Abstract
In the passing of just one century since the discovery of plastic materials, the world has reached a point of full-scale dissemination of plastics in just about every aspect of our lives within just the last half century. As a result, we are now facing serious environmental threats, including the wide spread of marine microplastics and emission of greenhouse gases. This is affecting every corner of the planet. International organizations have begun to re-examine the use of plastics and challenges connected to their material cycles. Under such circumstances, we must not only take into account the conventional 3Rs concept of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, but must also focus on the idea of “3R Plus,” which includes the concepts Renewable and Recovery. It is desirable to use exhaustible resources as little as possible while shifting toward renewable resources. “Recovery” includes both energy recovery and recovery of plastics from the environment. Here we introduce Kyoto City’s system for placing a charge on single-use plastic bags and show the positive effects: proving we can expect to halve the amount of single-use plastic bags by this effort alone. The paper also introduces approaches for introducing bio-plastic materials, along with a life cycle analysis for bio-plastics, proving there is a possibility for reducing GHG emissions on this front as well.
