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Conor Carlin is a manufacturing executive and sustainability professional with over 20 years of experience in the plastic and packaging industry.
An environmentalist, Carlin brings a unique perspective to the discussion on alternatives to plastics, speaking from his experience in varied roles within the industry. Carlin contributes to the discourse as a writer, editor, and speaker on the issues, opportunities, and challenges of sustainability in the manufacturing sector.
Carlin is currently the managing director of Illig LP North America and the vice president of sustainability for the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE).
The issue of reducing plastic use is more complicated than many assume. It’s more than simply finding a list of materials that can be used instead of plastic so that the earth will no longer be riddled with unsightly mountains of trash, the oceans free of debris, and our minds unburdened every time we visit the grocery store.
Forty percent of plastic waste comes from packaging—and a list of alternatives is not going to fix that. It is just not that simple.
Instead of presenting a list of plastic alternatives, we offer some things to consider when choosing the best alternative for the item you are seeking to replace. Keep in mind that the plastics industry is extremely diverse, as Carlin explained at the very beginning of our conversation:
First of all, this is not a monolithic industry. From oil and gas companies that produce resin with complex petrochemical processes, all the way to scientists who are researching novel PHAs, (where they’re essentially growing plastic from bacteria), the plastics world ranges from fossil-based to nature-based materials.
The plastics industry operates on the principle of form and function within the economic framework of supply and demand.
“Why does it need to perform a certain function?” Carlin asked. “Because somebody has an application that’s demanding that. And a lot of times plastic has replaced another, usually heavier, material.”
Carlin explained that this goes back to the very start of the plastics industry. It began with the invention of the thermoset plastic Bakelite and its predecessor created by John Wesley Hyatt in the 1890s: “Somebody had offered a reward of $10,000 (in 1863) to figure out a way to replace ivory billiard balls because they were made from harvesting elephant tusks,” he said. “So they found that a synthetic product was able to do that...They were able to make them from a type of polymer-based material.”
And so it began.
From billiard balls to the Boeing 787, from Legos to artificial hearts, the polymer industry is vast and its applications are infinite. Carlin continued,
There are just so many different types of plastic, and it's a very malleable science in the sense that you can make it do a lot of different things by bonding or cross-linking different molecules. There’s an awful lot of science going into that because the materials need to perform certain functions.
It is also a highly complex science, based on organic chemistry. “Synthetics and chemistry: these are not easily understood,” he explained. The industry is made up of a diverse group of professionals, too. “You’ve got mold-makers; you’ve got machinery builders; you have designers. Even at the university level, [there are] researchers, designers.”
With this in mind, let’s take a look at what’s at stake in choosing alternatives to plastics.
First, an alternative to plastic is not necessarily better for the environment. More likely, it has a different impact.
The Harvard Business Review reports that ”In some cases, recycling and reuse can have even greater environmental impacts than production using virgin resources.”
Carlin points out that, similarly, manufacturing alternatives to plastics can have an equal or greater impact on the environment. Aluminum mining, for example, takes a tremendous toll on the earth, including the loss of animal habitats and biodiversity, increased carbon emissions, and erosion.
Life cycle analysis (LCA), explained by Salah M El Haggar in Environmental Solutions, has been defined by the EPA as a way to “evaluate the environmental effects associated with any given industrial activity from the initial gathering of raw materials from the earth until the point at which all residuals are returned to the earth or cradle-to-grave.”
From this standpoint, Carlin explained that plastic is often the best performing material because it's highly efficient: “It doesn't take a lot of oil to make a lot of plastic, but the consumer doesn't always understand or appreciate that.”
He went on to explain that the same item made with paper may even have a worse environmental impact, initially: ”It may degrade; it may disintegrate; and the plastic may float in the river, so people are going to see it. But even then, it can still have a lower environmental impact than the paperboard, for example.”
Even here, however, we are met with the limitations of the LCA process, Carlin continued,
But, life cycle analyses don’t necessarily take into consideration the remaining effect, or end of life (EOL) impact, that the product can have on a fish, or a seagull, or a fisherman. It does have an impact—and maybe LCA isn’t the best way to measure it.
Something else to keep in mind is whether or not the necessary infrastructure in one’s community is available to handle material at the end of its life cycle.
A material that is biodegradable or compostable, for example, is not necessarily recyclable. So if you don’t have a compost bin or community composting program, the item will need to be discarded in the trash. What’s more, even if you are able to compost the item, there is no guarantee that there will be demand for the resulting composted material—the quality of which may be questionable, including among farmers and gardeners who are the target market for most compost. Carlin added,
There are many companies that say they don't want compostable items because there's no way to do it. And even if there was an industrial composting system around where it could be done, farmers don't necessarily want that compost [because] it may not be the highest quality.
This can be confusing to consumers and it brings us back to the complexity of the issue. Carlin co-authored a book entitled Plastics and Sustainability with Michael Tolinski. The subtitle of the book, Grey is the New Green, gets to the crux of this complexity:
Grey is an area where you have to appreciate nuance and be comfortable with ambiguity. Grey is also representative of recycled plastics due to the composition of materials in the recycling stream. And so then brand owners, in particular, have to pay attention to consumer preferences: will they pay the same or more if the item or package doesn’t look pristine?
Carlin urges folks to think critically about this important issue: “Why are we making things that can't necessarily be recycled? Why are we making things where the full environmental impact, especially end of life, is not adequately measured—or more importantly—priced into the good?”
He answers his own question with this insight,
There’s demand for the product. Until the demand goes away, carbon taxes come in, or some type of behavioral element changes the way consumers think and shop, we're always going to have to be comfortable with ambiguity. The least-worst option is sometimes the only one that we can use.
Let’s return to the top four items Plastic Free July encourages us to focus on: plastic bottles, bags, beverage containers, and straws. Here are some things to do to reduce the impact of these single-use plastics:
And no matter what your disposable items are made of, reuse them if it is safe to do so.
Carlin closes with this thought: “People have to actively work a little harder to think about the environmental impact of our choices. And that requires doing more...We are agents, and people have to take responsibility.”
To learn more about Plastic Free July and the complexity of reducing plastic use, check out these resources:
Cevia Yellin is a freelance writer based in Eugene, Oregon. She studied English and French literature as an undergraduate. After serving two years as an AmeriCorps volunteer, she earned her master of arts in teaching English to speakers of other languages. Cevia’s travels and experiences working with students of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds have contributed to her interest in the forces that shape identity. She grew up on the edge of Philadelphia, where her mom still lives in her childhood home.
Ideally, much of the world’s plastic would end up recycled into new products. In practice, that’s not the case. According to one estimate, the planet’s 9.2 billion tons of plastic has resulted in 6.9 billion tons of waste, of which 6.3 billion was never recycled.
Materials engineers study, design, and manipulate the properties of materials. Their work can enable entirely new products, or help to improve existing ones. This is a deeply multidisciplinary field, bringing together principles of physics, chemistry, and engineering. And several of the research challenges it’s facing are related to the most pressing challenges in the world.
Engineers take from their surroundings and make something greater than the sum of its parts. But materials engineers go one step further, creating entirely new materials and structures from which to work.