Choice of Life Cycle Assessment Software Can Impact Packaging System Decisions

摘要

A number of software packages are available that are designed to facilitate making environmental comparisons between different packaging options, to facilitate green' packaging design and assessment of the environmental aspect of sustainability. Some of these (e.g. SimaPro and GaBi) are full-fledged ISO 14040/14044-compliant programs for life cycle assessment (LCA). Others are more limited, but are designed to be much simpler to use (e.g. COMPASS and Package Modeling). A systematic comparison of the evaluation of several packaging systems using COMPASS, SimaPro, GaBi, and Package Modeling found significant discrepancies in LCA results from different software systems. Availability of common impact categories among the software limited comparisons to four categories: greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuelon-renewable energy, eutrophication, and water depletion. Given a common set of basic packaging containers as input, results from the LCA software systems being studied disagreed on which container had the greatest environmental impact, and in some cases results were more than an order of magnitude different between software. Discrepancies in results occurred in all four impact categories, and all four software systems disagreed with each other at multiple points in the comparisons. If there is to be increasing use of LCA analysis in guiding packaging design, this issue must be fully understood and resolved. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.