Sustainable plastic packaging

Plastic packaging can be produced with sustainable plastics through the use of the definitions presented above. Plastic packaging products account for approximately 30% of the plastics sold in the United States, and approximately 27% of the plastic products sold in Europe (Beswick and Dunn 2002). Sustainable plastic packaging can be made from recycled plastics or biobased plastics, like PHA, PLA, starch, and others. Life cycle assessments can be used to compare environmental impacts of using recycled or biobased plastic materials for plastic packaging products. 

Sustainable plastic packaging can include plastics made from recycled plastics and biobased plastics. Biobased plastics for packaging can be made from PLA, PHA, and thermoplastic starch. Recycled plastics for packaging can be made from PET, PS, PP, HDPE, or PLA. Currently, recycled plastics are predominately PET and HDPE. The following sections include LCA studies of PET, PLA, PP, HPPS, and HDPE. 

The goal of the LCA is to determine the LCAs of plastic packaging with biobased, petroleum-based, and recycled plastics. Sustainable plastic packaging can be compared with virgin PET, PP, and PS for packaging plastic materials. 

2 LCA Step 2. Creation of the Life Cycle Inventories for Plastic Packaging 

Life cycle inventory (LCI) methodology breaks down the plastics manufacturing of biobased plastics, recycled plastics, and virgin plastics. The manufacturing process for PLA includes the following  

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As defined in Chapter 1, sustainable plastic products can be created with lower carbon footprint, lower waste, and lower pollution than conventional plastic products. Plastic products can be used for sustainable plastic packaging, bottles, and bags. Life cycle assessments (LCAs) can be used to compare the different options for plastic packaging, bottles, and bags. Those three plastic products account for approximately 40% of all of the plastic products sold, but approximately 10% of the plastic products in a typical landfill and approximately 30% of the plastic waste in the oceans. 

In 2003, Ilip introduced a NatureWorks PLA rigid container for fresh produce applications as an environmentally sustainable alternative to traditional plastic packaging. 

Food packaging and food service plastics have the shortest service lifetime of any plastic product manufactured and end up in the waste or litter at a much faster rate compared to other plastic products. Packaging therefore has implications on sustainable development for several reasons. First, being a high-volume-use sector, plastic packaging produces waste that can end up in urban litter and even as ocean debris (see Chapter 10). There is no efficient mechanisms to collect, recycle, or dispose of most plastic litter. Secondly, some of the primary plastic packaging is used in contact with food or beverages, and the possibility of additives (and residual monomer)... 

All these families arise from petrochemical resources and this raises the question of the security of supply of fossil reserves to ensure the sustainability of plastic packaging. World reserves of oil are estimated at roughly 1 — 1.5 X 10 tonnes, more or less 40 years of consumption at the present rate. However, these values do not allow an easy correlation to the rate of petrochemical resource extraction and depletion. Many schools of thought have... 

Growing consumer interest in sustainable plastic solutions (e.g., eco-friendly packaging) and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. 

Transmaterialisation is a more fundamental approach to the problem, which, with the goal of sustainable development, would ultimately switch consumption to only those resources that are renewable on a short timescale. Clearly petroleum, which takes millions of years to form, is not an example of such a sustainable resource. For the method to be truly effective, the wastes associated with the conversion and consumption of such resources must also be environmentally compatible on a short timescale. The use of polyolefin plastic bags for example, which have lifetimes in the environment of hundreds of years, is not consistent with this (no matter how they compare with alternative packaging materials at other stages in their lifecycle), nor is the use of some hazardous process auxiliaries which are likely to cause rapid environmental damage on release into the environment. 

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