The chemical industry in Pennsylvania is a significant economic driver supporting high-wage jobs, generating tax revenue for communities, and advancing sustainable solutions to protect our environment. It also plays a crucial role in creating the essential building blocks for manufacturing everyday products that are critical for everyday life. The chemical industry creates products necessary to make medical equipment, renewable energy, food packaging, electronics, and more, with global demand expected to increase.
Modern society relies on chemical and plastics production and demand is expected to continue to increase.
Just as when consumers turn on the light switch and don't see what goes into producing electricity, the same is true for the consumer products we all use. From energy production to infrastructure such as pipelines, chemical and polymer production, product manufacturing, packaging and distribution to consumers — our industry touches nearly every aspect of the consumer product journey.
Understanding the full life cycle of products also helps us identify areas where we can make significant inroads to enhance sustainability and extend the product life cycle through scalable technologies such as advanced recycling.
While companies continue to explore plastic alternatives, including bio-based materials and plastic use reductions, global plastics projections are expected to increase without significant investment in scalable new technologies to reduce, recycle and reuse.
An October report from OECD projects that global plastics production will grow by 70% by 2040. That's an increase from 234 million tons in 2000 to 736 million tons. Plastics use reductions, replacements and alternatives will only get us so far.
Demand is growing because advances in plastics manufacturing have led to innovative breakthroughs for decades in medical devices, energy efficiency, technology, packaging, lightweighting airplanes and vehicles, battery manufacturing, and even space exploration. However, our industry recognizes the growing amount of plastic waste is not sustainable for our environment.
The University of Leeds used AI to assist in modeling waste management and found that 52 tons of plastic waste entered the environment in 2020 — 57% through open fires lit in homes, streets or dumpsters. Growing emissions issue from landfills, incineration and the environment is also creating challenges.
