The impact of packaging recyclable ability on environment: Case and scenario analysis of polypropylene express boxes and corrugated cartons

Abstract

With the push for sustainable design strategies, recyclable packaging is widely favored by the public in the express delivery industry due to its potential for lowering environmental burden and solving climatic challenges. The goal of this paper was to quantify and integrate the environmental footprints of polypropylene hollow board express box (PPH-EB) and establish evaluation model between the recyclable ability and environment performance (EMRE) based on life cycle assessment. This work was carried out by multiple indicators to avoid environmental problem-shifting, and corrugated cartons express box (C-EB) was taken as control objects. The results show that integrated index of PPH-EB is 94.42% lower than that of C-EB. Industrial Water Use (IWU), Primary Energy Demand (PED) and SO2 are major factors affecting results of PPH-EB, which mainly come from polypropylene particles and water resource consumption from recycle process. The most obvious advantage of PPH-EB compared with C-EB is the nearly 1700 times difference in normalized COD index caused by direct emission of paper preparation process. Scenario analysis showed that integrated index of PPH-EB was lower than that of traditional corrugated cartons after more than twice of use, but if the recycling times of PPH-EB continued to increase, the effect on reducing environmental burden was no longer significant. Therefore, although the recyclable times plays a role in decreasing the environmental impact, it is not a permanent strategy. In the design stage of the recyclable express box, the recyclable ability should be reasonably designed through EMRE, so as to minimize the environmental burden.