2025 AIChE Annual Meeting

(101h) Circularity Indicators for the Evaluation of Reusable Packaging

Authors

Rachael Rothman - Presenter, University of Sheffield
Stuart Walker, University of Sheffield
Over 140 million tonnes of plastic packaging is produced annually worldwide, the majority of which currently goes to waste. The EU Horizon funded Buddie-pack project aims to develop and demonstrate sustainable strategies for reusable plastic packaging. Strands of work on packaging design, behaviour change and sustainability assessment are combined in 5 large case demonstrations. This presentation will present findings, successes and challenges from the comprehensive sustainability assessment used to inform the design of a circular economy.

Environmental Life Cycle Assessment is concurrently informed by and informs the development of large-scale demonstrations. Assessment found that break-even points are heavily impacted by the mass of the reusable packaging and the source of electricity used for washing. In the case of a takeaway container, break-even points for global warming potential of 4 and 17 uses were calculated masses of 40g and 182g. These findings were used to develop lower weight packaging. This link between packaging design, performance optimisation, and environmental impact assessment is important and in some cases challenging, such as raw meat packaging.

Social Life Cycle Assessment was undertaken using the Social Hotspot Database (SHDB), providing data on 140 countries , 57 industrial sectors and 155 potential indicators. For a series of indicators, countries of interest for each lifecycle phase were identified through Harvard’s ‘Atlas of Economic Complexity’ . Combining this data allowed the collation of a map of S-LCA indicator risk related to reusable plastic packaging.

A set of circularity indicators have been developed, combining the Product Circularity Indicator method, environmental, economic and social indicators, and additional impact indicators including total litter and packaging-specific indicators such as ‘Spoonability’. The indicator combines these values to give designers a holistic measure in a range from A-G.

Results show the importance of considering a range of environmental and social impacts. There is no “one size fits all” set of rules and each use case should be evaluated to determine the “most sustainable” option.