What are sustainable plastics? A review of interrelated problems and solutions to help avoid unintended consequences

The data were collected for a research project that lead to the publication of Gonella, S., & de Gooyert, V. (2024). What are sustainable plastics? A review of interrelated problems and solutions to help avoid unintended consequences. Environmental Research Letters, 19(7), 073001–073001. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad536d.

This Data Acquisition Collection (DAC) stores data that was not possible to include in the corresponding Data Sharing Collection (DSC) (DOI: https://doi.org/10.34973/45cm-3w75) because of copyright reasons.

Plastics are affordable and versatile, but there is a growing awareness that they are unsustainable in a number of ways, including concerns about climate, health and biodiversity. A number of solutions are being explored that could enable a more sustainable plastics system. So far, most research has focused on isolated technical solutions that address only one specific sustainability challenge posed by plastics, such as end-of-life management or feedstock alternatives to fossil fuels. Some interventions might mitigate one problem but contribute to another at a different stage of the plastics life cycle. This study is based on a literature review and adopts qualitative system dynamics to analyse the unsustainability of plastics with a holistic, integrative approach. The paper provides an overview of the impacts of potential solutions on the plastics system, highlighting how some interventions could end up having unintended consequences, perhaps even overshadowing the benefits.

This DAC stores an ATLAS.ti file containing the analysed documents needed for the study. The corresponding DSC's READ ME file provides more information on the type of data included in this collection and the methodology used to extrapolate data from the literature and build qualitative system dynamics models. Specifically, the DSC includes a list of relevant literature, an explanation of how these documents were coded and the resulting qualitative system dynamics models. The ATLAS.ti file stored in this DAC could not be included in the DSC because it contains the full texts of papers that are not open access.