Content uploaded by David Amienyo
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by David Amienyo on May 31, 2014
Content may be subject to copyright.
A preview of the PDF is not available
Life cycle environmental impacts of carbonated soft drinks
The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment
Abstract and Figures
Purpose
The UK carbonated drinks sector was worth £8 billion in 2010 and is growing at an annual rate of 4.9 %. In an attempt to provide a better understanding of the environmental impacts of this sector, this paper presents, for the first time, the full life cycle impacts of carbonated soft drinks manufactured and consumed in the UK. Two functional units are considered: 1 l of packaged drink and total annual production of carbonated drinks in the UK. The latter has been used to estimate the impacts at the sectoral level. The system boundary is from ‘cradle to grave’. Different packaging used for carbonated drinks is considered: glass bottles (0.75 l), aluminium cans (0.33 l) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles (0.5 and 2 l).
Materials and methods
The study has been carried out following the ISO 14040/44 life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology. Data have been sourced from a drink manufacturer as well as the CCaLC, Ecoinvent and Gabi databases. The LCA software tools CCaLC v2.0 and GaBi 4.3 have been used for LCA modelling. The environmental impacts have been estimated according to the CML 2001 method.
Results and discussion
Packaging is the main hotspot for most environmental impacts, contributing between 59 and 77 %. The ingredients account between 7 and 14 % mainly due to sugar; the manufacturing stage contributes 5–10 %, largely due to the energy for filling and packaging. Refrigeration of the drink at retailer increases global warming potential by up to 33 %. Transport contributes up to 7 % to the total impacts.
Conclusions
The drink packaged in 2 l PET bottles is the most sustainable option for most impacts, including the carbon footprint, while the drink in glass bottles is the worst option. However, reusing glass bottles three times would make the carbon footprint of the drink in glass bottles comparable to that in aluminium cans and 0.5 l PET bottles. If recycling of PET bottles is increased to 60 %, the glass bottle would need to be reused 20 times to make their carbon footprints comparable. The estimates at the sectoral level indicate that the carbonated drinks in the UK are responsible for over 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 eq. emissions per year. This represented 13 % of the GHG emissions from the whole food and drink sector or 0.26 % of the UK total emissions in 2010.
Content may be subject to copyright.
... Fig. 1 presents the UPB and bottled water system boundaries (i.e. lifecycle stages included in the analysis), adapted from the peer-reviewed literature (7,18,(21)(22)(23)(24) . The system is divided into four main stages: ...
... Despite these limitations, our findings are aligned with previous studies. Specifically, the greenhouse gas emissions and water scarcity values estimated here align with studies from the UK and Europe (17,19,21,49,50) . At the time of writing, only one other study had been published on acidification and eutrophication impacts of beverages, and estimates differed significantly from those presented here (21) , most likely because acidification and eutrophication are highly region-dependent. ...
... Specifically, the greenhouse gas emissions and water scarcity values estimated here align with studies from the UK and Europe (17,19,21,49,50) . At the time of writing, only one other study had been published on acidification and eutrophication impacts of beverages, and estimates differed significantly from those presented here (21) , most likely because acidification and eutrophication are highly region-dependent. No comparable published estimates of land or plastic use were identified. ...
Objective
Ultra-processed beverages (UPBs) have known adverse impacts on health, but their impact on the environment is not well understood across different environmental indicators. This study aimed to quantify the environmental impacts of water-based UPBs and bottled waters sold in Australia and assess the impacts of various scenarios which may reduce such impacts in the future.
Design
This study presents a quantitative environmental impact assessment of a major sub-category of UPBs (water-based UPBs, including soft drinks, energy drinks, cordials, fruit drinks) and non-UPBs (bottled waters) in Australia. Alternative mitigation scenarios based on existing health and environmental targets were also modelled using sales projections for 2027. Sales data from Euromonitor International were matched with environmental impact data from peer-reviewed lifecycle assessment databases. Environmental impact indicators included greenhouse gas emissions, land use, eutrophication potential, acidification potential, water scarcity and plastic use.
Setting
The Australian beverage supply in 2022 and projected sales for 2027.
Participants
N/A
Results
Environmental impacts of UPBs were higher than bottled waters. UPBs accounted for 81-99% of total environmental impacts, partly driven by the volume of sales. Reformulation, reducing UPB consumption and increasing recycling all led to meaningful reductions in environmental impacts but with diverse effects across different environmental indicators. The largest reductions occurred when policy scenarios were combined to represent a suite of policy actions which aimed to meet health and environmental targets (30-82% environmental savings).
Conclusions
The results indicate that implementing a suite of policies which act to target multiple drivers of environmental harm are likely to lead to the most environmental benefits.
