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The management of plastic packaging waste is advancing quickly, and new strategies are being implemented worldwide for better resource recovery. To assess the environmental benefits of new ways of handling plastic packaging waste, we need to first evaluate current waste management options in order to create a basis for comparison. In this study, the environmental impacts of plastic packaging waste handling are assessed for the first time in Iceland using the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology. The results show that mechanical recycling, despite including the impacts of exporting the waste to different European countries, has more environmental benefits than landfilling the waste in Iceland. Increasing the recycling rates of plastic waste in Iceland is also identified as a promising option from a resource efficiency perspective. With better waste sorting, Iceland can become more environmentally sustainable, ensuring that plastic materials land in recycling processes, and thereby enhancing the flow of material in the circular economy.

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) are bio-based and biodegradable alternatives to conventional plastic types and have the potential to reduce the environmental impacts along the life cycle. In comparison to already established production routes for PHA (heterotrophic production) based on renewable feedstock like glucose (first generation feedstock), novel production routes, such as the photoautotrophic production of PHA based on CO

The merits of temporary carbon storage are often debated for bio-based and biodegradable plastics. We employed life cycle assessment (LCA) to assess environmental performance of polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA)-based plastics, considering multiple climate tipping as a new life cycle impact category. It accounts for the contribution of GHG emissions to trigger climate tipping points in the Earth system, considering in total 13 tipping elements that could pass a tipping point with increasing warming. The PHA was either laminated with poly(lactic acid), or metallized with aluminum or aluminum oxides to lower permeability of the resulting plastics toward oxygen, water vapor and aromas. The assessments were made accounting for potential differences in kinetics of evolution of greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4) from bioplastic degradation in the end-of-life. Results show that: (1) PHA films with high biodegradability perform best in relation to the climate tipping, but are not necessarily the best in relation to radiative forcing increase or global temperature change; (2) sugar beet molasses used as feedstock is an environmental hot spot, contributing significantly to a wide range of environmental problems; (3) increasing PHA production scale from pilot to full commercial scale increases environmental impacts, mainly due to decreasing PHA yield; and (4) further process optimization is necessary for the PHA-based plastics to become attractive alternatives to fossil-based plastics. Our study suggests that multiple climate tipping is a relevant impact category for LCA of biodegradable bioplastics.

The plastic economy, despite offering unique properties in fulfilling the functions of products in different industrial sectors over decades, has so far been mainly linear, that is, “take-make and dispose” with only a small fraction of plastics being recycled worldwide. With ever-increasing circular economy initiatives and the urge to conserve resources and prevent plastic pollution from affecting ecosystems, more emphasis on the resource recovery of plastic products after its use has been made over the last few years. It is necessary for manufacturers to understand the value chain as early as the design phase while manufacturing and distributing plastic products across the world. The current study provides an overview of the status quo of plastic waste management and analyzes the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies of different End-of-Life (EoL) options for plastics. Based on the LCA studies, a preliminary, country-specific Circular Footprint (CF) is calculated and Design for Recycling (DfR) strategies are identified. Results show that the environmental impacts of different EoL options differ significantly for different plastics. The CF highlights the lack of data regarding the composition and recovery of plastics in different countries thus showing the necessity to consider the whole lifecycle when quantifying the environmental impacts of plastics.

Polymers and plastics play a very important part in the modern world and contribute to people's wellbeing and comfort. However, products made of them are contributing to land- and marine-based environmental pollution due to littering and other ways of emission, and therefore threaten ecosystems worldwide. However, waste management and responses by governments and the consumer differ strongly from country to country. The current article provides an overview of several important aspects of polymer waste and plastic pollution as well as describes selected strategies to mitigate these using examples from Germany and Australia, and therefore aims to contribute to the resolution of the ever-increasing problem of unsustainable plastic consumption, disposal, and pollution.

Ziel des Kapitels „Okologische Nachhaltigkeitsbewertung von Biokunststoffen“ ist es, einen literaturbasierten Uberblick uber den aktuellen Status quo von Biokunststoffen hinsichtlich ihrer okologischen Auswirkungen zu geben. Vor dem Hintergrund begrenzter fossiler Ressourcen und des Klimawandels konnen Biokunststoffe eine potenzielle Alternative zu konventionellen Kunststoffen darstellen. Vorteile in der okologischen Bewertung oder auch einzelnen Umweltkategorien mussen jedoch fur die unterschiedlichen Biokunststoffe durch robuste Methoden quantifiziert und nachgewiesen werden. Hierzu werden vorhandene Methoden zur okologischen Bewertung von Biokunststoffen und Veroffentlichungen mit entsprechenden Kennwerten analysiert. Im Rahmen einer Metaanalyse werden die Kennwerte ausgewertet und diskutiert. Hiermit ergibt sich ein wichtiger Gesamtuberblick zu den okologischen Auswirkungen von Biokunststoffen. Die Analyse der Methoden zeigt auf, dass methodische Fehlstellen und Lucken einen direkten Vergleich von konventionellen Kunststoffen und Biokunststoffen erschweren. Die Analyse der vorhandenen Kennwerte zeigt auf, dass sich teilweise fur die Biokunststoffe hohe Abweichungen in den einzelnen Wirkungskategorien zeigen. Der direkte Vergleich zu konventionellen Kunststoffen zeigt mit den derzeit eingesetzten Methoden und Daten Vor- und Nachteile in den unterschiedlichen Umweltwirkungskategorien.

