Sustainable waste management scenarios for food packaging materials using SimaPro and WARM

Growing population and consumerism have created challenges for the management of waste resulting from packaging. In order to support sustainable packaging waste management, this study aims to compare the life cycle impacts of end-of-life scenarios for six packaging materials: aluminum, glass, polypropylene, high-density polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate, and steel. The decision-making process will take account of the three main aspects of sustainability, which are human health, environmental impact, and economic factors. What makes this work original is the investigation of packaging source reduction in single and combined scenarios for end-of-life options and also applying a novel waste reduction modeling tool. The ReCiPe2016 method is used to assess all ecosystem and human health impacts, and Water Use Life Cycle Assessment (WULCA) for water scarcity. The results indicated that, among the end-of-life packaging alternatives considered, source reduction is the most sustainable waste treatment as it mitigates climate change, leaves a low-material footprint, and consumes fewer natural resources. By contrast, landfilling and incineration have high levels of negative impact, while recycling is noticeably costly. In addition, observation of the considerable difference in the outputs of the SimaPro and WARM databases indicates that there are still extensive measures to be taken to improve LCA tools in order to present reliable information in the packaging material sector. This highlights the crucial role of sustainable waste management policies and LCA applications in the packaging industry to reduce negative life cycle impacts of such products, and that of raising public awareness about the importance of appropriate waste management.