Waste treatment of household plastic packaging waste, put on market

Product name

Waste treatment of household plastic packaging waste, put on market.

Reference flow

1 tonne plastic packaging material put on market.

System boundaries

Starts with one tonne plastic packaging waste put on market in Norway. Approx. 50% of the PPW is discarded in the residual waste bin and is incinerated at a local incineration plant in Norway. The remaing part is either separated by households (36%) and collected by municipalities for further waste treatment, or sent to at a mixed-waste material recovery facility (18%). Separated PPW is transported by train to Germany for further sorting and recycling. Sorting residues are incinerated in Germany. The inventory does not include avoided emissions because of secondary products substituting other products.

Use advice of the dataset

This dataset should be used when modelling treatment of household plastic packaging waste in Norway. Assumed material composition: PET bottles: 4.5%, HDPE: 6.6%, PP: 12.3%, PE film: 40.6%, PET trays: 7.8%, PS: 3.7%, PP and other film: 9.4%, Other rigid plastic: 1.6%, Black rigid plastic: 6.6%, PE laminate: 7.0%

If the purpose is to compare different waste treatment options (e.g. recycling and energy recovery), the avoided emissions should be included in each system. 1 tonne plastic packaging material results in the production of 102 kg PO, 24 kg PP, 4 kg PS, 4 kg PET, 19 kg HPDE and 74 kg LDPE granulate in addition to the production of 16555 MJ heat and 2474 MJ electricity in Norway and 1582 MJ heat and 754 MJ electricity in Germany.

Technology description

PPW is either source separated by households or collected together with mixed waste and separated in a mixed-waste MRF afterward. In the dataset, 82% of the generated PPW is covered by a system that relies on source separation, 18% is separated from mixed waste in a mixed-waste MRF. The separated PPW is sorted and recycled in three different facilities in Germany. More information about the facilities is available in Furberg et al. (2022).

Quality level

Very good

Location

Norway

Geographical representativeness description

The Producer Responsibility Organisation (PRO) managing the system covers 80% of Norway population, the remaining 20% of the population (mainly Oslo) is covered by another PRO which is not included in the dataset. Site specific data is collected for the mixed waste MRFs in Norway and for the three facilities in Germany. For the background processes, ecoinvent v3.8 cut-off is used.

Quality level

Very good

Reference year

2020

Time representativeness description

Generated PPW, source separation efficiency, transport data and division of PPW between different treatment facilities in Germany is from 2020.

Time quality level

Very good

LCI method principle

Attributional

Other comments on methods approaches

Data collection period

2020