Combining Eco-Design and LCA as Decision-Making Process to Prevent Plastics in Packaging Application

Alessandra Bonoli,Eleonora Foschi,Sara Zanni

doi:10.3390/su12229738

Alessandra Bonoli, Eleonora Foschi + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12229738

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Nov 22, 2020
Citations: 30	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Bologna

Abstract

The diffusion of the culture of sustainability and circular economy increasingly pushes companies to adopt green strategies and integrate circular business models in the corporate agenda. It assumes higher relevance in the packaging industry because of the growing plastics demand, the increasing awareness of consumers on single-use-products, the low recyclability performance and last but not least, the challenge of urban littering and microplastics dispersion in marine ecosystem. This paper presents the case of a small-medium enterprise that implemented a decision-making process to rethink the design of frozen food packaging in accordance with systemic and life cycle thinking. Eco-design and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) have been simultaneously used to test and validate the redesign process, thus fostering the substitution of the plastic “open and close” cap with a closing method entirely made of cardboard. Results shows how using an integrated decision-making system at the design stage have allowed to get up many benefits at multiple levels, including sustainable and safe supply chain, efficient logistic operations, better recyclability, and lower energy consumption. Moreover, even if it cannot be assessed by the existing tools, the solution provides a strong contribution to the reduction in the consumption of plastics and the prevention of marine pollution.

Highlights

Among all the materials, plastics have shown the fastest growing demand in the last decades, moving from 1.7 million metric tons (Mt) in 1950 to 359 Mt in 2018 [1,2,3,4,5]
It digs up correlation with the market trend of the last decades which sees a fourfold increase in the demand of conventional plastics from 1960 to date, accounting for 130 Mt in 2015 [11]
This paper presents the case of a small-medium enterprise that implemented an integrated decision-making process to rethink the packaging design, contributing to maximize efficiency at the EoL as well as in logistics and distribution operations

Summary

Introduction

Plastics have shown the fastest growing demand in the last decades, moving from 1.7 million metric tons (Mt) in 1950 to 359 Mt in 2018 [1,2,3,4,5]. Despite significant worldwide advances in management, treatment and recycling of plastics in the last three decades, the largest amount of post-consumer waste properly collected is incinerated and/or landfilled [5,6]. The single-use plastic packaging accounts for 50% of the marine litter [18,19] It digs up correlation with the market trend of the last decades which sees a fourfold increase in the demand of conventional plastics from 1960 to date, accounting for 130 Mt in 2015 [11]. Looking at the waste management performance, only 42% of 17.8 Mt of plastic packaging waste (PPW) collected was sent for recycling while the remaining was landfilled (18.5%) and incinerated for energy recovery (39.5%) [2]. The design largely contributes to underperform the material valorization of packaging in further cycles

Results

Discussion

Conclusion