Comparative LCA to evaluate how much recycling is environmentally favourable for food packaging

Highlights

• The influence of methodological choices to determine the environmental rank order.

• Comparative LCA investigation in terms of an end-of-life scenario.

• Environmental accounting for recycled products and further recycling.

• Effectiveness of LCA methodology to support industry design and waste management.

Abstract

Plastic represents a significant fraction of the total packaging waste, and its management is an important issue that should embrace recycling techniques for material recovery. Support decisions in the area of waste management can be made using the life cycle approach, which is commonly used to identify the environmental impacts of recycling and can give information to put environmental issues into a wide perspective.

This study evaluates how much an innovative recyclable package is environmentally preferable to an alternative package that is not recyclable considering that both are produced from recycling post-consumer PET bottles.

Two products were chosen to perform the study. The first product is a package produced with a multilayer film and whose end-of-life scenario includes land-filling and incineration. The second product is an innovative package produced employing a mono-material whose end-of-life scenario comprises recycling, land-filling and incineration.

This study explains that the utilisation of recycled materials represents the initial effort to reduce environmental burdens and shows that using recycled materials combined with specific additives that assure the recyclability of the final product leads to a better environmental performance. The package produced employing a recyclable mono-material film is more environmental advisable than the multilayer for all of the impact categories analysed. The results obtained are also tested using a sensitivity analysis and an uncertainty analysis and confirm the results of the life cycle impact assessment. The study demonstrates the pertinence of the life cycle approach to assess whether a prevention activity to reduce waste production is actually environmental sustainable and to provide decision-making support in the field of packaging waste management.

Introduction

Plastic production is a significant issue involving several industrial sectors. In 2011, the world plastic production rose to approximately 280 million tonnes, of which 58 million tonnes were produced in Europe (Plastics Europe, 2012). The market share of end-use applications shows that the largest segment is the packaging sector, representing 39.4% of the overall demand, followed by building and construction, automotive and electrical and electronic equipment (Plastics Europe, 2012), with bottle grade PET representing one of the most used packaging plastic, characterised by a worldwide consumption covering 8% of the total demand of standard plastics (Shen et al., 2010). In particular, the amount of packaging in the Italian market in 2009 was approximately 10.8 millions of tonnes, of which 2.1 millions of tonnes was composed of plastic (ISPRA, 2011). In Europe, the plastic fraction represents 18% of the total packaging waste (ISPRA, 2011), and Italy has the largest per capita consumption of packaging bottles, generating approximately 200,000 tonnes of waste per year (Nessi et al., 2012). Thus, the management of packaging waste is an important issue that should use recycling techniques for material recovery (Arena et al., 2003).

Support decisions in the area of waste management can be made using the life cycle approach (Ekvall et al., 2007), which is commonly used to identify the environmental impacts of recycling and can give information to put environmental issues into a wide perspective (Lazarevic et al., 2012).

Several life cycle assessment (LCA) studies have investigated plastic waste treatments (Perugini et al., 2005) and packaging production (De Monte et al., 2005, Humbert et al., 2009, Keoleian et al., 2004, Mourad et al., 2008), and other studies have focused on recycling plastic in the road safety sector (Simões et al., 2010) and for sports field drainage systems (Williams et al., 2010), buildings (Intini and Kuehtz, 2011) and fibre production (Shen et al., 2011).

However, in the food sector, the quantification of the preference level in the case of two packages made with waste plastic, of which one is recyclable and the alternative one is not, is seldom investigated, in spite of the interest in recycling in general (Nicholson et al., 2009, Takata et al., 2012, Varzinskas et al., 2012) and in the quantification of the environmental advantages of recycling innovations (Bocken et al., 2012, Dvarionienė et al., 2012).

This study investigates the market segment of food packaging characterised by the employment of post-consumer PET bottles. Since the application of LCA can support the decision making process in the field of waste management (Bernstad and Cour Jansen, 2012, Nessi et al., 2012, Silva et al., 2012), the aim of this study is to evaluate how much an innovative recyclable package is environmentally preferable than an alternative package that is not recyclable considering that both are produced from recycling post-consumer PET bottles.