Goal, scope and backgroundThe industrial packages sector has great importance for the transport sector in Europe. These containers, mainly wooden pallets
and spools, are subject to European legislation, which promotes their reuse and recycling. This study uses life cycle assessment
(LCA) to assess the environmental impact of the current management system in this sector and the benefits and drawbacks of
different reuse intensities as a waste prevention strategy as opposed to the recycling option.
Materials and methodsIn this paper, four case studies located in Spain and representative of the wooden package sector in Europe are analysed:
high reuse pallet, low reuse pallet, low reuse spool and null reuse spool. For the LCA study cases, the functional unit is
that required to satisfy the transport necessity of 1,000t by road. The impact and energy consumption assessment methods
used are CML 2 Baseline 2000 and Cumulative Energy Demand. Data are mostly provided by the leading enterprises and organisations
in this sector.
ResultsThe paper provides, as a first result, a comprehensive inventory of the systems under study. Secondly, our assessment shows
that the systems with higher reuse intensity show a reduction in energy and wood consumption and all the environmental impact
categories except for the global warming potential from 34.0% to 81.0% in the pallet study cases and from 50.4% to 72.8% in
the spool ones. This reduction is at the expense of the maintenance stage, which on the contrary increases its impact, although
it is still relatively small—less than 7% in all the impact categories and flow indicators of the study cases. The highest
impact stages are transport, raw material extraction and the process chain. The final disposal and maintenance stages are
the lowest impact, contributing at most to less than 30% of the impact in the pallet study cases and 10% in the spool cases.
DiscussionWood consumption (WC), directly related to the number of containers needed to satisfy the functional unit, is the main factor
in determining the impact of the stages, especially in the raw materials extraction and process chain stages, assuming that
these are undertaken with the same technologies in all the case studies. Other variables, such as the management system, the
maintenance index and the final disposal scenario, affect the impact of the remaining stages: transport, maintenance and final
disposal. The global warming potential results obtained demonstrate the environmental benefits of using containers made of
a renewable resource such as wood instead of using other materials, but these results are not expected to prioritise the lower
reuse systems because of their better performance in this category.
ConclusionsReuse, a strategy capable of reducing the environmental impacts of the wooden container systems, is preferable to recycling,
while the package maintenance tasks are still feasible. Therefore, reuse, combined with recycling as final disposal, should
be encouraged to reduce the demand for natural resources and the waste generated.
RecommendationsBased on these results, attention should be paid to the maintenance stage, which, being the lowest-impact one, could substantially
reduce the impact of the remaining stages.