If plastics were a country, it would trail just China, the U.S., India, and Russia as a top greenhouse gas emitter, an environmental group said in a report released Thursday.
And in the U.S., growing use of plastics in the U.S. from consumer goods to fracking for natural gas puts it on a path to overtake coal’s contribution to climate change over the next decade, according to the report from the Vermont-based environmental group Beyond Plastics.
That reshuffling is the result of a continuing decline of coal for U.S. electricity generation and a surge in the nation’s petrochemical and chemical ...