Strategic choice of the management of disposable meal boxes from the perspectives of life cycle impact assessment: Recycling fossil plastics or promoting biogenic plastics

Abstract

Proper strategy for managing disposable meal boxes is crucial to achieve low-carbon waste systems. A life cycle assessment is conducted on the systems with incineration, landfilling and recycling, to compare the environmental impacts of managing waste polypropylene (PP) meal boxes and the alternative, polylactic acid (PLA) ones. Recycling PP meal boxes provides 1.81 tCO2-eq savings per ton of recycled waste to the climate change impact, but incinerating the residues contributes 1.96 tCO2-eq loads per ton of incinerated waste. In contrast, incinerating and landfilling one ton of waste PLA meal boxes contribute 0.45 tCO2-eq savings and 1.88 tCO2-eq loads, respectively. Using PLA meal boxes to replace PP ones is more suitable for the regions with high incineration ratio and low recycling ratio. With cleaner energy, recycling PP meal boxes becomes more valuable than energy recovery. This study calls for a conditional reconsideration of the strategical trade-off from long-term and environmental perspectives.