LCA - Datasets for PlastiCircle Environmental Evaluation of the Light Packaging Waste Management

Datasets presented are related to Delievrable 7.3 - LCA.

To structure the environmental assessment, cities and industries are treated separately. The three pilot cities evaluated in PlastiCircle are:
1. Valencia 2. Utrecht 3. Alba Iulia

Within the project several technologies and strategies have been developed to improve the waste management of the pilot cities and other aspects in the value chain. Main developments spin around (a) citizens identification through a labelling system integrated on the container on a PAYT basis; (b) route optimization based on filling level sensors integrated on the container and corresponding algorithms for the optimization; (c) Eco-driving app to monitor the transport parameters and suggest efficient driving to the drivers. Moreover, on the sorting stage (d) PICVISA developed different improvement on their sorting equipment to enhance yield and purity on extracted fractions, and as well, a mechanical module to improve film recovery was developed. All these conditions have been evaluated on this report, focusing on the following sections:
1. Collection – Impact of PAYT system on the pilot and quality segregation and IoT infrastructure.
2. Transport – Impact of route optimization and efficient driving
3. Sorting – Impact from yield and purity improvements and development of turbosorter

For the sorting stage a model has been designed for each pilot waste recycling plant, focusing on the energy used per tonne, the yield of each fraction on the plant and the input waste as main parameters, inter alia.

As a bridge between the cities and the final converters, there is a need of a proper pre-treatment/ conditioning of the post-consumer polymer to provide quality standard feedstock to the industries. PlastiCircle, lacks a partner on the consortium undertaking these tasks on an industrial level, however, different lab scale trials and some trials with Sorema have been assessed during the project, also considering broken down processes to evaluate impact on these intermediate stages taking into consideration processes such as the ones used by European industries as Sorema or Herbold, and other processes extracted from literature and commercial solutions:
4. Washing/Pre-treatment – Impact on the pre-conditioning for plastic packaging bales.

Once plastic is ready as flakes or pellets forms, industries within the project use those recycled plastic as raw materials to manufacture their products. Their different processes have been defined analysed, performing specific LCA for each one of their results considering the trials and impacts from the developments done during the project.

Attached datasets used for the LCA models in PlastiCircle can be found.