During EU Commission’s Green Week : APEAL SUCCESSFULLY INITIATES DEBATE ON PACKAGING WASTE LEGISLATION
On 26th April 2001, 200 key stakeholders from industry and EU institutions discussed uses and misuses of LCA’s in environmental policy making. Misuses of LCAs are preventing the Directive on Packaging and Packaging Waste to be implemented in a correct way …
The debate brought together top level speakers from the Commission, MEP’s, Industry (APEAL, ASSURE, EUROPEN), UK DTI, NGOs (Green, consumers), independent LCA practitioners (TNO, Ecobilan-Price Waterhouse Coopers). Taylor Nelson SOFRES Dimarso presented some essential conclusions from an interesting survey amongst LCA experts throughout Europe. LCA experts agree that LCA is a good tool to assess environmental impact of packaging, but there are a number of conditions to meet for a valid use. Bernhard Van der Ven, TNO (Institute of Environment, Energy and Process innovation) states: « Our sensitivity analysis of LCA’s clearly demonstrates that, in terms of environmental impact, the borderline between ecologically favourable and unfavourable packaging is very tenuous. Therefore, the present discriminations between packaging materials are not justified». Laurent Grisel, Ecobilan - Price Waterhouse Coopers demonstrated that there are solutions to be found through a multi-criteria approach. This enables the ability to meet strong, and well specified, environmental goals. Today's focus on waste reduction, while still maintaining an open market for free competition, eliminates discrimination between packaging materials. It is essential that every product makes a positive contribution to the environment in its own way, making use of its own, specific, strong points.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a multi-criteria evaluation tool that can be applied to both products and services to quantify their environmental burdens. An assessment is performed on the whole product life cycle of the product, from cradle (extraction of resources) to grave (final fate of the product through waste management). Globally LCA is a valuable tool if it is used properly. Assisting industry in the environmental evaluation and improvement of products was the first concern of LCA studies. Unfortunately, more and more political decisions are taken based on this tool, without considering all aspects, limits and other important relevant factors, which puts the industry at risk and subsequently, profitability and employment. Among many, sensitivity analysis is a must, and ought to be taken into account, according to ISO standards. Indeed, sensitivity analysis enables a range of values for various LCA parameters to be taken into account, considering real market conditions. An example to illustrate what sensitivity analysis means: refillable packaging is transported over a range of distances from 20 to 200 km, according to local circumstances, in opposition to a unique 50 km distance consideration. When you combine all these different values together, you get a range of environmental impact values per criteria, instead of a single value. This is more representative of reality. This gives then a more adequate view of the impact of a product on the environment.

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