A Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Electronic Retail of Household Products

Abstract

Electronic shopping is getting more and more popular, and it is not only clothes and electronics that people buy online, but groceries and household products too. Based on real-life data from a major cosmetics and household products retailer in the Czech Republic, this study set to assess the life cycle environmental impact of parcel delivery. Two archetype parcels containing common household and hygiene products were designed and packed in two distinct ways, and the environmental impact was quantified using the Life Cycle Assessment method. It showed that it is environmentally beneficial to use plastic cushions to insulate the goods instead of paper. However, the most important process contributing to the environmental burden was found to be electricity consumption in the logistics center. Hence, the importance of energy efficiency and efficient space utilization was demonstrated on alternative scenarios. Since the cardboard box the goods are packed in turned out to be another important contributor, an alternative scenario was designed where a reusable plastic crate was used instead. Even though the scenario was based on several simplistic assumptions, it showed a clear potential to be environmentally beneficial. In the study, contribution of other processes was scrutinized, as well as sensitivity to variation of parameters, e.g. transportation distances. The main scientific contribution of this work is to show the importance of logistics and distribution of products to end customers in the rapidly developing field of electronic retail of household products.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Package Deliveries: Sustainable Decision-Making for the Academic Institutions

“…In an LCA, we have the life cycle inventory (LCI) phase where we consider the environmental inputs and outputs of the concerned product or service provided with the primary objective to quantify them (Matustik & Koci, 2020;Tampubolon et al, 2021). When we utilize LCA tools and software, we can often use LCI databases that already have tested and verified data of standard materials and products as discussed in Section 3.1.…”

“…We will use ReCiPe 2016 (H) LCIA Methodology for the environmental characterization of the emission flows. The reason for selecting ReCiPe 2016 (H) LCIA Methodology is due to its ability to convert emissions to environmental impacts in both midpoint and endpoint levels (Matustik & Koci, 2020). The ReCiPe 2016 (H) method is a commonly used LCIA methodology that covers a wide range of environmental impact categories and has been updated to reflect the latest scientific understanding of environmental impacts.…”

Priority Products for Sustainability Information and Recommendation Software: Insights in the Context of the EU’s Action Plan Circular Economy

“…Various contributions analyse sustainability in specific industries or give guidance on particular sectors. See, for example, [16] on electronic products, [17,18] on textiles, [19,20] on cars, and [21] on textiles and vehicles, supplemented by a rich source base of contributions on electric vehicles' batteries: see, e.g., [22].…”

Influence of the Material Composition SMD Diodes on Their Environmental Impact

“…Furthermore, diverse authors have written articles about electronic components such as diodes [56], printed circuit boards [57,58], even several studies including LCA on electronic devices as tablets [59], smartphones [60,61] or virtual reality devices [62], photovoltaic cells [63], lighting systems [64], or other electronic products [65,66] and electronic components [67,68].…”