Sustainability assessment of recyclable and reusable plastic cosmetic packages

Abstract

The importance of sustainability has become increasingly relevant in past years, with the government, businesses, and the general public alike striving to improve their environmental footprint in various aspects of their life. This sense of sustainable urgency also applies to the cosmetic industry, which contributes significantly to the global plastic manufactured and used worldwide. The main tool used to assess the proposed methodology was the life cycle analysis (LCA). The primary goal of this study was to analyse the total life cycle environmental impact of a reusable cosmetic product and a recyclable cosmetic product. This was done by creating several different versions of the existing cosmetic product being analysed, with each version housing a specific attribute change. Some examples of the attribute alterations include applying different rates of dematerialisation, adding recycling potential, and altering the product’s design to study the effect that this has on sustainability. In total seven versions were proposed, including the original existing version which was treated as the benchmark. Results showed that the most environmentally friendly version proved to be the design which eliminated the use of the pan altogether, thus allowing the cosmetic powder to be inserted directly into the case itself. However, this was deemed as not being entirely realistic, since the pan component design cannot be altered easily. Thus, the most environmental version resulted in being the version which is both reusable and recyclable. In addition to this, the variation of the environmental footprint with regards to all phases of the plastic cosmetic product’s life cycle, i.e. raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, use, and end of life, were also analysed. It was found that throughout all the seven versions, the biggest contributor by far was contributed to the raw material extraction and manufacturing stages. Furthermore, the effect of how altering different parameters such as the manufacturing location, and end of life location were studied. Results showed that manufacturing in Malta proved to be 13% more environmentally friendly than manufacturing in China, and that using and disposing of this product in Europe proved to be on average 44% more environmentally friendly then the proposed alternative in the United States of America. Finally, the cost aspect of sustainability was also discussed by using the life cycle costing tool. In summary, this exercise found that the highest part contributor to the case assembly was the mirror, and that manufacturing in China proved to be cheaper overall than manufacturing in Malta.