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

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. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.