Life cycle impact assessment of beverage packaging systems: focus on the collection of post-consumer bottles

摘要

Choice of packaging material has a significant contribution to the overall impact of beverage value chain. Collection of post-consumer packaging materials is often controlled by national or regional regulation, which have to be based on sound considerations. Therefore, stakeholders alongside the packaging value chain need for supporting information to select environmentally sound packaging and define own policy. To meet comprehensiveness, five different packaging materials were examined during their whole life cycle. Due to the potentially direct impact of collection system on the human population, and lacking information on such an analysis in recent literature, we were focussing in detail on six bottle collection systems such as kerbside bin, kerbside bag, deposit-refund, combinations with thermal compression of plastic bottles as well as an attempt made toward examining refill-bottles.