Bio-based plastics have been identified as a promising alternative to conventional plastics with regards to finite fossil resources and climate change. With emerging novel bio-based plastics and 70% of its market share in short life cycle packaging applications, the end-of-life options (recycling, anaerobic and aerobic digestion, energy recovery etc.) as well as the resource circulation have been moved into the spotlight and have to be assessed. This paper will provide an insight into the bio-based plastics in the context of circular economy and gives an overview on its status and potential future development. The focus is set on the assessment of the potential environmental impacts of the different end-of-life options and resource circulation of bio-based plastics with the help of life cycle assessment.

Against the background of climate change and finite fossil resources, bio-based plastics have been in the focus of research for the last decade and were identified as a promising alternative to fossil-based plastics. Now, with an evolving bio-based plastic market and application range, the environmental advantages of bio-based plastic have come to the fore and identified as crucial by different stakeholders. While the majority of assessments for bio-based plastics are carried out based on attributional life cycle assessment, there have been only few consequential studies done in this area. Also, the application of eco-design strategies has not been in the focus for the bio-based products due to the prevailing misconceptions of renewable materials (as feedstock for bio-based plastics) considered in itself as an ‘eco-design strategy’. In this paper, we discuss the life cycle assessment as well as eco-design strategies of a bio-based product taking attributional as well as consequential approaches into account.

Are bioplastics sustainable? To answer this question transparent and reliable methods are needed. The article presents a short review of ecological and socio-economic aspects along the value chain of bioplastics with focus on the methodology state of the art and further developments.

With a growing demand of resources and environmental issues like climate change, circular economy has become an inevitable fundamental principle in resource consumption. While conventional plastics have become an essential material group in the 20th century, bio-based and/or biodegradable alternatives are still evolving. Principles of the circular economy need to be implemented for all kinds of material flows and bioplastic is no exception, as biomass is a limited resource as well. To identifiy environmentally favourable pathways for bioplastic waste streams, it is helpful to develop suitable specific indicators. To review the current status quo, a literature review was conducted with focus on (bio-) plastics. While general circular economy approaches are available manifold, only few literature on specific circular economy indicators for (bio-) plastics is available. Especially the aspect of biodegradability is unique for bioplastics and therefore enables further waste treatment options. An already existing framework is therefore extended for these waste treatment options to enable the identification of optimal pathways also for biodegradable plastics.

Bio-based plastics show an evolving market and application range and therefore have become increasingly popular in research and economy. The limitation of fossil resources as well as linked environmental issues have led to the development of an innovative bioeconomy and also triggered the shift from fossil-based plastics to bio-based plastics. The original motivation for this study was to propose a comprehensive approach to calculate the sustainability performance of bio-based plastics on a global scale. To provide a calculative basis, a review on available data from life cycle assessment (LCA), social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) studies on bio-based plastics was carried out and showed limited availability of quantifiable results with regard to the social and economic performance of bio-based plastics. In environmental LCA, with the ISO-family and related documents, a group of harmonized standards and approaches does exist. However, missing practical and consented guidelines hamper the comparability of studies and the exploitability of data - not only within the bio-based plastic sector but also in comparison to the fossil-based counterparts. Therefore, a calculation for the global sustainability performance of bio-based plastics was merely conducted for the environmental impact category global warming potential. Taking the technical substitution potential of fossil-based with bio-based plastics as well as limitations in data availability into account the estimation was performed for a substitution of approximately two-thirds of the global plastic demand. The results show, that bio-based plastics could potentially save 241 to 316 Mio. t of CO2-eq. annually. Thereby this study gives a first outlook how bio-based plastics could contribute to a sustainable development, making benefits and drawbacks more tangible.

In order to design and develop a sustainable bio-based plastic product right from its development phase, it is necessary to analyse and interpret the direct and indirect environmental impacts along the life cycle of the product system through life cycle thinking. Eco-design is a well-established approach in designing products with the consideration and integration of the environmental impacts of the product system, and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a standardized methodology to quantify and analyse the environmental impacts of the product system along the production chain. This paper identifies the practical needs for integrating LCA and eco-design strategies into the production of bio-based plastic products, taking a bio-based computer mouse body made of Poly Lactic Acid (PLA) as a case study.