The Environmental Performance of Glass and PET Mineral Water Bottles in Italy

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 14:388–395, 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 34:2137–2143, 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 39:142–155, 2011;Vinci et al. in Trends in beverage packaging 16:105–133, 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) Bottles—Indian 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 2030–2050 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.