LCA Food 2012 in Saint Malo, France! - Manifestations et colloques ...

PARALLEL SESSION 3B: PACKAGING 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
Figure 4. Effect of recycling loop number (q[1;3]) and collection rate (c = 50% ; 60% ; 75%) on the environmental
impacts assessment of PET bottle waste treatment in Ile-de-France region. The unit of the y-axis is
directly expressed in the unit of the considered impact.
The effect of multiple recycling trips for PET bottles on the final result is analysed (Fig. 5). With the
France parameters, multiple recycling trips allow a reduction of abiotic depletion (resp. Acidification) of
11.1% (resp.10.9%) more than if there is only a single end-of-life. GWP decreases by only 3.4%. The effect
of multiple recycling trips is significant from the third end-of-life (Fig. 5).
Figure 5: Effect of the number of recycling loops on the final impacts.
4. Discussion
4.1. Evaluation of the recycling routes.
First, it must be said that the three scenarios are in agreement with the literature. With the data used, either
secondary or tertiary recycling is always preferable to thermal recycling. This is not surprising since
thermal recycling techniques were not created to treat PET (ADEME, 2002), and are more adapted to composite
waste flow that cannot be sorted. However, the data used for the LCI of pyrolysis and hydrocracking
could be outdated as underlined in Perugini et al., 2005. Indeed, this range of recycling techniques suffers
from a general lack of data concerning environmental impacts as highlighted in Al-Salem et al., 2009. The
hypothesis on hydrogen production is even not relevant in ecoinvent: in this database used for our impact
assessment, the hydrogen production is an average of different process, water electrolysis mainly, which is a
non-sense or a continuous production. In reality, almost all industrial sites worldwide like refineries do use
stream reforming of natural gas followed by water gas shift for hydrogen production (Chaumette, 1996;
Raimbault, 1997; Yurum, 1995). Then, impacts assessment of hydrocracking is underestimated in our model,
and those of pyrolyis are overestimated.
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0,04
0,03
0,02
0,01
0
-0,01
-0,02
-0,03
-0,04
-0,05
0,03
0,02
0,01
0
-0,01
-0,02
-0,03
-0,04
Current situation Objective PREDMA
-0,05q=1
(c=50 %)
q=3
2014 (c=60 %)
q= ∞
0,04
0,03
0,02
0,01
0
-0,01
-0,02
-0,03
-0,05
GWP/100, end-of-lives (kg CO2 eq)
GWP/100, virgin production (kg CO2 eq)
Acidification, end-of-lives (kg SO2 eq)
Acidification, virgin production (kg SO2 eq)
Abiotic depletion, end-of-lives (kg Sb eq)
Objective PREDMA
-0,04
2019 (c=75 Abiotic %) depletion, virgin production (kg Sb eq)
Current situation
(c=50 %)
Objective PREDMA
2014 (c=60 %)
Abiotic depletion, virgin production (kg Sb eq) Abiotic depletion, end-of-lives (kg Sb eq)
Acidification, virgin production (kg SO2 eq) Acidification, end-of-lives (kg SO2 eq)
GWP/100, virgin production (kg CO2 eq) GWP/100, end-of-lives (kg CO2 eq)
Objective PREDMA
2019 (c=75 %)
GWP/100, end-of-live
GWP/100, virgin prod
Acidification, end-of-
Acidification, virgin p
Abiotic depletion, en
Abiotic depletion, vir
eq)