US consultants Franklin Associates reviewed the shipment of ten items over the entire life cycle of reusable plastic and single-use corrugated containers. The US Reusable Pallet & Container Coalition is a Washington trade group that represents those in the reusable transportation packaging industry.

On average across all ten produce applications, RPCs:

• Required 39% less total energy
• Produced 95% less total solid waste
• Generated 29% less total greenhouse gas emissions

The study - Life Cycle Inventory of Reusable Plastic Containers and Display-Ready Corrugated Containers Used for Fresh Produce Applications - aimed to evaluate the energy, solid wastes, and atmospheric and waterborne emissions associated with RPCs and DRCs used for shipping fresh produce.

The LCI quantifies the energy use and environmental emissions associated with the life cycle of specific products "from cradle to grave." Ten different produce applications (1,000 tons of each type of produce) were modeled individually for shipping in RPCs and in DRCs.

The ten produce applications used in the study were as follows:

• Apples
• Bell peppers
• Carrots
• Grapes
• Lettuce-head
• Oranges
• Peaches/nectarines
• Onions
• Tomatoes
• Strawberries

The functional unit was 1,000 short tons or 2 million pounds of each type of produce hauled between grower and retailer.

One factor dominates the findings. Multiple trips ("turns") in an RPC closed operating system lead to materials efficiencies that create relatively low environmental burdens that are only partly offset by backhaul and cleaning steps.

In the DRC system a container is manufactured for each trip to retail. Recovery and recycling rates for DRCs are high, but the production step (including recycling) introduces a higher level of burdens. In the case of RPCs and DRCs, multiple reuses of RPCs result in lower environmental burdens than single-trip DRC containers.

The more lifetime uses that can be achieved for an RPC, the lower the environmental burdens for container production that are allocated to each use of the container. Thus, the success of a reusable container system depends on keeping RPCs in circulation for repeated reuse and recycling. Maximum reductions in container production burdens and disposal burdens are achieved by multiple uses of a container without remanufacturing (i.e., RPC reuse compared to DRC recycling).

Total System Energy Results

In almost every product application studied, the benefits of the closed-loop RPC pooling operation more than offset the benefits of lighter container weight and a high recycling rate for corrugated containers. As a result, total energy requirements for RPCs are lower than corresponding DRCs in all average use scenarios. RPCs also have lower total energy requirements than corresponding DRCs in eight out of ten alternative scenarios evaluating the effects of lower reuse rates and higher loss rates for RPCs compared to lightweighted DRCs.

Total System GHG Results

GHG results generally track closely with fossil fuel consumption, since that is the source of the majority of GHG emissions. GHG comparisons for the RPC and DRC average scenarios are lower for RPCs for 18 of 20 average scenarios covering 10 produce applications.

Total System Solid Waste Results

RPCs produce less solid waste than corresponding DRCs in all produce applications and scenarios.

This is due to several key factors:

• The burdens for production of RPCs are allocated over a (large) number of useful lives
• RPCs that remain in the closed-loop pooling system are recycled when they are removed from service
• Losses of RPCs from the closed-loop system are small, ES-4
• DRCs make only one trip before they are recycled (requiring repulping and remanufacture) or disposed

EPA has long used the waste management hierarchy of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle." This LCI considers all three techniques: reduction in weight of DRCs, reuse of RPCs, and recycling of both RPCs and DRCs. The results indicate that, for the produce applications studied, reuse with closed-loop recycling at end of life is the most efficient means of reducing not only solid waste but also energy use and GHG emissions.

Reduction in container weight was observed to reduce not only the environmental burdens for container production and end-of-life management, but also the burdens for container transportation (less weight to haul = less fuel consumption). In this study, lightweighting was evaluated only for DRCs; however, the observations about the benefits of lightweighting hold true for any type of container.

Copies of preface and executive summary (15 pages, 0.3MB) are available from the RPCC's website at:

http://www.rpcc.us/userimages/Fact%20Sheet-LCI%20Study.pdf

Or we can email you a copy.

Copies of the full study (80 pages) are available at US$375 from the RPCC at:

http://www.rpcc.us