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. 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. The READ ME file explains in more detail what kind of data is included in this collection and the methodology used to extrapolate data from the literature and build qualitative system dynamics models. More specifically, this collection includes: a list of relevant literature; an explanation of how these documents were coded; the qualitative system dynamics models obtained.