Plastic industry is heating up Earth's atmosphere TWICE as fast as the global airline industry, study claims

The airline industry is notorious for dumping thousands of tons of greenhouse gases into Earth's  atmosphere each year, but a new study finds the plastics industry is multiple times worse.

Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory uncovered the plastic industry releases equivalent of 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year - compared to the airline industry's 1 billion tons. 

Most of the news about plastic concerns garbage, which ends up in the oceans and even the human body, but plastic creates astounding amounts of atmosphere-warming gases long before it's ever even used, the scientists found

Global plastic production - which runs on oil and uses petroleum byproducts to make the synthetic material - pollutes the atmosphere as much as 600 coal powerplants - this is three times as many as exist across the entire US.

Plastic production, which uses petroleum products, is a leading source of greenhouse gases generated in the US. 

Plastic creates pollution at both the beginning of its life, when the factories that make it produce greenhouse gases, and at the end of its life, when it litters the natural world and leeches into humans' bodies.

READ MORE: World's plastic pollution threat is a 'planetary emergency,' according to the Environmental Investigation Agency

A global treaty will be needed to fight the crisis, the damning report warned.

'The production of most plastic products is projected to increase exponentially, stressing planetary boundaries through a triple crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution,' researchers wrote in the government-funded study.

'Plastics' impact on the climate will only grow in the coming decades, as production is expected by industry analysts to at least double by 2050.'

If that happens, they predict the resulting global heating will cost $38 trillion. 

'Climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly-developed ones such as Germany, France and the United States,' said lead author Leonie Wenz of the Potsdam Institute. 

Yet most of the public and scientific focus on plastics is on what happens to them once they become trash.

This ignores a huge part of the picture, though, according to the scientists behind the report.

'The rapidly increasing production of plastics and the continued reliance on fossil fuels for production, have contributed to numerous environmental problems and health harms,' researchers wrote. 

'As a result, plastic pollution has become an increasing threat to natural ecosystems, human health and climate.'

However, they added, there is not enough information out there on how plastic manufacturing contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and the overall 'carbon budget' that must be met to keep global warming below a 2.7 or 3.6  degrees Fahrenheit global rise in temperature.

The carbon budget is the amount of carbon that can be emitted and still fall below those numbers. 

Their project aimed to fill in those gaps.

It focused on the fossil fuels used at every step of the plastic production process, including the energy used for manufacturing and the petroleum products that make up the plastic itself.

The study examined the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from the nine different fossil fuel-based plastics that make up 80 percent of plastic production.

The sample included polyethylene (PE), used in plastic bags, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) found in pipes and a plastic used in car parts - among others.

Nine types of plastic make up about 80 percent of the world's plastic, but each type of plastic has different recycling and manufacturing requirements, making it difficult to make blanket recommendations.

Global plastic production emits more greenhouse gases than 600 coal-fired powerplants - triple the number of coal plants in the entire US.

What they found was that manufacturing these nine plastics accounted for about 2.24 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year (GtCO2e), a measure of the global warming potential of all the different greenhouse gases produced, including methane and nitrous oxide.

2.24 gigatonnes is about 2.5 billion tons. 

These emissions made up 5.3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, excluding land use changes and forestry. 

And even under a modest rate of plastic industry growth, these numbers would skyrocket in the coming years, the scientists found.

'Under a conservative growth scenario' of 2.5 percent a year, greenhouse gas emissions from plastic manufacturing 'would more than double to 4.75 GtCO2e by 2050, accounting for 21-26% of the remaining global carbon budget to keep average temperature increases below 1.5°C PUT FAHRENHEIT IN ( ), researchers wrote.

This research adds a crucial piece of the plastics picture left out by much of the reporting on plastic waste.

And indeed, plastic waste is wreaking havoc on the environment and on human health. 

Millions of tons of plastic are floating in the world's oceans, scientists estimate.

And this trash breaks down into microscopic fragments called microplastics that have been shown to accumulate in the brain, kidneys, liver, and even placenta, reducing fertility and increasing people's risk of inflammation-linked conditions like inflammatory bowel disease, cancer, and Alzheimer's.

Airline pollution is particularly concerning because it is released so high up in the atmosphere, but plastic production creates 2.5 times as much CO2-equivalent emissions.

Coal powerplants, too, are notoriously dirty and bad for the climate, but they produce just a fraction of the greenhouse gases that plastic production does.

Microplastics are so ubiquitous that they've even been found in the clouds. 

But the harm begins long before plastic products have the opportunity to become waste.

It begins at the beginning, when the plastic is made, and it comes in the form of planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions, which the new study demonstrates are significant. 

The cost of all this pollution is not just paid in global warming, but also in the actual financial costs of dealing with a heating planet.

And a study published this week in the journal Nature showed just how high that cost is.

A team of German scientists found that continuing to use fossil fuels costs six times more than it would take the world to transition to renewable energy.

These costs include not just the costs of attempting to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but the impact of climate change on labor, agriculture, and flood damage.

Of course, there are some situations where plastics are necessary, especially in medicine: syringes, IV tubes, bandage packaging - the list goes on and on. 

The researchers behind the new study are not proposing a ban all plastics, but suggest scaling the industry back. 

Eliminating non-essential use of plastics without alternatives, such as microbeads in cleaning products, could lead to a reduction in global [greenhouse gas] emissions from primary plastic production due to a reduction in production volume,' they wrote.

'However, the [greenhouse gas] impact could be different if primary plastic production is reduced by using alternative materials or recycling.'