Life cycle assessment of environmental impacts of Finnish beverage packaging systems

The study on hand was started with a pre-study to identify differences of beverage sectors between Finland and other countries and to assess the applicability of packaging life-cycle assessments (LCA) carried out for other countries to Finland. The pre-study revealed specific features of the Finnish beverage sector and infrastructures (energy supply, waste management) which could significantly influence environmental impacts. Therefore, a thorough study on the Finnish beverage packaging systems was considered necessary to produce relevant background information for political and economic decision making and public discussion on the life-cycle wide environmental quality of different beverage packaging options in Finland. Four different basic types of beverage packaging systems; glass bottles, aluminium cans, PET bottles and steel cans are studied. Functional requirement set for each system is 1000 litres of beverage delivered to consumption. From the methodological point of view, the study concentrates on the inventory analysis, i.e. to identify and quantify all relevant resource demands and emissions to air, water and soil from the studied systems including all materially, energetically or logistically interrelated activities to fulfil the functional requirement. The inventory results of the study show that under the most favourable assumptions there hardly is a clear winner in the comparison between different system options