LCA credibility crisis? Unreliable methodologies leading circular packaging economy astray, warns report

11 Aug 2023 --- Eunomia Research and Consulting has demonstrated in a new report how LCA designs and methodologies typically produce biased and suboptimal results. The report published by Zero Waste Europe examines several recent, highly publicized LCAs on the environmental impact of reusable packaging formats for the takeaway sector compared to single-use designs. 

The findings show that by manipulating metrics and making base assumptions, reuse models could be shown as drastically more damaging and costly to the environment and economy than traditional recycling systems. 

The report’s authors looked at three LCAs on this topic to expose how unreliable data and test parameters can produce skewed statistics, which can then influence policy change (such as the EU’s PPWD) and consumer perception. 

The paper aims to illustrate how independently conducted LCAs on any topic can (and almost always do) produce favorable outcomes for the companies and associations commissioning them. 

We look at the criticisms levied against each study and the assumptions and uncertainty underlying them, and how the use of “what if” scenarios envisioning new research designs can radically alter findings. 

The report shows that study methods can be designed to produce favorable outcomes for stakeholders.Marred baselines 
The first example – a McDonald’s commissioned study – projected that 2030 mandatory reuse targets set by PPWD revisions would increase plastic packaging waste by “up to 300%” for dine-in consumption and “up to 1500%” for takeaway. 

The paper notes this study was sponsored by McDonald’s, though no mention or indication of lobbying practices was indicated in the publication. 

According to Eunomia, the study relies on very few assumptions, and consequently, it is “almost impossible to determine how the analysis was constructed.” No peer review was undertaken. 

The study also assumes large and systemic improvements in recycling infrastructure but no improvements in reuse systems. For example, reusable cups are said to use nine times more plastic than single-use designs, which is inconsistent with the further claim that reusables require 50-100 uses to create the same plastic waste generation, states the paper. 

No insights into effectively addressing the contamination issues associated with recycling are provided either, which are essential to achieving significant improvements in recycling rates. 

Moreover, the burden of water usage is made unclear. Water “used” to wash reusable packaging is often returned to the system, whereas water “consumed” means a net loss. 

This distinction is not made clear, and quantifying water's impact on the environment can then become misleading. 

Confidential and disaggregated data 
The second study analyzed by Eunomia, a peer-reviewed LCA commissioned by the European Paper Packaging Alliance (EPPA), is also marked as an industry lobbying effort since the association’s interests lie in continuing to sell single-use items. 

The EPPA says the LCAs it has commissioned are reliable and that critics lack technical understanding.Many of the same criticisms levied against the McDonald’s-commissioned study apply to the EPPA report. Assumptions regarding consumer behavior lead the results into likely unrealistic findings, for example. 

The EPPA study assumes that 50% of journeys made to return reusable products are dedicated (made solely for the purpose of returning a product), with a “conservative” number set at 20%. “These assumptions heavily contribute to more than 50% of the climate change impact in the study and strongly influence the resulting conclusions,” reads Eunomia’s analysis. 

“Considering the nature of convenience in fast food consumption, the EPPA suggestion that 20% of all individual containers would require a dedicated return journey does not appear highly credible, and 50% as a base case is a bold assumption in light of the lack of data.” 

As with the McDonald’s study, the EPPA report also covers nine different container types but presents the results as one aggregated figure. In this way, poor results from different product designs can be “stacked” together on the baseline scenario to produce a beneficial outcome for single-use systems. 

But Matti Rantanen, director general of the EPPA, states that its two commissioned LCAs “stand out in terms of robustness and reliability.”

“They are the only ones to adopt a system approach (not a product-to-product comparison) using representative assumptions and primary data for the environmental ‘hotspots’ along with an extensive sensitivity analysis,” he says. 

“Unfortunately, much of the criticism from proponents of reuse stems from technical misunderstandings and biased comparisons with studies that do not adhere to the proper ISO standards and use general models for comparison.”

A “post-LCA world” 
The criticisms raised in ZWE and Eunomia’s report show that LCAs can be easily manipulated to produce favorable outcomes for the parties commissioning them – regardless of the “independence” of the analysts. 

At Interpack 2023, Paul Foulkes-Arellano, circularity educator at Circuthon and non-executive director of Sparxell, told Packaging Insights we are living in a “post-LCA world.” 

“An LCA is a snapshot in time – it’s literally looking at one metric, whereas the metrics are four-dimensional if you add time.” 

We have contacted McDonald’s, ZWE and Eunomia for comment. 

By Louis Gore-Langton