Prospective Life Cycle Assessment of the European PET Packaging Sector

Abstract

The EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) sets recycled content targets for polyethylene terephthalate (PET) packaging at the product level for 2040 and enables future EU legislation on bio-based targets. However, its effect on the projected environmental impacts of the European PET packaging sector in 2040 remains unclear. This study addresses the research question: “What magnitude and direction of change in projected environmental impacts of the European PET packaging sector is achievable through feedstock substitution in the context of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation in 2040?”

The research approach combines static prospective Material Flow Analysis (pMFA) with prospective Life Cycle Assessment (pLCA). Three foreground scenarios explore the Business-as-usual (BAU), PPWR recycled content targets (Scenario 1), and a potential Joint Target with bio-based-content targets (Scenario 2). The future PET packaging demand is represented by a packaging market mix. The pMFA uses data on projected feedstock shares from the Plastics Integrated Assessment (PLAIA), part of the Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) IMAGE, and is conducted in the subSTance flow ANalysis software. The pLCA adopts the ecoinvent v3.12 database modified using premise, applying the IAM IMAGE under three Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios based on SSP2 with medium emissions (SSP2-M), low emissions (SSP2-L), and very low high overshoot (SSP2-VLHO). The pLCA is performed in Activity Browser using the Environmental Footprint v3.1.

Results show that PPWR recycled content targets are highly environmentally beneficial, with Scenarios 1 and 2 reducing environmental impacts across all impact categories compared to BAU and achieving similar climate change impact reductions of -64% and -59%, respectively. Meeting the recycled content targets requires imports of recycled PET, indicating a risk of circularity leakage. A Joint Target, allowing bio-based feedstock to partially replace recycled feedstock, o]ers no additional advantage over recycled content targets, with Scenario 2 showing moderately higher environmental impacts than Scenario 1. The largest di]erences are observed in land use (-17 percentage points (pp)), terrestrial eutrophication, and particulate matter formation (both -10 pp), all relative to BAU. At the process level, energy production and manufacturing are the dominant contributors across most impact categories. At the life cycle stage level, PET polymer production and EoL management emerge as hotspots, with Bio-PET showing disproportionately high land use impacts in Scenario 2. The baseline assumes sugar beet as the biomass source for bioethanol and wood for terephthalic acid production. Sensitivity analysis with wheat for bioethanol production shows similar results.

Policy recommendations include scaling up recycling infrastructure to address the identified risk of circularity leakage and prioritizing demand reduction and reuse quotas. Main limitations include uncertainties resulting from reconciling multiple data sources in the pMFA, and the lack of prospective foreground unit process data for the chemical sector in the pLCA. Future research should develop and integrate such data, develop regional classification in IMAGE aligned with political entities, and evaluate the effects of the PPWR on further packaging materials to allow cross-sector assessment.

Resolver link to Supplementary data: Prospective Life Cycle Assessment of the European PET Packaging Sector: https://doi.org/10.4121/508cfd64-f031-47ff-ae86-58f0b21b7a51