Plastics have helped to build the modern world.
They keep our food fresh and safe; they are used to build our cities, homes and even the mattresses we sleep on; they power the green revolution, producing light-weight electric vehicles and solar cells; they are essential components of mobile phones and computers; and they enable medical advances, from masks, contact lenses and heart diaphragm pumps to artificial tissues.
Plastics are essential to create a more sustainable society, and to ensure that future technologies develop rapidly and cost effectively.
Plastic packaging reduces food waste by prolonging its shelf life, and has an important role to play in detecting food quality.
Recent developments in plastic composites mean that plastic can form 50% of the primary structure of aeroplanes, resulting in significant greenhouse gas emissions savings.
Future technologies central to reducing our reliance on fossil fuels will also require plastics.
In electric vehicles, for example, it is possible to replace even more metal components than in petrol cars, and to use light-weight plastics in energy recovery devices, cooling pipes, pumps, fans and casings.
The use of plastics in electric vehicles is already growing rapidly.
Wind turbine blades require plastic composites and adhesives, while batteries rely on plastics in their housing and may even apply them as electrolytes and other components.
Plastics are also widely used in home insulation, reducing energy usage, and they play critical roles in the construction sector as pipes and conduits, cladding, seals, adhesives and gaskets. In future, plastic composites could replace metals in load-bearing structures and will likely be important in intelligent buildings as components of detection and monitoring systems.
Plastics are essential as the active layer in water purification systems and deliver efficiencies in agriculture, such as reducing water usage and increasing productivity.
Future technology sectors such as robotics, drones, electronics, personalized healthcare and diagnostics each rely on the development of better plastic materials.
Despite these benefits, the use of plastics is also causing major environmental challenges.
Plastic manufacturing consumes significant quantities of petrochemicals: in Europe, for example, it accounts for roughly 4%–6% of all oil and gas use, according to industry group Plastics Europe.
Since plastics are interwoven with the petrochemical industry, they are subject to its fluctuations, geo-politics and contributions to CO2 emissions.
Discarded plastic pollutes the natural world, with microplastics and nanoplastics being detected in many ecosystems (see box: Sizing up plastic pollution).
The majority of plastic waste is generated and emitted on land, but research on plastic pollution initially focused mainly on the marine environment, where plastic particles are reported to occur from tropical to pristine polar areas, and from beaches to deep-sea sediments.
Later, river and lake systems were examined, where plastic particles were found even in remote mountain lakes.
Plastic particles have more recently been found in the atmosphere and in terrestrial ecosystems, especially in urban and agricultural soils.
The ingestion of plastic particles together with food has already been investigated in a variety of organisms from aquatic and terrestrial habitats, and the resulting effects on organisms and human health are still under discussion.
Possible risks associated with plastic particles cannot be generalized because microplastics and nanoplastics comprise a very heterogeneous group of particles that vary in polymer composition, additive content, size, shape, ageing state, and consequently in their physicochemical properties.
However, the ubiquitous contamination of the environment with microplastics and nanoplastics, along with the possible associated risks to ecosystems and ultimately to human health, has recently attracted a great deal of public and scientific attention.
For many members of the general public, plastics now epitomize a disposable way of life and are associated with cheap, low-quality and low-value products.
The visible evidence of plastic pollution and as yet unknown impacts of these materials are driving a reconsideration of their life cycles, designs and uses.
Technical solutions will be needed to ensure that in future plastics combine useful properties with better end-of-life options, and chemistry will play a central role in delivering these.
Developments in chemistry will be key to understand and mitigate the impact of plastics in the environment.
Chemistry can help to develop efficient ways to recycle the plastics we use today and, in the longer term, create replacements that are made from sustainable starting materials, are more amenable to recycling at end-of-life, and have reduced environmental persistence or impact.
Sustainability across the entire plastics life cycle must be a core design feature of the polymers of the future.
It is also clear that a suite of materials will be required to meet the myriad of applications, just as different plastics are applied today.
This means that underpinning investment is recommended in a range of different technologies and options.
It is also essential to emphasize that no single solution is suitable for all scenarios, geographies or products.
Different countries already employ a wide range of waste management practices, with varying degrees of environmental impacts.
As such, the most sustainable option for a particular location is not necessarily a global solution.
In some scenarios, improved sustainability will arise from deployment of polymers built entirely from renewable, biologically-derived feedstock chemicals, or from wastes like CO2 where the raw materials used to produce the polymer are carbon neutral.
