Life Cycle Economic Impacts of Reusable Plastic Crate

Given the importance of packaging in fruit and vegetable transportation, life cycle assessment was applied to study the environmental impacts. However, economic evaluation was rarely combined with environmental performance. In this paper, life cycle costs (LCC) models are built, while reusable plastic packaging (two business models: purchased reusable plastic packaging-PRPC, and rent/leasing-RRPC) and disposable packaging (cardboard box-CB) are selected for the life cycle economic studies, and then results are studied combining life cycle assessment results. The findings are: 1) At selected reference scenario, purchased reusable plastic crate (PRPC) mode has the lowest costs while cardboard box highest; 2) All packaging types transportation costs have positive linear correlation with transportation distance, so is the reciprocal of circulation times; 3) Optimizing reverse logistics, storage ratio, folded percentage, reduced crate price and extended lifetime could lead to positive financial performance for RPC, while the crate rotation factor increase and circulation crate number increase has negative influence.