Life Cycle Assessment and Ecodesign At Nestlé Change in the program: New Speaker is Robert Vos

Historically the packaging industry has accounted for environmental impacts of packaging through environmental attributes such as packaging weight reduction, recycled content, and recovery rates of used packaging. Although such indicators are relatively easy to measure, they are only proxies for environmental impacts and may not lead to reduced environmental impacts in all cases. Some attributes, such as light weighting and recyclability, may even be in direct conflict with each other and it might be very difficult for a packaging developer to judge which alternative would be the best for a given context. Therefore a decision support tool giving feedback on the environmental consequences of decisions taken in the packaging development process over the entire packaging life cycle is needed.

The appropriate tool for considering environmental impacts over the packaging life cycle is life cycle assessment (LCA). Full LCA tools allow for great flexibility on all levels of a LCA. This flexibility also contributes to some of the draw-backs of clean-slate approaches: they require considerable expertise and are tedious and costly. For these reason full LCA is mainly used as a strategic mid-term decision support for key products within the fast moving consumer goods sector (FMCG).  

Systematic use of LCA as decision support would require a “streamlined” approach to LCA allowing rapid assessments to be made by non-experts. For this purpose Nestlé has contributed to the development of PIQET (Packaging Impact Quick Evaluation Tool). PIQET is a LCA-based tool with a tailor-made interface that allows packaging developers to generate LCA feedback in a matter of minutes at very low cost. PIQET is currently used systematically in the Nestlé packaging development process.

This paper discusses the pros and cons of streamlined LCA versus full LCA with respect to requirements for a FMCG company. It is concluded that streamlined LCA is a powerful tool for systematic LCA-based decision making at a stage where design freedom is high and cost for change is low. The streamlining process ensures a consistent approach for LCA to be applied across a company, but does not provide the flexibility, precision and comprehensive treatment of uncertainty and sensitivity of full LCA tools, required for communication of environmental claims to third parties. Therefore, streamlined LCA tools should currently be seen as an affordable and practical compromise between the use of simple environmental attributes and full LCA for internal decision making.