Alternatives to Polybags

Plastic pollution has become one of the most visible and pressing challenges in today’s economy – with brands firmly in the sights of customers and regulators looking for solutions.

Messages like reduce, reuse, recycle and anti-littering campaigns, have done much to focus attention on individual action. Over time however, it has become clear that focussing attention on what happens at the end of packaging life is far too late to solve the pollution problem and also misses the challenge of plastics’ – an oil-based product – impact on climate change.

The real pollution and climate challenges with plastic start upstream, long before they reach the customers, and that is where we need to focus attention on solutions. That is why, over the past months, we have been working with Fashion Pact members and consultancy partners to address the industry-wide challenge of plastic polybags.

These simple pieces of packaging are ubiquitous in the fashion industry, wrapping garments to protect them as they make their way along the supply chain – often being discarded and replaced at different stages. Despite their vital role in keeping materials, clothing and accessories safe they are often thrown away after use or fed into leaky local recycling systems around the world, subsequently finding their way into rivers, oceans, and other environments.

As part of our mission to create a nature-positive and net-zero fashion industry, the Fashion Pact is developing circular economy efforts to address these issues. With our members, we set out to investigate the impacts of replacing plastic polybags with paper options (recycled and non-recycled, kraft and translucent).

While any process of this kind will have limitations and cannot fully replicate the scale of market conditions, by carefully shaping the research to examine key regions and actions, we have been able to reach several important conclusions.

Impact on Carbon Emissions

End-of-life markets (countries of disposal) have a large influence on the packaging footprint and plastic leakage into the environment.

China had the highest rate of LDPE packaging recycling (33%), meanwhile the US landfills 78% of LDPE and only 3% is recycled.

When it came to the paper-based solutions, European countries were found to be recycling almost double the US (30% vs 17%) while China recycles none. Instead, 70% of its waste paper and board goes to landfill, and the rest is incinerated for energy recovery.

Generally speaking, European countries tend to have higher waste-to-energy ratios compared to the USA or China.

Raw materials production and conversion is the most impactful life-cycle stage of the polybag both in terms of climate change and land use change.

The production and conversion of raw materials and their conversion into polybags, accounts for a major part of overall carbon footprint.

Having high amounts of recycled content in the bag material and low energy consumption
are the two key factors to consider to minimise the carbon footprint of the bag production.

Plastic Pollution

There is a lot of variation in the leakage intensity even between European countries, the European average is 13% for this type of plastic packaging (from 2% in Denmark to 57% in Romania). Plastic leakage in Italy is almost 50% higher than the European average.

Key Findings

• Ethylene production represents 50% of the plastic bag overall carbon footprint. It is the largest contributor to the carbon footprint.
• For the translucent paper packaging, the energy associated with the production of paper from wood pulp is the largest contributor to the carbon footprint, representing up to 70% of the total carbon footprint (depending on countries of disposal). It’s more balanced between materials and energy for the kraft paper bag.
• Wood pulp contributes to more than 97% of the land use impact for the paper polybags. Part of this can be retrieved if the packaging is recycled at end-of-life.
• While plastic is the most carbon intensive packaging of the assessment, the translucent paper bag is more impactful overall in countries with a high share of waste going to landfill (for instance China, with 70%). Indeed, during the decomposition of the paper bag in such environments, a lot of methane is emitted to air and not captured.
• Plastic leakage is associated with all countries of disposal for the plastic polybag. The leakage intensity varies from 3.5% to 21.7%.
• About 3x more plastic polybags end-up in the environment in China than the US.
• Origin and essence of wood have a very high influence on land use. The European average for bleached kraft wood pulp and kraft paper (made of pine) were used for the assessment but ideally all primary data should be available to get a better model.
• Translucent paper production is very energy intensive thus carbon-intensive, it requires 4 times more electricity and heat than virgin kraft paper production. It’s very probable that the supplier batch production was too small and not to the scale of a larger industrial production.

Recommendations

For all markets

• Include as much recycled content (plastic, paper) as possible
• Use renewable energy and avoid fossil-based feedstocks
• Avoid single-use packaging
• Use FSC and Spruce wood pulp instead of Pine wood pulp for paper.

For Europe and the US

• Paper-based packaging is the best option compared to plastic regarding both climate change and land use impacts.
• 100% recycled plastic packaging is the second best option and a potential solution in low plastic leaking countries if it’s not possible to use paper.

For China

• Use paper and engage with EPRs schemes to develop collection and recycling of paper-based packaging in the country.
• Use plastic and engage with EPRs schemes to reduce plastic leakage in the country.