Table 3.
Comparing some environmental impacts of commodity polymer production and current ability for recycling from post-consumer sources.
| LCI data cradle-to-gate (EU data) |
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| polymer | energy (GJ tonne−1) | water (kL tonne−1) | CO2-ea (t tonne−1) | Usageb (ktonne) | closed-loop recycling | effectiveness in current recycling processes |
| PET | 82.7 | 66 | 3.4 | 2160 | yes | high with clear PET from bottles coloured PET is mostly used for fibre additional issues with CPET trays, PET-G |
| HDPE | 76.7 | 32 | 1.9 | 5468 | some | high with natural HDPE bottles, but more complex for opaque bottles and trays because of wide variety of grades and colour and mixtures with LDPE and PP |
| PVC | 56.7 | 46 | 1.9 | 6509 | some | poor recovery because of cross-contamination with PET PVC packages and labels present a major issue with PET bottle and mixed plastics recycling |
| LDPE | 78.1 | 47 | 2.1 | 7899 | some | poor recovery rates, mostly as mixed polyolefins that can have sufficient properties for some applications. Most post-consumer flexible packaging not recovered |
| PP | 73.4 | 43 | 2.0 | 7779 | in theory | not widely recycled yet from post-consumer, but has potential. Needs action on sorting and separation, plus development of further outlets for recycled PP |
| PS | 87.4 | 140 | 3.4 | 2600 | in theory | poor, extremely difficult to cost-effectively separate from co-mingled collection, separate collection of industrial packaging and EPS foam can be effective |
| recycled plastics | 8–55 | typical 3.5c | typical 1.4 | 3130 | some | considerable variability in energy, water and emissions from recycling processes as it is a developing industry and affected by efficiency of collection, process type and product mix, etc. |
a CO2-e is GWP calculated as 100-yr equivalent to CO2 emissions. All LCI data are specific to European industry and covers the production process of the raw materials, intermediates and final polymer, but not further processing and logistics (PlasticsEurope 2008a).
b Usage was for the aggregate EU-15 countries across all market sectors in 2002.
c Typical values for water and greenhouse gas emissions from recycling activities to produce 1 kg PET from waste plastic (Perugini et al. 2005).