559154/document
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