Sustainable chemistry - from theory to practice

The Japanese petrochemical industry is one of the largest in the world. The strong growth of the plastic packaging market has been fuelled by the consumer demand for clean, easy, functional and cheap products. However this success has created a number of environmental problems such as waste, CO2 emissions and energy consumption throughout the life cycle of petrochemicals. In order to enhance the sustainability it is important to reduce these environmental impacts. The potentials for sustainable development is analysed from a technical perspective and from an economic perspective, using a set of linear programming models. The effectiveness and efficiency of policy instruments such as recycling ordinances, taxes and subsidies is compared. The model results suggest that a CO2 tax would result in significant secondary waste benefits, and a materials tax would result in significant secondary CO2 benefits. However the actual welfare effect of both approaches is subject to large uncertainties. Introduction Sustainability is defined as a resource consumption that maximizes the welfare of the living people without compromising the welfare of future generations. Packaging materials contribute significantly to the welfare of people. However life cycle studies (e.g. SAEFL 1998) indicate a number of environmental problems in relation to packaging: Waste landfilling; GHG emissions; Consumption of scarce resources. Consideration of these environmental problems may affect the optimal packaging system choice. Packaging materials constitute at this moment approximately 3.3% of the total GHG emission and 14% of the material related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Western Europe (Hekkert 2000). Table 1 provides an overview of Japanese packaging materials and the related environmental impacts. The figures suggest that the Japanese situation is quite similar. Plastics constitute the most problematic packaging materials category from an environmental point of view. As a consequence a discussion of sustainable packaging is largely a discussion of sustainable plastics (and sustainable chemistry). Table 1: Materials consumption for packaging 1999 (Japan Packaging Institute 2001, Sakamura et al 2001) [Mt/yr] CO2 [t/t] CO2 [Mt/yr] Waste [Mt/yr] Plastics 3.5 5/0.5 15.8 Paper and board 13.2 0.6/0.6 7.9 Wood 1.1 0.5/0.5 0.6 Glass 1.9 0.5/0.3 1.0 0.7 Steel (est.) 2.3 2.5/0.7 4.7 0.6 Aluminum (cans) 0.3 13/2 2.4 0.2 Aluminum (foils, caps etc.) (est.) 0.1 13/2 1.3 0.1