Plastic products should tell you how clean they are. Here’s how they can.

Our new guidance will help buyers clean up the plastics industry.

From children’s toys, to hi-tech cold weather wear, to seemingly endless packaging, plastic is nearly inescapable this holiday season. And the truth is, plastic’s dominance isn’t seasonal — projections of plastic use show that we are far behind efforts to reduce the environmental impact of this material.

With plastics, we face two challenges that can often seem at odds: cutting unnecessary new fossil-based plastic while producing what is necessary with as low an emission profile as possible.

Key sectors — such as packaging, buildings, and clothing — provide significant opportunities to reduce new fossil-based plastic. A major way of achieving this is through customer choices, but when a potential buyer weighs the climate costs, they can often feel limited. Currently, there is no way for a consumer to know what the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their plastic purchase will be.

But there is a way to bring this information to light — and help consumers up and down the supply chain make more informed choices: consistently counting and conveying emissions associated with a plastic product. Like nutritional information on your favorite foods, this transparency of materials and emissions impacting the climate can help buyers choose less harmful options or outright switch to an alternative product.

Digital package labels make this information increasingly traceable and transparent, allowing buyers to make more informed purchasing choices. Producers can then measure the demand signal for low-carbon products, allowing them to provide additional sales justifications for actions that reduce emissions.

RMI’s recently launched Plastics Extrusion and Molding Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reporting Guidance requires emissions disclosure from all plastics production steps, from fossil fuel extraction to fully shaped plastic products. When applied, these disclosures can lead buyers to better-informed purchasing decisions which stimulate the market for lower emissions plastic.

Exhibit 1: Plastic emissions are often far away from key purchasing decision-makers.  Our reporting guidance helps bridge this information gap with prioritized, actionable insights.

The guidance: A new method to measure and accelerate plastic emissions reductions

To consistently make cleaner decisions, corporate buyers of consumer goods, medical equipment, clothing, construction materials, and industrial goods need a wider set of comparable plastics emissions data. That data should include:

• chemical type (aka resin) of plastic used
• specific energy and feedstock inputs chosen
• product design
• methane intensity

Prioritizing steps where clean inputs matter most

Over half the climate emissions from plastics production come from sources either upstream or downstream of chemical plants. Our method clarifies the steps in this chain that generate the largest emissions reductions, particularly the first and final steps of the production process. These steps can drive up to a 350 percent difference in fossil-based plastic emissions.

The guidance specifically includes emissions from the plastic shaping or conversion process that is mostly electrified and occurs near the end of the production process. The guidance is consistent with and builds on guidance developed by the chemical industry association Together for Sustainability.

Exhibit 2: RMI’s emissions reporting guide extends best practices to the “last mile” of plastic production so retailers, brands, and consumers can compare what matters most.

Chemical type

All plastics are not created equal. And since plastics often have a blend of fossil and non-fossil feedstocks, our method also requires showing the highest and lowest emission plastic feedstocks by category. This requirement can often reveal stark and previously hidden differences in emissions, not only in the same type of plastic, but among the various common plastic types as well.

Thermoplastics make up about 80 percent of plastic production and consist of six main resin types, listed in Exhibit 1. Each of these resins has a unique manufacturing process that affects the range of possible emissions. The chart below compares several literature sources’ cradle-to-polymer pellet emissions factors for traditional plastic production processes.

Exhibit 3: Emissions can vary drastically between and within different types of plastic resins. Consistent accounting methods can determine how much of this difference really counts, allowing customers and producers to compete on the climate attributes of plastic products.

Product design

Design decisions have a significant impact on a product’s life cycle emissions before production even starts. Lighter designs may reduce transportation emissions but may eventually reduce the useful life and recyclability of a product. Our methodology allows flexibility in determining the product that best suits a specific market.

Measuring methane

Our metrics require separate disclosure of methane leakage intensity, which occurs during oil and gas extraction and fossil gas management throughout the rest of the supply chain. While these methane emissions may be relatively small by mass, methane is a very potent greenhouse gas that represents nearly half of emissions from oil and gas production and thus represents an important contribution to the overall emissions.  Methane can also be independently measured and managed at little to no cost.

A system designed for collaboration and digital scaling

To maintain transparency and enable efficient and targeted decarbonization efforts, emissions reporting must be harmonized, collaborative, and scalable.

Within the plastics accounting landscape specifically, there is a need for standardization of how plastic product molding is reported. RMI’s new Guidance was developed to be complementary to existing reporting best practices, including Together for Sustainability’s Product Carbon Footprint guidelines for the chemical industry and MiQ’s emissions certification system for oil and gas.

RMI has previously developed accounting guidelines for the steel and aluminum sectors. Our new plastics guidelines build on established cross-sector accounting principles of transparency and traceability.

These principles are further enabled by the development of a standardized data format, centrally located on Github. There are a range of databases and tools, such as ClimateTRACE and OCI+, that can provide emissions estimates where directly measured data is not available.

These tools allow insight into the entire oil and gas supply chain and enable us to estimate the carbon intensity of plastic products more accurately than ever before.

Call to action – consumer brands and retailers can test this emissions transparency system with suppliers now

We invite key players to participate in bringing transparency to climate impacts associated with plastic products. Consumer brands, retailers, and data solution providers: if you are interested in piloting RMI’s guidance for the plastic products within your operations, please reach out to Joe Fallurin at jfallurin@rmi.org. We also welcome feedback from anyone interested in this effort.

Please share your thoughts through our Microsoft Form. Your involvement will help ensure RMI’s Guidance meets industry needs.

We extend our gratitude to Berry Global and Systemiq for their valuable feedback, which has played an essential role in shaping our Guidance and advancing our shared goals for transparency and sustainability.