Circular packaging plastic usage at construction sites: A study to increase the circularity of packaging plastic at construction sites in Sweden

Sammanfattning

n 2017 there were 349 000 000 tonnes of plastics produced worldwide (Plastics Europe,2022) and 2 411 000 tonnes of plastics were produced and imported in Sweden, withthe packaging industry being the single most user of plastic followed by the constructionsector (Almasai et al., 2019). Of the total waste sent to incineration almost half of thewaste was from packaging plastic (Almasai et al., 2019).The aim of the project was to develop circular strategies that promote efficient plasticpackaging usage at construction sites. The first step was to identify the total quantityand type of packaging plastic used and to quantify its presence in waste containers atthe construction sites by using Material Flow Analysis (MFA). From the results, it wasobserved that Polyethylene (PE) was the major plastic type present at construction sitesand the combustible containers had the highest quantities of plastic. Due to unreliabledata, a worst case and a best case scenario were made with total recyclability of 5.8% and40% respectively. An Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) was performed with the results obtainedfrom MFA to create a baseline scenario that was used for formulating circular strategies.A total of 25 circular strategies were developed from seven design principles adapted tocircular economy.The suitable circular strategies were selected by a two step screening process which includedenvironmental impacts and relevant framework. From the results, it could beobserved that circular strategies with an emphasis on improving sorting and recycling,lowers the environmental impacts more than other strategies i.e transportation strategies.The circular strategy Less plastic types had the least amount of environmental impacts.This was due to the increased recyclability to 90%, which was achieved through improvedsorting. This was accomplished by switching all hard plastic to the same type of Polypropylene(PP). An additional recycling scenario of 50% was considered because achievinga 90% recycling target might be difficult in the real world, given different workingconditions at different construction sites. The results showed that even reaching a 50%recycling rate has significantly lesser impacts than the current scenario.Since PE was the major plastic type observed at the construction sites, it could be easierfor suppliers to shift all hard plastic to PE instead of PP. Therefore the recycling scenarioswere tested with PE and the results showed that the environmental impacts were close toPP.