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Managing materials from cradle to grave is literally everyone’s responsibility, whether manufacturing, purchasing, using, or pitching a product. In late March, the Sustainable Materials Management Coalition (Coalition) released the publication Guidance on Life-Cycle Thinking and Its Role in Environmental Decision Making, which offers insights into how much of a difference a change of mind-set can make.
At its most simple, life-cycle thinking recognizes that each step of the creation, use, and disposal of a product requires materials and energy and produces waste. According to the Coalition, “Life-cycle thinking helps us to identify priorities, design and select products, and make sound environmental choices. It helps us get beyond one-dimensional goals like ‘zero waste’ and automatic preferences for attributes like ‘compostable’ or ‘recycled content,’ and it allows us to identify the most effective strategies in specific situations.”
In other words, life-cycle thinking does not stick with the seemingly obvious or traditional but digs deeper to find the real facts. For example, a lesson in source reduction came from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (ODEQ), which did a study to assess packaging for shipping nonbreakable materials to determine which were preferable based on energy, solid waste, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions consideration. The findings showed that, in most cases, flexible paper or plastic shipping bags (including padded bags) that were neither recycled nor recyclable were the more environmentally sound choice than cardboard boxes and associated fill material with recycled content and/or recyclability.
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Why? Because the flexible bags simply contain less material, are more compact, require less material to be produced, and ship more efficiently, all of which require less energy in manufacturing and shipping. In fact, the study showed that the worst-performing shipping bag still required one-third less energy than the best-performing box.
Another common belief is that of diverting waste from landfills as the primary reason for recycling. While that is an important part of it, the Coalition cites several LCAs that showed the true benefits of recycling are “overwhelmingly” found in the replacement of virgin materials and the elimination of the environmental impacts associated with producing them.
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For example, “the energy expended in recycling a kilogram of aluminum cans saves approximately 95% of the energy consumed in producing a kilogram of virgin aluminum,” which does not even include additional environmental impacts associated with bauxite mining and aluminum production. Another LCA by the ODEQ provided calculations that showed aluminum scrap could actually be shipped more than 500,000 miles by oceangoing vessels before it exceeded the amount of energy used to produce the same amount of virgin aluminum. To put that in perspective, the distance from the Earth to the moon is less than 250,000 miles.
Similarly, another ODEQ evaluated how reducing curbside recycling pickup frequency would impact recycling rates. The study found that reducing pickups from weekly to every other week would not only reduce recycling rates but also the loss of recyclables to replace virgin feedstocks in manufacturing would be great. According to the Coalition, “the resulting reduction in GHGs is approximately 38 times greater than the GHG emissions associated with extracting, refining, transporting, and burning the fossil fuels used by the collection truck.” Moreover, the study showed that while reducing pickups would reduce truck emissions, if this reduction caused even a small decrease in the quantity or quality of collected materials, the result would essentially result in a net increase in GHG emissions.