... Given the goal of selecting the best material for packaging tomato-based products with the least negative environmental effects, many studies concluded that metal and glass packaging have the highest environmental impacts among different types of packaging material [8][9][10][11]43]. However, the reduction in the environmental impact associated with packaging materials recycling in the EoL phase has been overlooked. ...
Background: The tomato processing industry is a vital sector, with tomatoes being the primary vegetable for industrial transformation. To individuate potential actions to make the tomato processing industry more sustainable, a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was conducted for an Italian tomato processing company located in southern Italy. Methods: Foreground data were collected from the company, while background data were sourced from the Ecoinvent database. The assessment employed the CML-IA baseline (V3.5) method for midpoints and IMPACT 2002+ for endpoints. Results: The research revealed that a can of peeled tomatoes (400 g) and a bottle of tomato puree (500 g) were responsible for global warming potential (GWP) of 0.666 kg CO2eq and 0.479 kg CO2eq, respectively. The packaging phase is the primary contributor to adverse environmental effects and has been considered as the primary focus for improvement. The end-of-life (EoL) scenarios demonstrated that recycling packaging materials could significantly reduce CO2 emissions by 46% and 48% for metal and glass packaging, respectively. Conclusions: Moreover, the replacement of tinplate cans with glass jars as alternative packaging materials for peeled tomatoes, and glass bottles with carton-based containers or stand-up pouches as alternative packaging materials for tomato puree emerged as more environmentally friendly options across various environmental impact categories.
... In contrast, FLW reduction may be less important for decreasing the overall environmental burden of a food with a low burden for its production. In a study of carbonated drinks, packaging greatly contributed to the overall environmental impacts (from 49 % to 79 %, global warming potential [CO2eq]) (Amienyo et al., 2013) because beverage ingredients have relatively low environmental impacts among food categories. Therefore, packaging production can remarkably influence the LCA results of foods with low environmental burdens, and the development of packaging conditions should be prioritized over decreases in FLW to effectively reduce environmental burdens of the entire life cycle. ...
Packaging maintains quality and decreases food loss and waste (FLW); however, it creates environmental problems such as climate change. This review elucidates the contributions of packaging to the environmental impacts of the life cycle of foods and supports environmentally proper packaging that maintains the quality of foods and minimizes FLW. Many studies report that the food production stage is the most relevant process. This shows that additional production compensating for the FLW can increase the environmental burdens, and FLW reduction by packaging decreases the burden of the food life cycle. The lower the energy density of food (kcal/100 g) is, the greater the contribution of packaging. This supports decision making on which stages we should prioritize to minimize the environmental impacts. Food packaging systems requires environmentally optimized packaging that balances the direct (i.e., environmental burden for packaging production) and indirect (i.e., reduction in FLW and FLW-related environmental burden) influences.
... Notably, the study did not consider wastewater and solid waste aspects, offering specific insights into select facets of traditional apple cultivation's environmental footprint. Amienyo et al. (2012) assessed UK carbonated soft drinks' environmental impacts, emphasizing packaging's significant role (59-77%) and 1.5 million tons of CO 2 emissions annually. However, the study omitted analysis of solid waste and wastewater categories. ...
Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) acts as a tool to implement circular economy in the supply chain and achieve a more sustainable business model. Therefore, this chapter explains the different phases of the LCSA: design, extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, packaging, distributing, product use and end-of-life. It also provides examples of businesses that embed sustainability practices under each of these phases by cutting inputs such as energy, water and materials or outputs such as greenhouse gas emissions and waste, as well as how these practices cut costs or increase revenues. Furthermore, this chapter demonstrates business models that are originally built on incorporating sustainability within their core activities, highlighting which phases of their supply chain target sustainability. The provided examples are real-life businesses of different sizes and types from a variety of industry sectors. They mainly operate in Egypt, whether local or multinational companies.
Biofilm formation on food packaging surfaces is a major issue in the industry, as it leads to contamination, reduces shelf life, and poses risks to human health. To mitigate these effects, developing smart coatings that can actively sense and combat microbial growth has become a critical research focus. This study is motivated by the need for intelligent packaging solutions that integrate antimicrobial agents and sensors for real‐time contamination detection. It is hypothesized that combining conducting polymers (CPs) with nanomaterials can enhance antimicrobial efficacy while maintaining the mechanical integrity and environmental stability required for food packaging applications. Through the application of numerous technologies like surface modification, CP–nanoparticle integration, and multilayered coating, the antimicrobial performance and sensor capabilities of these materials were analyzed. Case studies showed a 90% inhibition of bacterial growth and a tenfold decrease in viable bacterial counts with AgNPs incorporation, extending strawberries’ shelf life by 40% and maintaining fish freshness for an additional 5 days. Moreover, multilayered CP coatings in complex systems have been shown to reduce oxidative spoilage in nuts and dried fruits by up to 85%, while maintaining the quality of leafy greens for up to 3 weeks under suboptimal conditions. Environmental assessments indicated a 30% reduction in carbon footprint when CP coatings were combined with biodegradable polymers, contributing to a more transparent and reliable food supply chain. CP‐based films integrated with intelligent sensors exhibit high sensitivity, detecting ammonia concentrations below 500 ppb, and offer significant selectivity for sensing hazardous gases. These findings indicate that CP‐based smart coatings markedly enhance food safety and sustainability in packaging applications.
