Defined scenarios and data inventories for final sustainability assessment

In the CIRCULAR FoodPack project, the newly developed value chains from WP2 and WP3 undergo a comprehensive life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA), which integrates environmental impacts through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), economic impacts through Life Cycle Costing (LCC), and social impacts through Social LCA (S-LCA). Within the framework of life cycle thinking, four phases are essential for conducting these assessments: a) goal and scope definition phase, b) inventory analysis phase, c) impact assessment phase, and d) interpretation phase (ISO 14044, 2006). Until M30, the primary focus was on achieving milestone 13 by enhancing the innovative and baseline scenarios, ensuring consistent process flow schemes for the final sustainability assessment. This involved refining the scenarios based on the three use cases (Loops 1-3) that generate home packaging (H), personal care packaging (PC), and food packaging (F), encompassing the following five demonstrators/applications: Wet wipes (H1), Detergent tabs (H2), Cosmetics in sachets (PC1), Chocolate powder (F1), and Coffee (F2). The Loops represent different feasible process cascades experimented in the CFP project, which are then translated into scenarios for the LCSA model. A distinction is drawn between innovative scenarios for household and business waste, each with the corresponding baseline scenarios. Additionally, two different perspectives are considered, including (i) system perspective, focusing on packaging applications; and (ii) material perspective focusing on pellet specifications. From the system perspective (S1), the final assessment comprises three main innovative scenarios, one sub-scenario and two baseline scenarios tailored to both household or business waste. Specifically for household waste, these scenarios include: (S1) Non-food (NF) packaging from household waste (Loop 1), (S2) Food (F) and NF packaging from household waste – (Loop 3 cycle 1 and Loop 1), sub-scenario (S2.1) F and NF packaging from household waste – (Loop 3 cycle 2 and Loop 1) and (S3) Baseline for household waste. For business waste, the scenarios consist of: (S4) F packaging from business waste (Loop 2), and (S5) Baseline for business waste. In terms of the material perspective (M2), three primary scenarios are explored for household waste input: (M1) NF pellet scenario - Loop 1, (M2) F pellet scenario - Loop 3, and (M3) Baseline pellet scenario, resulting in the production of either recycled PE (rPE) pellets or virgin PE (vPE) pellets in the Baseline scenario.Another substantial aspect involved collaboratively refining process flow schemes with project partners for the following processes: Collection, state of the art (SoA) sorting and tracer-based sorting, Pretreatment including oversorting, shredding, washing, grinding and float-sink separation, Purification with option A-CreaSolv® and option B-deinking and delamination, Posttreatment consisting of recompounding and deodorization, Laminate production and also considering ink production, primer production and tracer production and Food and non-food packaging production. Particular attention was directed towards the Business, F packaging scenario (Loop 2), including the Business to Business (B2B) collection, pretreatment, and the baseline scenario, as well as to delamination and deinking, laminate, and food and non-food packaging, due to the data gaps and updates resulting from process improvements during the project period. Based on this collaborative effort, data for LCA, LCC, and S-LCA inventories have been supplemented by the respective partners to complete the necessary data for the final sustainability assessment. Note: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101003806.