Katie Malarkey is a PhD student in Sustainability at the Rochester Institute of Technology, researching U.S. agricultural plastic usage. With 5 years and counting on this topic, she’s ready to share what she’s found.
Funded by RECIPES and with the help of her advisor and co-director of the RECIPES Network, Callie Babbitt, Katie’s recently published research “The Plastic Footprint of U.S. Agriculture” models plastic use across every stage of agriculture: Preparation, planting, growth, harvesting, and storage.
Plastics boost productivity by helping crops grow faster, longer, and with less manual labor. But they have large environmental and health impacts.
Over the course of her research, she collected information from “a plethora of resources” like other universities, manufacturers, and farmers themselves. In the last 3 years, she pulled data from 26 plastic products and more than 220 crops to understand the annual plastic usage per application.
With all the data and analysis (and many days behind a computer), she found that we consume about 1.56 million tonnes of plastic from agriculture each year in the U.S.— that’s 2.7% of all U.S. plastic demand.
Plastic agricultural products are typically single use or hard to recycle because of contamination from dirt. Katie’s research concludes that “the best opportunities to reduce agricultural plastic use are to focus on the ‘big three’… pots and nursery trays, silage wraps and tarps, and plastic mulch films.”
By reusing, substituting materials, and extending product lifespans across these categories, we could reduce plastic demand by up to 60% — highlighting that circular economic solutions can have a huge impact in this field (no pun intended!).
