Environmental implications and market analysis of soft drink packaging systems in Mexico. A waste management approach

This paper presents a waste management analysis of the packaging systems for soft drinks in Mexico, with emphasis on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) containers. The work presented is part of a project sponsored by a consortium of Mexican industries that participate in the PET market, such as resin producers, bottle manufacturers, soft drinks producers, distributors, and plastic recyclers. Two different life cycle assessments (LCAs) were elaborated to provide insight on waste management scenarios and waste products comparisons, respectively. The first LCA was a description of the actual PET market and PET waste treatment in Mexico. On the second LCA, three systems were analyzed: PET bottles, aluminum cans, and glass bottles. Currently, these results are used in Mexico as a basis for environmental policy.

PET bottle’s participation in the market has increased substantially in the previous years, and it is forecasted that this increase rate will continue. Due to this factor, there are some concerns about the environmental implications of PET usage. In order to analyze the waste management of PET bottles in Mexico, an LCA and a series of sensitivity analyses were conducted in order to understand: (1) the effect of different collecting distances in environmental impacts, (2) the effect of different recycling rates in environmental impacts, (3) the effect of different collecting rates in environmental impacts, and (4) the effect of different collecting rates with its associated distances in the environmental impacts.

An optimal degree of PET waste collection was identified as a result of considering different collecting rates and distances. At this point, minimum environmental impact occurs. This is due to the excessive increase in environmental resources that is needed in order to collect higher amounts of waste by traveling longer distances. These results may pose significant implications on current environmental legislation and waste management policies in Mexico and can well be applied into other Latin-American and developing countries. Other results show that production processes represent the highest environmental impacts along the supply chain, which are considerably higher than those impacts related to transport and collecting activities. Because of this, the environmental advantages of waste management in Mexico can be significant as long as the material that is collected is also recycled. Results to be presented include specific impact data on electricity generation and transport in Mexico.

This work can be used as a basis for decision making in environmental policy. Moreover, it provides technical grounds to demonstrate that under certain conditions, traditional waste management systems may cause higher environmental impacts than the environmental benefit/credit that they are supposed to deliver.