Subramanian Senthilkannan Muthu - Sustainable Packaging

Indexed by Scopus

This series aims to broadly cover all the aspects related to environmental assessment of products, development of environmental and ecological indicators and eco-design of various products and processes. Below are the areas fall under the aims and scope of this series, but not limited to: Environmental Life Cycle Assessment; Social Life Cycle Assessment; Organizational and Product Carbon Footprints; Ecological, Energy and Water Footprints; Life cycle costing; Environmental and sustainable indicators; Environmental impact assessment methods and tools; Eco-design (sustainable design) aspects and tools; Biodegradation studies; Recycling; Solid waste management; Environmental and social audits; Green Purchasing and tools; Product environmental footprints; Environmental management standards and regulations; Eco-labels; Green Claims and green washing; Assessment of sustainability aspects.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13340

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Worldwide the environmental weight of the packaging has overtaken the threshold, both due to the waste and the emissions generated. This issue stimulated the European Union (EU) to provide for a stringent regulation to tackle this burden. Particularly, the consumption of mineral water packed is very significant, as regards the use of plastic bottles, especially in the small size, which stresses the need for a boosted management of packaging by the governments, industries and consumers (Botto et al. in Environ Sci Policy 14:388395, 2011). Over the years, the EU has shown an increasing consumption of mineral water packed, and Italy, with 222 L per capita is the first European consumer country and the third worldwide. This chapter investigated the glass and Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) packaging to analyse their environmental impact and undertake a comparison among them (Vellini and Savioli in Energy 34:21372143, 2009). Particularly the research provides a twofold analysis. Firstly, it assesses the impacts of 1 kg of hollow glass through the Life Cycle Assessment methodology (Schmitz et al. in Energy Policy 39:142155, 2011;Vinci et al. in Trends in beverage packaging 16:105133, 2019;) and makes a comparison with a 1 kg of PET ( Marathe KV, Chavan K, Nakhate P (2017) Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) BottlesIndian Perspective. http://www.in-beverage.org/lca-pet/ICT%20Final%20Report%20on%20LCA%20of%20PET%20Bottles_for%20PACE_01_01_2018.pdf . Accessed 2 March 2021). Secondly, the Greenhouse gas emissions of still water bottled based on the current Italian consumption is evaluated using the Carbon Footprint methodology, to highlight which among the glass and PET mineral water bottles have the better environmental performance (Kouloumpis et al. in Sci Total Environ 727, 2020). Finally, according to the European 20302050 climate and energy framework, an improved eco-friendly performance scenario based on post-consumption options for both materials, was investigated regarding the Italian mineral water bottles consumption.