Life cycle assessment and life cycle costing of emerging circular flexible plastic food and non-food packaging

Closed-loop recycling of food (F) and non-food (NF) multi-material multilayer (MuMu) flexible plastic packaging remains challenging for state-of-the-art technologies hence it is currently incinerated and landfilled (baseline). Two innovative recycling scenarios are compared, using a basket-of-products approach for LCA and LCC: one producing NF packaging and another producing both F and NF packaging enabled by tracer technology. This involves advanced mechanical and physical recycling, followed by the production of novel polyethylene (PE)-based mono-material multilayer packaging with PE post-consumer recyclates (PCR), compared against the baseline. The innovative scenarios outperform the baseline across climate change, fossil and minerals and metals resource use, freshwater ecotoxicity, particulate matter, and acidification achieving 16 % to 52 % impact reductions, with LCC results showing a similar trend (41–49 %). The loops are not fully closed in mass terms, due to losses but also laminate design with PCR is challenging and does not enable full uptake.