Purpose
There are increasing concerns regarding detrimental health effects of added sugar in food and drink products. Non-nutritive sweeteners (NNS) and sweetness enhancers (SE) are seen as viable alternatives. Much work has been done on health and safety of NNS&SE when consumed in place of sugar, but very little on their sustainability. This work aims to bridge that gap with an environmental study of replacing added sugar with NNS&SE in the context of drink and yoghurt.
Methods
A life cycle assessment (LCA) approach was used to compare environmental impact of a drink and yoghurt, sweetened with sucrose, to those sweetened with NNSs or an SE: stevia rebaudioside A, sucralose, aspartame, neotame, and thaumatin. Primary ingredients data were taken from preparation of foodstuffs for clinical trials. Results are reported via the ReCiPe 2016 (H) method, with focus on land use, global warming potential (GWP), marine eutrophication, mineral resource scarcity, and water consumption. Impacts are reported in terms of 1 kg product. Scenarios explore sensitivity of the LCA results to change in background processes, functional unit, and sweetener type. This research was conducted as part of the EU Horizon 2020 project SWEET (sweeteners and sweetness enhancers: impact on health, obesity, safety, and sustainability).
Results and discussion
Replacing sugar with an NNS or part-replacing with an SE is shown to reduce environmental impact across most impact categories, for example, on a mass basis, GWP for a drink reduces from 0.61 to approx. 0.51 kgCO2-eq/kg and for a yoghurt from 4.15 to approx. 3.73 kgCO2-eq/kg. Variability in environmental impact is shown to be relatively small between the NNSs, indicating that choice of NNS is less important than the reformulation changes required to accommodate the loss of sugar. Reporting impact in terms of calorie density, instead of mass, shows greater reduction in environmental impact when using an NNS or SE and shows how important functional unit is when reporting impact of these products.
Conclusion
This study is the first to compare food or drink products sweetened with sugar, NNS, or SE. Results show that there is great potential to reduce environmental impact of sweetened drinks and yoghurts. Moreover, the choice of NNS does not greatly affect the environmental impact of either product. Therefore, this research shows that choices relating to replacing added sugar may be based more upon health or formulation needs and less on environmental concerns.
Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) has become the most favourable packaging material world-wide for beverages. The reason for this development is the excellent material properties of the PET material, especially its unbreakability and the very low weight of the bottles compared to glass bottles of the same filling volume. Nowadays, PET bottles are used for softdrinks, mineral water, energy drinks, ice teas as well as for more sensitive beverages like beer, wine and juices. For a long time, however, a bottle-to-bottle recycling of post-consumer PET packaging materials was not possible, because of the lack of knowledge about contamination of packaging polymers during first use or recollection. In addition, the decontamination efficiencies of recycling processes were in most cases unknown. During the last 20 years, PET recollection as well as recycling processes made a huge progress. Today, sophisticated decontamination processes, so-called super-clean recycling processes, are available for PET, which are able to decontaminate post-consumer contaminants to concentration levels of virgin PET materials. In the 1991, the first food contact approval of post-consumer PET in direct food contact applications has been given for post-consumer recycled PET in the USA. Now, 20 years after the first food approval of a PET super-clean recycling process, this article gives an overview over the world-wide progress of the bottle-to-bottle recycling of PET beverage bottles, e.g. the recollection amount of post-consumer PET bottles and the super-clean recycling technologies.
This work aims at examining, from an energy and environmental standpoint, one production cycle which is extremely energy-consuming, namely the glass production for drink containers. More specifically, the industrial process is first analysed as is, so as to evaluate and assess its energy needs and its associated environmental impact. As a second step the influence of glass container recycle and reuse on energy consumption and pollutant emission is investigated. To this end the recycling chain operation is illustrated and appropriate working hypotheses for the modified process are formulated, so that its energy and environmental performance can be evaluated. Finally, the two production scenarios are compared by means of LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) methodology, to the purpose of determining the best recycling percentage for glass containers from the standpoint of energy consumption and pollutant emission minimization, taking also into account the waste legislation currently in force.
