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On top of this, there is the embedded fossil carbon inside chemical products, some of which is released to the atmosphere at the end of life of the products. [...] To estimate the relative breakdown of these different end of life routes in the UK, we refer to tables 11 and 13 of the ‘UK statistics on waste’, available from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). [...] Therefore 1.73t of mixed plastic waste would be needed to produce one tonne of ethylene and, at the scale of the UK’s production of ethylene, that means 4.67Mt of mixed plastic waste would be required each year. [...] In Defra’s ‘Area of crops grown for bioenergy in England and the UK: 2008-2020’, annex A contains the conversion factors in the second column of the table below. [...] The carbon content of ethylene by mass is 85.7 per cent (two carbon atoms, four hydrogen atoms), and, therefore, the equivalent amount of embedded CO2 is 3.15t per tonne of ethylene, since one tonne of carbon generates 3.67t of CO2.