Potential environmental impacts of plastic packaging of consumer goods in Mediterranean Region

Synthetic plastics produced from non-renewable resources are widely utilized through its useful practices. Packaging is also an industry that highly consumes plastics around 44%, when other plastic industries are considered. The main polymer types, polyolefins, polystyrene, polyethylene-terephthalate, which are broadly used in consumer goods packaging involve single use plastics and cause damage on the environment including marine ecosystem. As impacts on the marine environment has also gained an extensive potential through Mediterranean Action Plan, main objective of this study is determined to assess potential environmental impacts of three plastic packaging materials in Turkey, Italy and Spain which represent nearly 14% of plastic pollution and 100 ton/day of plastic waste disposal in the region. Five environmental impact categories of climate change, acidification, resource depletion, ozone depletion, and photochemical ozone formation were studied to obtain results of packaging materials according to ReCiPe 2016 v1.1 and CML2001–Jan.2016 methodologies with GaBi 9.1.2 software. This study has shown that polypropylene material has had the highest environmental impact results in CML and ReCiPe methodologies due to fossil dependency. Moreover, scenarios with higher renewable energy share in their electricity grid, have received normalization results that have lower environmental impact. Packaging reduction targets set by European Commission were also lowered the environmental impact scores in the implemented scenarios. Climate change and resource depletion impact categories were obtained highest normalization scores among the five environmental impact categories. Also, scenarios with end-of-life options which includes higher recycling shares and lower incineration shares have taken lower environmental impact scores.