Evaluation of the environmental impact of a plastic sprayer through life cycle assessment: an industrial case study

Abstract

The use of plastics for the production of household objects represents a considerable fraction of the global plastic market. In this study, an environmental impact assessment was performed to identify the environmental burdens associated with the production of plastic trigger sprayers. The environmental impact of the analysed trigger sprayer is mainly determined by the extraction of raw materials, electricity consumption in the production stage and end-of-life treatment of wastes. The application of three improvements to the traditional process leads to a significant decrease in the environmental impact across all the considered impact categories: the benefits mainly arise from the use of renewable electricity and partly from the substitution of virgin material with recycled one. The carbon footprint related to a single plastic sprayer is decreased of around 23% upon the modifications applied to the traditional process, i.e., from 0.099 kg CO2 eq down to 0.077 kg CO2 eq that reported to the annual production of 15 million pieces, would lead to a reduction of around 339 ton CO2 eq released to the atmosphere. The obtained results indicate that to further improve the environmental performance of plastic dispensers (and of plastic objects in general), technologies suitable for the processing and manufacturing of recycled materials should be implemented. This will be achieved only through the improvement of a collection, sorting and recycling system able to provide high-quality secondary materials. Finally, the industrial process should be optimized decreasing the production scrap, using renewable energy sources and promoting its reuse for multiple times.