The demand for bioplastics is growing owing to the innovations in production technology, applications, and increased demand for environmentally sustainable products. Globally, bioplastics make up less than 1% of the 365 million tons produced annually, but this number is expected to increase substantially in the next decade (European Bioplastics, 2022). There is an increased focus on shifting to products made from bio-based resources since they are not dependent on fossil resources, but rather on biomass resources which can be replenished in a much smaller period and are also known to have lower harmful environmental effects. Yet, few studies report the effect of introducing such industries in the economy at a large scale, and a majority of these studies are focused on implementing bioeconomy in the European region. In the United States, the bio-based plastic production is at a much lower scale, accounting for less than 0.1% of the total annual plastic production. However, over the last few years, the bio-based industry has demonstrated to be a substantial generator of economic activity (Daystar et al., 2021), and we can expect a significant increase in the production of bioplastics as well. In this study, we evaluate the impact of substituting 10% of conventional plastics with bio-based plastics. In order to do this, we introduce a new sector in the existing economic tables and simulate its effect on the economic output and employment with a Multi-regional Input Output (MRIO) model of the United States built with the Industrial Ecology Laboratory (IE Lab)(Malik et al., 2014) (Faturay et al., 2020). The MRIO data enables detailed tracking of resource flows between the economic sectors of different regions of a country. We combine this with the regional Greenhouse Gas (GHG) database to study the supply chain emissions that are likely to occur from this substitution. These results will provide a greater understanding on whether shifting to the production of bioplastics at a large scale would be favorable, and which regions will be the most impacted by this implementation.
References:
Daystar, J., Handfield, R., Golden, J. S., McConnell, E., & Pascual-Gonzalez, J. (2021). An Economic Impact Analysis of the US Biobased Products Industry. Industrial Biotechnology, 17(5), 259–270. https://doi.org/10.1089/ind.2021.29263.jda
Faturay, F., Vunnava, V. S. G., Lenzen, M., & Singh, S. (2020). Using a new USA multi-region input output (MRIO) model for assessing economic and energy impacts of wind energy expansion in USA. Applied Energy, 261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2019.114141
Malik, A., Lenzen, M., Ely, Rô. N., & Dietzenbacher, E. (2014). Simulating the impact of new industries on the economy: The case of biorefining in Australia. Ecological Economics, 107, 84–93.
Market. European Bioplastics e.V. (2022, January 5). from https://www.european-bioplastics.org/market/
