Case Study: PET Water Bottles LCA Using Ecoinvent 3.1

Hi and welcome back to Open LCA video tutorials. Today we're going to go through a case study on PET water bottles using the Ecoinvent 3. 1 database.

The case study is available online at openca. org/learn more. And this would be part one of two.

The first video showing one way of modeling and the second video show a different option for modeling. So as I mentioned the case study is already available online. So if you want to see any more details on it, then freefield to check it out.

I will put a link to the case study in the description box below. So, this is the initial situation we're looking at. We want to look at a water bottle made of PET, PP for the label and highdensity polyethylene for the lid.

So, we're obviously going to require some transportation in the production process as well as the water itself. And a bit of electricity goes into processing. It's easy to estimate the transport distances for production and obviously the amount of water we're going to be using, but we don't have any reliable information on the amount of electricity being used in this study.

So, we're actually not going to take that into account, but assume that the amount of electricity being used at different production locations would be about the same and thus could be left out for the purposes of a comparison. So, what is the life cycle of a PET bottle look like? Well, it starts out with the plastic granulate production.

The plastic granulate for the highdensity polyethylene, the polyropylene and the polyethylene terolate for the plastic components is first produced. Then it is transported and then the components themselves are produced. This is what's called a PET preform.

The lid and here's a label roll. These are then again transported to another location where the bottle is then filled with water after it has been blown up and the lid and label are added to it. The next step, it's transported to another location, namely the point of sale or a warehouse or some sort of other location.

There are likely other processes involved in the life cycle of a water bottle, namely the recycling processes, additional transport processes, how the recycled bottles are shaved into flakes and reused as new plastic granulate. But we won't be including any of these processes within the system boundaries of this study. For the purposes of this study, we thought it would be interesting to look at production taking place in different regions.

The ecoinvent databases make it possible to compare values for different regions. So we thought we would look at production in Germany compared to production in Asia. So we have three different cases that we will be modeling in this case study.

In case one, all of the production phases take place within Germany. So the production site of the granulates is in Germany. The next site is where the plastic components are made.

The preform, the lid and the label. And in the next site, the preform is blown into the bottle. The label is added as well as the lid and it is filled with water.

And the fourth site is the point of sale. In case two, we're going to be looking at a life cycle that begins in China with the granular production. These granulates are then transported with a train to Turkey and in Turkey the plastic granulates are then made into the plastic components and the bottle is filled with water and the filled water bottle is then transported to Germany.

In case three, the plastic granulate production is also in China this time in eastern China and transported with a ship to Turkey and then filled with water and the full bottle is once again transported to Germany. So we have three different case studies that we're going to be looking at and we're going to be using the Ecoin 3. 1 database in order to model our study.

So let's take a look at how we do that in the software. Okay. So here's the latest version of open LCA 1.

4. 1 beta 6 which I will be using to model today. So I've already imported the Ecoin 3.

1 allocation default. If you'd like to learn how to import databases into Open RCA, we do have videos on that. I will put also the links to those in the description box below.

So the first thing that we have to do when we want to start looking at modeling is we have to think about what product it is that we want to produce. So in our case study, we're looking at producing a water bottle. So we have to create a new flow, which is the first step.

So, if I right click on the flow folder, I can click on new flow. And I'm going to name it water bottle and give it the flow type product. The reference flow property of the bottle itself is going to be number of items.

We're going to be looking at a,000 water bottles as that is the functional unit of the paper. And then click on finish. Now I want to modify or produce basically this water bottle.

So how do I do that? I need to create a process to produce the bottle. So I right click on the process folder on new process.

And I'm going to name this study or this process rather water bottle production case one. We don't need to create a new product flow for for the process because that's the step we just did beforehand. So I will select the water bottle as a quantitative reference and click finish.

And now this process opens up. And here on the general information tab, we have the possibility to create a product system among other things, but we will do that once we finish putting in our inputs and outputs. So, as I mentioned as we were looking at the map if we're looking at three different cases and case one is going to be the production within Germany.

So, we basically have two different options for modeling this case study. One option would be to take all of the processes that are involved in your production and include them as inputs and have one process for the production of one product. Another option is to break down the production chain into different processes and connect them with one another.

Option number one is what we're going to be looking at in this video and this is also described in the paper. And option number two is something that we're going to look at in the next video. So in this video, we're going to make three different cases for three different bottles dependent on how they were produced.

So we start off by producing our granulate. So in order to add an input, I can click on the green button here and we want to find the granulate for the production of PET. [Music] So you can either search through the folders or type in a filter and when I go through I can see that we have polyethylene terflet a granulate we want to select the bottle grade and in case one we're going to be producing in Germany.

