NAPCOR Heralds Results of Life-Cycle Inventory Study

The National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR) announced the release of a new study that provides life cycle inventory data for recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic resins.

The study’s LCI report indicates that incorporating recycled PET resin in the manufacture of a package significantly reduces the environmental footprint of that package in terms of production energy required and greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is long-sought-after information for companies that want to include environmental sustainability as one of the ways in which they evaluate their product package options,” says Tom Busard, NAPCOR’s chairman and VP Global Procurement and Material Systems for Plastipak Packaging. “There’s no true sustainability without recycling, and this new study confirms and quantifies the environmental benefits of recycling PET. We’re seeing more customers requesting LCIs in order to do Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) so that they can more accurately understand the sustainability profiles of their packaging.”

LCAs consider the complete life of a product or package, including the raw materials, manufacturing, and end of life.

Dennis Sabourin, NAPCOR’s executive director, adds, “This is a scientific approach and provides an excellent tool for making informed decisions.” Sabourin emphasizes that the sustainability profile and analysis for the PET package must not only take into account its recyclability, and the increasing use of recycled PET resin content in new packaging, but also PET’s inherent performance characteristics: lightweight; shatter-resistant; safe; able to preserve taste and other product characteristics on-shelf; and its suitability to be made significantly lighter without sacrificing performance for a variety of product applications. Fundamentally, packaging exists in order to effectively deliver a product while preserving that product’s quality in a safe, cost effective, and sustainable manner.

The new study’s findings are captured in Final Report – Life Cycle Inventory of 100% Postconsumer HDPE and PET Recycled Resin from Postconsumer Containers and Packaging, which is available at http://www.napcor.com/PET/sustainability.html.

Information from the new study will soon be added to the U.S. Life-Cycle Inventory Database. A project of the U.S. Department of Energy and its National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), this is a publicly available database that allows users to review and compare analysis results, http://www.nrel.gov/lci/about.html