In most developing countries like Nigeria, low to medium-income earners consume packaged water coming from sachet water. Sachet water is made from LDPE. I am looking at each packaging holistically from LCA, ease of recycling to how much useful products can be recovered from it through recycling.
However, what I find is that the papers on these are rather focused on other things than what I would like to know. For example, while there are several papers on pyrolysis of LDPE, most are focused on the viability of the process and characterising or quantifying the yield. None compares their endproducts gotten from PET or HDPE with LDPE and so on, to highlight the importance of one alternative over the other. So I would appreciate if someone can outline some of the issues associated with each or point me to some resources to get clear guidance on the advantages and pitfalls of each beyond the fact that LDPEs get stuck to machines during recycling.
Ultimately I will like to bring clarity to a question like should the Government ban a product like sachet water because it qualifies as a single-use plastic and is made of LDPE which has the lowest value when recycled compared to alternatives like HDPE or PET?
Good morning. I don't really know how the situation is in Nigeria regarding recycling, but I'll give you some thoughts from Europe. Here, many people are quickly discussing technology, polymer's chemistry and so on. But, to my mind, to many people forget that recycling issues are mainly issues related to the economy and social sciences. Indeed, prior to do something technical with our plastic waste, with have to collect it! People are not recycling equally, hence this is really hard to predic how much waste will be collected. Moreover, few processes exist in Europe to correctly recycle polymers at the value they desserve. You can have the best technology on Earth, and know perfecty how to recycle a polymer, but if the process doesn't exist at the scale of a collectivity, what's the point?
However, you seem really aware of the recycling capacity in Nigeria, so my message will be probably useless. To ban LDPE could be interesting is recycling it is pointless. If you already perform holistic LCA, you probably have a good view on it. But are there alternative to these LDPE sachet water? To ban it will probably be beneficial to the environment, but what about people? Are there some people relying on the collection of this waste? The recycling processes? Will the interdiction of this LDPE lead to better or worse behaviour, consumption patterns?
I hope my messy thoughts will help you.
Dear Uchenna,
since you are testing a holistic LCA, it may be appropriate to perform a separate analysis for all three plastic products (LDPE, HDPE and PET) in the EoL stage. The LCA analysis should be performed by introducing the plastic waste into section C3 (recycling) and not scenario C4 (thermic treatment). Some LCA software distinguishes between C3 and C4 processes. I would turn on the plastic product leaving the Use section as an output with a delivery process. I performed an entire life cycle analysis on polypropylene and solved it that way. Best regards, Viktoria
You can find data about PET in the following link
Chapter Recycling of PET in asphalt concrete
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