ABSTRACT

Plastic waste can cause a variety of environmental impacts and pose a significant challenge for the consumer product industry. Understanding the environmental tradeoffs of various end-of-life strategies for plastic waste is thus important for developing and deploying appropriate sustainable solutions. The study employed life cycle assessment (LCA) to assess the environmental impacts of various plastic waste treatment systems from existing pyrolysis plant for petroleum product recovery. The study considered four different waste treatment scenarios for plastic waste: landfill disposal ofmixed waste; incineration ofmixed waste; recycling ofmixed waste; and recycling of recyclable waste. The results demonstrated a considerable advantage of recycling over landfill disposal or incineration. The main environmental benefit is from the recycle of plastics that can substitute for the production ofplastics from virgin materials. From a sensitivity analysis, five key parameters are identified that affect the aggregate environmental impact including mass fraction offilms in the waste, recycling rate, utilization rate, waste-to-energy conversion rate, and the type of energy can be substituted by the recovered energy from incineration.