PLASTICS AND HEALTH IMPACTS - Plastics and Environmental Sustainability - page 343

limit values for drinking water. Growing exports of bottled water by
countries such as France, China, and Italy into countries such as the United
States, Japan, and Germany add to the ecological footprint of the product
because of transportation costs.
Globally, 60% of the carbonated beverages are packed in plastic compared
to only 20% in cans (Rexam Consumer Packaging Report, 2011); beer is
excluded from this estimate as only approximately 5% of it is packaged in
plastic. The embodied energy for manufacture of carbonated drinks is not
very different from that for bottled water (~0.01 MJ/l) (the carbon footprint
for manufacturing the beverage, however, itself will be considerably higher
than that for water). Unlike for water, there is no convenient alternative
packaging for carbonated beverage except for bottles and metal cans
accounting for over a third of the retail value of these products. As with
water bottles, recycling the polyester (PET) soft drink bottles can vary
significantly but bring down the energy costs and, to a lesser extent, the
carbonemissionloadassociatedwiththeproduct.Plastic(PET)packagingis
generally found to be competitive over the aluminum or glass counterparts
in comparative cradle-to-grave LCA studies. A significant factor in
packaging beverages is the water footprint associated with the process;
estimated water footprint in producing 0.5 l PET bottle was estimated to be
150-300 l (Ercin et al., 2011)! A 2009 study comparing PET to glass and
aluminum cans (funded by PETRA, the industry trade association) and the
results were already discussed in Chapter 5 .
8.1.1 Packaging Milk in HDPE
The LCA studies that compare different packaging materials for 1 l milk
containers generally show HDPE plastic or PP-coated paperboard cartons
to be more energy efficient compared to comparable glass or aluminum
packaging. The greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are also relatively lower
for plastics packaging. Generally, both the embodied energy and carbon
footprint of the package are dominated by the fabrication and use phases
(possibly by transportation as well). A typical such comparison is shown in
Figure 8.2 (Ghenai, 2012). As the transportation costs are variable, they are
not included in the figure.