For some applications, durable or longer-lasting polymers, which can be reused multiple times prior to efficient closed-loop recycling, will be the best option. In yet other scenarios, it will be important
to design polymers to incorporate special chemical and physical features to make them ‘degradable on demand’ – such features will reduce energy use and improve selectivity for closed-loop recycling.
Fundamentally, there is a need to design polymers for efficient disassembly.
Such an approach has the potential to enable closed-loop recycling over multiple cycles and to reduce, or even nullify, environmental persistence if they escape from waste systems.
We recognize that building this new future for plastics necessitates a major collaboration between sciences, engineering, technology, materials design, humanities, human behaviour, policy, regulation, economics and business.
This report focuses only on the contributions and solutions that could be technically feasible, and on the research challenges specific to chemistry and the chemical sciences.
It deliberately avoids making recommendations on policies or regulations for recycling, waste management systems, use of financial incentives and taxation (the Further reading appendix p45 includes references to recent policy briefings and reports from expert working groups that address some of these important parallel issues).
In coming up with our recommendations, we emphasize that technology alone cannot provide all solutions and that parallel advances in waste management, regulation, economics and behaviour will be needed to deliver the infrastructure and ecosystems for a sustainable plastics future.
We signal that experts in chemistry are well placed to provide impartial evidence for policymaking and standardization of plastics, as well as in environmental monitoring and detection.
We propose four major research challenges and their underpinning research priorities.
These research challenges are interlinked and symbiotic, as such we do not recommend unbalanced selection or weighting of research in a particular direction.
Our philosophy is that plastics should not be deliberately released or dumped into the environment and that efficient closed-loop waste management systems are vital to implement these technological advances and solutions.
Meeting the technical challenges necessitates close integration with a range of other technical disciplines, as well as in parallel with the broader considerations outlined above.
To ensure future researchers are able to invent effectively in this space, it is important to offer multi-disciplinary training and education of chemists in areas such as polymer science, materials engineering, process design, eco-toxicology, molecular biology, environmental sciences, life cycle assessment and data science.
We, as a scientific community, recognize the benefits of, and urgent need for, outreach, advocacy and public engagement activities to stimulate a public dialogue about the impacts and solutions of future plastics, and to examine material selection choices using a life cycle approach, and in the context of sustainable development goals.
recycling, will be the best option. In yet other scenarios, it will be important to design polymers to incorporate special chemical and physical features to make them ‘degradable on demand’ – such features will reduce energy use and improve selectivity for closed-loop recycling.
Fundamentally, there is a need to design polymers for efficient disassembly.
Such an approach has the potential to enable closed-loop recycling over multiple cycles and to reduce, or even nullify, environmental persistence if they escape from waste systems.
We recognize that building this new future for plastics necessitates a major collaboration between sciences, engineering, technology, materials design, humanities, human behaviour, policy, regulation, economics and business.
This report focuses only on the contributions and solutions that could be technically feasible, and on the research challenges specific to chemistry and the chemical sciences.
It deliberately avoids making recommendations on policies or regulations for recycling, waste management systems, use of financial incentives and taxation (the Further reading appendix p45 includes references to recent policy briefings and reports from expert working groups that address some of these important parallel issues).
In coming up with our recommendations, we emphasize that technology alone cannot provide all solutions and that parallel advances in waste management, regulation, economics and behaviour will be needed to deliver the infrastructure and ecosystems for a sustainable plastics future.
We signal that experts in chemistry are well placed to provide impartial evidence for policymaking and standardization of plastics, as well as in environmental monitoring and detection.
We propose four major research challenges and their underpinning research priorities.
These research challenges are interlinked and symbiotic, as such we do not recommend unbalanced selection or weighting of research in a particular direction.
Our philosophy is that plastics should not be deliberately released or dumped into the environment and that efficient closed-loop waste management systems are vital to implement these technological advances and solutions.
Meeting the technical challenges necessitates close integration with a range of other technical disciplines, as well as in parallel with the broader considerations outlined above.
To ensure future researchers are able to invent effectively in this space, it is important to offer multi-disciplinary training and education of chemists in areas such as polymer science, materials engineering, process design, eco-toxicology, molecular biology, environmental sciences, life cycle assessment and data science.
We, as a scientific community, recognize the benefits of, and urgent need for, outreach, advocacy and public engagement activities to stimulate a public dialogue about the impacts and solutions of future plastics, and to examine material selection choices using a life cycle approach, and in the context of sustainable development goals.
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