ON THE COSTS OF CIRCULARITY STRATEGIES: ENVIRONMENTAL LIFE CYCLE COSTING OF GLASS BOTTLE

Ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns is one of the 17 Global Goals set in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The shift towards sustainable production and consumption patterns requires decoupling economic growth from resource constraints, i.e. a circular economy. The circular economy provides an alternative to the linear take-make-waste economic system, being an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design. Packaging represents a large share of the material flows for many materials, therefore in a circular economy high priority is given to the packaging sector and to packaging waste management. Glass is one of the most effectively recycled materials in Europe. In 2014 the average glass recycling rate in the EU28 zone was equal to 74%. The majority of such glass goes back into making new packaging: glass stands alone as the most closed loop recycled food and drink packaging in the EU and in the world. However, recycling is not the only circularity strategy that applies to beverage glass, since also reuse can be an option, depending on the packaging waste collection system. Two different glass packaging systems are considered in the present study: the city of Bologna (IT) and the city of Copenhagen (DK). The main differences between the two systems are the options to recover glass bottle and the waste collection system. In Bologna, only one-way glass packaging is used and the glass packaging waste fraction is collected as part of the glass-metals fraction and sent to recycling. In Denmark, including Copenhagen, both refillable glass bottles and one-way bottles are sold. There is a deposit-return system (named DRS, Dansk Retursystem) that manages the collection of one-way and refillable packaging using a refundable deposit. We performed an environmental Life Cycle Costing (eLCC) of the production, purchasing and waste management of glass beer bottles in the two cities. Three main perspectives were considered: producers, consumers and waste management operators, with the aim to compare the economic performances of the two systems and to identify potential cost reductions