Effects of Circularity Interventions in the European Plastic Packaging Sector.

Low levels of plastics circularity today reflect major challenges for the sector to reduce environmental impacts and a need for wider systemic change. In this work, we investigated the potential for climate and socioeconomic benefits of circular economy (CE) interventions in the plastic packaging system. By means of a mixed-unit input-output (IO) model, we performed a comparative scenario analysis for the development of demand and waste management up to 2030 within the EU-28 (EU27 + United Kingdom). We modeled the development of material flows and assessed the effects of both demand-side and end-of-life interventions. Different levels of ambition toward 2030 based on EU circular economy strategies were tested. Results showed that on reaching high levels of circularity, between 14 and 22 Mt CO2-eq/year could be reduced by 2030 (20-30% of the total sector impact in 2018) compared to business-as-usual. Demand change (e.g., by decreasing product packaging intensities) showed similar emission-saving potential as achieving the current recycling target of 55%, which emphasizes the role of demand-side actions. Most scenarios displayed moderate employment gains and potential economic losses, pertaining to both direct and indirect activity shifts in the economy. While considering model limitations, the approach is useful in indicating potential first-order effects of system changes.

Adding country resolution to EXIOBASE: impacts on land use embodied in trade.

Multiregional input-output (MRIO) databases are used to analyze the impact of resource use and environmental impacts along global supply chains. To accurately account for pressures and impacts that are highly concentrated in specific sectors or regions of the world, such as agricultural and land-use-related impacts, MRIO databases are being fueled by increasingly more detailed data. To date no MRIO database exists which couples a high level of harmonized sector detail with high country resolution. Currently available databases either aggregate minor countries into rest-of-the-world (WIOD and EXIOBASE 3), or the high country resolution is achieved at the cost of non-harmonized or lower sectoral detail (Eora, OECD-ICIO or the GTAP-MRIO). This aggregation can cause potentially significant differences in environmental and socioeconomic impact calculations. In this paper, we describe the development of an EXIOBASE 3 variant that expands regional coverage from 49 regions to 214 countries, while keeping the high and harmonized sectoral detail. We show the relevance of disaggregation for land-use accounting. Previous rest-of-the-world regions supply one-third of global land, which is used to produce a large range of different products under very different levels of productivity. We find that the aggregation of regions leads to a difference in the balance of land embodied in trade of up to 6% and a difference of land embodied in imports of up to 68% for individual countries and up to 600% for land-use-relevant sectors. Whilst the database can still be considered experimental, it is expected to increase the accuracy of estimates for environmental footprint studies of the original EXIOBASE countries, and provides the first estimates for the countries in the previous rest-of-the world.