Life Cycle Assessment of plastic film recycling comparing kerbside and separate collection on laboratory and industrial level

Life cycle assessment was used to analyse and compare the environmental impacts of an individual drop off system for plastic waste recycling against a kerbside collection system. Despite good primary data, several methodological questions were identified. Allocation by mass of transported waste plastics film revealed the yellow bag to be the superior alternative over the individual drop off. However, results were sensible to methodological choices. Afterwards, the collection results were extended to 1 kg of recycled LDPE, using laboratory and industrial recycling scenarios. The industrial scenario yielded much lower impacts, proving that laboratory scale recycling is hardly able to predict industrial results. Findings were confirmed by statistical analysis from 1,000 Monte Carlo runs by using discernibility and overlap area analysis. Ultimately, 23 possible recycling product designs were derived, using mechanical properties obtained from the laboratory and were compared to four commercially available benchmarks. Properties were hard to match from the laboratory recycling design, producing mostly inferior LCA results. • Primary data for a drop-off waste management system was collected and used in the LCA • Industrial data for the curbside collection was used as a benchmark • LCA was performed on three levels: 1 kg of waste collected, recycled and 23 product designs using blending • Uncertainty analysis was performed to compare industrial and laboratory scale recycling processes • It was shown that a laboratory setting can not accurately predict industrial behaviour.