Life cycle environmental impacts of consumer packaging products in Japan

Abstract

Several Japanese companies and the government are recently promoting a plastic ban and imposing a tax levy to curb litter and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This has led to a rapid rise of nonplastic packaging alternatives. While plastics and litter are pressing concerns, it is paramount to examine environmental risks of other alternatives before wide application and legislative action, to not further the risk of environmental damage. This study aims to quantify and compare plastic products such as polyethylene-terephthalate (PET) bottles and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) bags with widely available alternatives in Japan like glass bottles, aluminum bottles, paper bags, and textile bags, to find a product with the least environmental impact. A life cycle assessment is conducted from a cradle-to-grave environmental impact approach that includes raw material extraction, production, transportation, end-of-life treatment, and disposal. Sixteen impact categories including climate change, acidification, aquatictoxicity, so forth, and weighing is assessed using the MiLCA software. The functional unit is one piece of each packaging product, and impacts of product-filling, storage, recycling, and reuse are excluded for a consistent comparison. HDPE bags performed better than paper and textile bags in 15 of the 16 analyzed impact categories. Similarly, PET bottles outperformed aluminum and glass bottles in 12 out of the 16 impact categories analyzed. Weighted results also highlight the heightened negative environmental impacts of replacing plastic packaging with widely available alternatives.

Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of Two Types of Flexible Plastic Packaging under a Sustainable Circular Economy Approach

“…Schmidt and Laner [15] revealed the environmental performance of the management of plastic waste in Germany by an LCA study, examined many impact categories, and presented the factors that Germany should focus on in the long term with a detailed study. Another important study was conducted by Pragati and Maeda [16] for Japan. Environmental impacts of consumer packaging products have been revealed through LCA.…”

Prospects for Recyclable Multilayer Packaging: A Case Study

“…Despite the broad scientific research effort in developing biobased materials for food packaging, their application is not yet viable due to both the lack of proper industrial recycling capacities [17,18] and because of a shortfall in performance. Using polymer substitutes, such as paper, aluminum, or glass, may quickly lead to higher transportation and manufacturing costs, not benefiting the carbon footprint or sustainability life cycle analysis [19][20][21].…”