Life Cycle Assessment of Stone Paper, Polypropylene Film, and Coated Paper for Use as Product Labels

Abstract

Environmental concerns are growing in today’s societies, and governments, companies, and other organizations are looking to decrease the impacts on the environment from their products and the products they source. In order to do this, they need to know how a product is impacting the environment, and a life cycle assessment can help to understand the impacts of products and identify areas for potential environmental improvement. This life cycle assessment analyzed the life cycle of three materials: coated paper, PP film, and Stone Paper, in the function of a product label. The aim was to perform comparative analysis of the materials by evaluating performance on multiple impact categories. From this analysis, information can be provided to decision makers and preliminary recommendations can be made to improve the life cycle of Stone Paper. The results found that no material clearly dominated the other materials across all impact categories, but some general trends were identified. PP Film performed relatively poorly in fossil fuel related impact categories, whereas coated paper performed relatively poorly in land use and water depletion categories. Stone Paper fared relatively poorly in two human and environmental health impact categories. Strong general conclusions about the other impact categories cannot be made. Sensitivity analysis for transportation and end of life scenarios were carried out, and found a preference for short transportation distances for Stone Paper, landfilling for coated paper, and incineration for PP film were found.