Carbon Footprint Assessment of Construction Waste Packaging Using the Package-to-Product Indicator

The environmental impacts of buildings are based on the construction products, which together with their packaging can be assessed as one product system. To reduce the environmental impacts of buildings, the products and their packaging need to be optimised and analysed using environmental assessment. The purpose of this study is to assess the packaging related to the product according to the Life Cycle Assessment method. The environmental assessment was performed using the Product Environmental Footprint methodology, version 3.0. To compare the primary, secondary, and tertiary packaging, the results of the climate change indicator were used as a base to calculate the Package-to-Product (PtP) indicator. Among the considered scenarios to handle the waste packaging (landfilling scenario, material recovery scenario, energy recovery scenario, and the mixed scenario), the material recovery scenario is the most preferable and, for most of the packaging materials, the scenario with the lowest impact. Following the PtP result, the secondary packaging in the roof tile system has a significant share of the impact of the whole system (16% for the energy recovery scenario). Moreover, the results confirm the PtP indicator as the appropriate indicator to analyse the environmental impacts of construction products.