Life cycle assessment of recycling options for polylactic acid
By Daniel Maga, Markus Hiebel, Nils Thonemann. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 2019
175 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract This paper presents an attributional life cycle assessment for different recycling technologies for post-industrial and post-consumer polylactic acid (PLA) waste in Germany. The study investigates mechanical recycling of post-industrial and post-consumer PLA waste as well as solvent based recycling and chemical recycling of post-consumer PLA waste. Recycling of PLA waste is exclusively compared to thermal treatment since a comparison of the different recycling options is not possible due to different qualities of the waste streams and of the products. The life cycle impact results show environmental benefits of all recycling technologies. Environmental benefits are achieved by replacing virgin PLA with PLA recyclates. The substitution of virgin PLA by recyclates leads to higher savings of greenhouse gas emissions compared to incineration. Depending on the recycling technology, savings are 0.3–1.2 times higher. The lower global warming impact goes along with higher savings in primary energy demand and less fossil resource depletion. Apart from benefits related to global warming impact and energy, the comparison between thermal treatment and the recycling shows benefits in the category agricultural land occupation since biomass cultivation is avoided. Further environmental benefits are achieved in the impact categories photochemical ozone formation, terrestrial and aquatic eutrophication, acidification, and particulate matter due to avoided biomass cultivation, harvesting, and transportation. The latter three impacts are mainly influenced by agricultural activities and transportation, whereas eutrophication is driven by fertilization. The results demonstrate that recycling of PLA products can contribute to a better environmental performance of PLA products in their life cycle.
Subfields: Biomaterials, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ef02c2d574d2cb036df9a2b308ace4a554afc373
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In Biomaterials
In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
In Pollution
Citations in the corpus
- Life cycle assessment of bio-based and fossil-based plastic: A review (2020, methodology): “10 Of the articles listed in Table 2, it was not possible to extract accurate data from three (Leceta 2014[18], Maga 2019[2] and Potting 2015[23]) due to the presentation methods used, leaving 25 studies, from which 89 separate polymer results (50 bio-based and 39 fossil-based) were obtained.”