Find out about.......Plastics, Polymer Engineering and Leadership: Major Benefits of Plastics for the Environment

Saturday 14 January 2023

Major Benefits of Plastics for the Environment

Hello and welcome to a new blog post. Today we discuss briefly the major benefits of plastics for our environment. In this post I selected nine impact factors which are in my view important and the list of benefits of plastics not only for the environment is much longer.

The following video shows a brief summary:

Let us get started:

1) Durability: polymer based pipes are designed to last for more than 100 years. Also they reduce the overall failure rate and ensure fresh water supply to many difficult reachable regions of the world.

2) Water saver: as we mentioned water before, the production of a plastic bag consumes less than 4% of the water needed to make a paper bag.

3) Light weighting: lightweight plastic parts save around 3,000 liters of fuel over the lifetime of an average car.

4) Food waste prevention: plastics packaging increases the shelf life. In the case of bananas, wrapping them in a modified atmosphere bag extends their shelf-life by 2 to 3 days.

5) Product protection: plastics packaging helps to reduce the products which are sold loose. It has been found that this in-store waste in some cases leads to losses of 20%.

6) Resourceful in production: producing plastics uses only 4% of the world's oil production. The remaining 96% are used for transport, energy, heat or are burnt.

7) Recyclability: thermoplastics can be recycled however it is not always technically or economically possible. In general, recycling one tonne of plastic bottles saves 1.5 tonnes of Carbon emission.

8) Reduction of CO2 emissions: it is shown by several studies that plastics reduce CO2 emissions massively and fossil fuel use massively.

9) Safety: chemicals and additives in plastics are strictly regulated, tested for decades. In most cases they are only present in parts per million amounts.

Altogether we can state that plastics are part of our solution and are not the problem.

I published already several posts on how polymer impacting the environment in a positive way:

Turning thermoplastics carbon neutral

Global warming potential vs thermal properties of thermoplastics

Sustainability in plastics industry

Eco profiles of polymer resins

Thanks for reading and #findoutaboutplastics

Greetings,

Herwig

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