Environmental potential of recycling of plastic wastes in Australia based on life cycle assessment

Abstract

Plastic consumption in Australia is steadily increasing and is estimated to reach 8.8 million tonnes by 2050. Alongside plastic consumption, plastic waste management (PWM) faces rising environmental challenges in Australia as most of them are currently landfilled. Therefore, the Australian government has published a policy to transition to a circular economy as well as a new strategy for PWM with higher recycling rates. To understand the implications of the policy changes and the environmental impacts of End-of-Life (EoL) options, life cycle thinking is necessary. This study evaluates and compares the environmental impacts of the Australian PWM for 2018–2019 to the policy envisaged for 2030 that includes higher recycling rates and waste export bans from a life cycle assessment (LCA) perspective. From the results, it can be seen that the current PWM is majorly linear (take, make, use and dispose) as most of the wastes gets landfilled and exported to other countries but the future PWM strategy for 2030 results in higher resource recovery and significant reduction in the environmental impacts. There is a reduction in Global Warming Potential (GWP) by a factor of almost 10, if the recycling rates increase from 13 to 70%. The state and the federal governments along with other stakeholders need to implement stringent measures to recover plastic wastes if a transition to a circular economy is to happen by 2030.