Where Are All the Additives? Identifying Trends in Plastic Additive Inclusion in LCAs of Mechanical Recycling

Description

Pathways for circular plastics are key topics in today’s Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) community. To ensure the accuracy and reliability of these studies, LCAs on circular plastic materials and circular plastic recycling scenarios must consider the impacts of
the entire chemical composition of the plastic assessed. Plastic additives are essential to the production and reprocessing of all plastics (Hahladakis et al., 2018). Added throughout all stages of production and recycling, plastic additives make up between .01-70% of the net weight of plastic materials (Aurisano, et al., 2021; ECHA, 2020). However, recent studies into the flows and reporting of additives throughout the EU found between 6,000-10,000+ additives were underreported despite their common use in plastic materials (Aurisano et al., 2021; Wiesinger et al., 2021). When considering scenarios for circular plastic pathways in LCA, it is vital that the flows and impacts of plastic additives are accounted for in the discussion and life cycle inventory (LCI) of the study. Previous literature reviews of LCAs of plastics have speculated that additive exclusion is due to knowledge gaps or cutoff approaches but have not explored these suspicions in detail (Bishop et al., 2021; van Oers et al., 2012). This systematic literature review separates author talk about additives from additive data presence in the LCI to identify if additive exclusion, or inclusion, occurs due to knowledge gaps or data quality. Focusing on LCAs that assessed plastic circularity in mechanical recycling pathways, we identified 103 LCAs published in peer-reviewed journals from 2010-2020. Despite one-third of the authors discussing additives in the text and one fifth mentioning the importance of additives, we could not classify additive inclusion in the data for one-half of all articles despite thorough reviews of the article text and all accompanying supplemental materials. This review highlights the importance of data transparency in published LCAs and underscores the difficulty in informing decision making due to the state of standardization and harmonization in LCA today.

Period	15 May 2022 → 19 May 2022
Event title	SETAC Europe 32nd Annual Meeting: Towards a Reduced Pollution
Event type	Conference
Conference number	32
Location	Copenhagen, DenmarkShow on map