Towards Sustainable Plastic Packaging for Evergreen Garden Care - A life cycle approach to assessing sustainability of the use of recycled high-density polyethylene and other circular strategies in non-beverage bottles

Abstract

The current plastic industry is unsustainable and associated with climate change, fossil fuel depletion and littering of plastic waste. To reduce these environmental impacts, companies and governmental bodies are increasingly adopting strategies based on the concept Circular Economy (CE). This concept aims to minimise resource input, waste and emissions through closed production systems, established via the principles reduce, reuse or recycle. The use of recycled plastic in products is impaired by concerns about the quality and sustainability of the recycled plastic resin. With the use of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA), this study aimed to assess the environmental, (private) economic, and social impacts of using recycled high-density polyethylene (rHDPE) in non-beverage bottles. Taking the European sorting performance into account, it was found that the use of rHDPE in non-beverage bottles reduces 18%, 25% and 17% of the total life cycle impacts in the category’s climate change, ecotoxicity and fossil fuel depletion. The private economic impact showed to fluctuate due to commercial reasons. Because social impact assessment databases are still under development, the social impacts of the use of rHDPE could not be determined. For packaging in specific, the application of CE has been largely limited to recycling, and less research has been performed on how circular strategies, apart from recycling, can create greater sustainability benefits. Therefore, the same LCSA was used to find environmental and economic hotspots in the life cycle of the non-beverage bottle. These results were connected to circular strategies for plastic packaging, identified through interviews with experts in the sustainable packaging sector. Through combining the life cycle hotspot analyses with the circular strategies for non-beverage bottles, several strategies with high potential sustainability benefits are proposed. Further quantification of their actual sustainability benefits is currently not possible due to insufficient circularity measurement tools. Future research on the development of these tools is suggested.