Goal, Scope and Background
Agricultural production includes not only crop production, but also food processing, transport, distribution, preparation, and disposal. The effects of all these must be considered and controlled if the food chain is to be made sustainable. The goal of this case study was to identify and review the significant areas of potential environmental impacts across the whole life cycle of cane sugar on the island of Mauritius.
Methods
The functional unit was one tonne of exported raw sugar from the island. The life cycle investigated includes the stage of cane cultivation and harvest, cane burning, transport, fertilizer and herbicide manufacture, cane sugar manufacture and electricity generation from bagasse. Data was gathered from companies, factories, sugar statistics, databases and literature. Energy depletion, climate change, acidification, oxidant formation, nutrification, aquatic ecotoxicity and human toxicity were assessed.
Results and Discussion
The inventory of the current sugar production system revealed that the production of one tonne of sugar requires, on average, a land area of 0.12 ha, the application of 0.84 kg of herbicides and 16.5 kg of N-fertilizer, use of 553 tons of water and 170 tonne-km of transport services. The total energy consumption is about 14235 MJ per tonne of sugar, of which fossil fuel consumption accounts for 1995 MJ and the rest is from renewable bagasse. 160 kg of CO2 per tonne of sugar is released from fossil fuel energy use and the net avoided emissions of CO2 on the island due to the use of bagasse as an energy source is 932,000 tonnes. 1.7 kg TSP, 1.21 kg SO2,1.26 kgNOxand 1.26 kg CO are emitted to the air per tonne of sugar produced. 1.7 kg N, 0.002 kg herbicide, 19.1 kg COD, 13.1 kgTSS and 0.37 kg PO43- are emitted to water per tonne of sugar produced. Cane cultivation and harvest accounts for the largest environmental impact (44%) followed by fertilizer and herbicide manufacture (22%), sugar processing and electricity generation (20%), transportation (13%) and cane burning (1%). Nutrification is the main impact followed by acidification and energy depletion.
Conclusions
There are a number of options for improvement of the environmental performance of the cane-sugar production chain. Cane cultivation, and fertilizer and herbicide manufacture, were hotspots for most of the impact categories investigated. Better irrigation systems, precision farming, optimal use of herbicides, centralisation of sugar factories, implementation of co-generation projects and pollution control during manufacturing and bagasse burning are measures that would considerably decrease resource use and environmental impacts.
Recommendation and Outlook
LCA was shown to be a valuable tool to assess the environmental impacts throughout the food production chain and to evaluate government policies on agricultural production systems.
Most market products are offered to consumers in a wide range of packaging alternatives and the proportion of municipal solid waste attributed to packaging increases year after year. This study assesses the environmental impact of the commonest packaging options on the Spanish market for juice, beer and water. The production of different packaging materials and sizes was evaluated along with their method of final disposal (landfilling, incineration and recycling). Recycling was found to be the most environmentally friendly disposal option for all the packaging alternatives compared, and either incineration or landfilling was considered the second best option depending on the packaging material. The packaging options with the lowest environmental impacts were aseptic carton and plastic packaging (for sizes greater than 1 l). The environmental profile of the whole beverage life cycle was evaluated. The results of the evaluation of the entire life cycle show that the impact of beer packaging is similar to the impact of beer production and these are the highest impact stages in the life cycle of beer. Packaging was found to have the highest environmental impact in the life cycles of water and juice.
Sustainability indicators Water UK: London. www.water.org.uk/home/news/press-releases/ sustain- ability-indicators
- Uk Water
Water UK (2009) Sustainability indicators 2008/2009. Water UK:
London. www.water.org.uk/home/news/press-releases/ sustain-
ability-indicators-2008-09/sustainability-2009.pdf
Food industry sustainability strategy Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: London. www. defra. gov. uk/ publications
- Defra
Life cycle inventory of three single-serving soft drink containers. Franklin Associates, A Division of ERG: Praire Village
- Franklin Associates
Ullmann’s encyclopaedia of industrial chemistry
- M Bohnet
- C J Brinker
- B Cornils
Bohnet M, Brinker CJ, Cornils B (eds) (2003) Ullmann's encyclopaedia of industrial chemistry. Wiley, New York
British Glass (2009) Recycled content. British Glass: Sheffield.
www.britglass.org.uk/publications
Market transformation programme, BNCR: 36: direct emission of refrigerant gases. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
- Defra
Defra (2007) Market transformation programme, BNCR: 36: direct
emission of refrigerant gases. Department for Environment, Food
and Rural Affairs, London