Straw wars – a consequential saga: the life cycle climate change consequences of replacing plastic with paper

Simon Hoge and Miguel Brandão

Chapter 31 in Handbook of the Circular Economy, 2020, pp 410-424 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The current concern over single-use plastic has led to the formulation of policies aiming at limiting plastic use. We estimated the climate change impacts of replacing plastic drinking straws with those made from paper. We found that Kraft paper drinking straws could potentially lead to a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions when compared to conventional Polypropylene. Thirty three per cent of the total contribution of Kraft paper is related to indirect land use change as a result of the demand for land to grow the paper feedstock. Direct emissions of paper straws are also higher than their plastic counterpart. Our results suggest that replacing plastic straws with their paper counterpart may be an effective solution to address marine pollution, but may increase climate change impacts, thus warranting thoughtful consideration.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Environment; Geography; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781788972710/9781788972710.00041.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:18519_31

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().