So I'm going to select the reer which is representative of Europe for my case. So I select that and click on okay. Now I need to look at my amount.

Now for amount you have the option to either put in the values manually or to create parameters. Let's say I want to create a parameter. So I first go to the parameters tab and add a parameter for the weight and say weight polyethylene toolate.

And in this case study the weight of the pet is 60 g. So 0. 06 kg.

Now that I have this parameter set, I can use it in my inputs and this value will automatically be calculated as you can see when you click here on the right and my kilogram of units is correct. So my next component is the [Music] polyropylene. So we search through for the polyropylene granulate.

Again here you have the granulate for the region of Europe. cells like that and I can add a parameter for that. And the weight of the polyropylene label is 1 g.

So 0. 001 kilogram. And the same goes for the poly ethylene high density.

And here once again the European and the weight for that is 0. 04. [Music] 04.

Okay. So after we have our granulates, we're going to transport them, namely 200 km. All of the values are also again you can see in the paper.

So we need some transportation with a freight truck. [Music] So once again I look for the transportation in Europe. And here I'm going to change my unit to kilogram km because we're working with kilogram.

And then I'm going to also set parameters once again for both the weight as well as the distance. So let's add a distance one as well as the weight bottle empty. The distance one is the first distance that we're going to be traveling and the weight bottle empty because we're basically transporting the weight of all these components together.

So the distance as I mentioned is 200 km and the weight of the empty bottle is 0. 65 kg. So now I can put that in my amount.

The amount is then the kilograms. So the weight bottle empty times the distance. So once the so once the granuates have been transported the next process is the plastic component production which means that these granulates are melted down and made into the preform the actual lid and the label itself.

But since we don't have any information on the amount of electricity that's used or any other factors that come into play in that process, the only other component to that process is again the transportation. After creating the components, we're going to be transporting them another 200 km to the location where the preforms will be blown and the water is added to the bottle. So I'm going to add another parameter for a second distance.

The value for distance 2 is then also 200 km in the paper. So why am I actually setting a parameter for distances that are the same or why don't I just put in the value as it is? That's also something you can do.

It's all possible. You can do anything you want to do. You can put the values directly in here and not use parameters at all.

It's all just a matter of taste and all just a matter of what you want to be able to control later. If I'm calculating a product system, I can change the values that I've set here later to say maybe I want to say I want to look at 300 km or 500 km. If I set a parameter, I can easily do that on the product system level without going back into the processes.

But as I said, it's just a matter of taste and preference. But now we've set the parameters for the second distance. So we're still traveling the weight of the empty bottle another 200 km.

So, after the plastic components have been reduced, the bottle is going to be blown and filled with water. So, let's add some water to our bottle. We're just going to say it's tap water.

I don't have any more concrete information on that. Europe without Switzerland. Okay.

And we have 1 kilogram of water going into our bottle. And then we have one more transport process namely the transportation from the fil of the filled water bottle to the point of sale. So I'm going to add two more parameters namely distance 3 which is 50 km and the weight of the filled bottle which is then the weight of the water plus the bottle.

So 1. 065 kg. And in my inputs and outputs or my inputs, sorry, add that transport.

So the weight of the full bottle times the distance. I just realized here I made a mistake. This is D2.

[Music] Okay. So what's the reason that I added up all of these different transport processes instead of adding this flow three times? Well, the reason for that is that in OpenLCA, it's only possible to have one input flow per process.

So, if you add the same flow multiple times to a process, the software isn't going to actually be able to add them up. So, you're going to get incorrect results. So, if you want to use the same flow, you need to add the amounts that that flow contribute in the amount column.

So I'm going to save this as this is basically everything that goes into the production of a water bottle according to our system boundaries and according to the way we set up the study. So now we finished creating the process for the production of one water bottle. So we can basically go to the general information tab and create a product system.

Now I'm going to say water bottle production just name it as it is and add the connected processes and click finish. So here's the product system that we created. So in the paper it says that our functional unit is 1,000 one L bottles.

The way we created the process is that it's the values for one bottle. So we're going to change our target amount in the product system to 1,000 so that we're actually looking at 1,000 bottles. And here we can go to the model graph and you can see that we have all five of our inputs and they're all connected with their providers as it should be.

So we could basically at this point already calculate if you wanted to at this time change any of the values for any of the parameters you sent on the process level. You can click on the green button here and you can see all of the parameters that you set for this process. So you can even use the shift button to select them all and you can see here all of the values that you set on the process level.

And if you want to change them now you can do so before calculation and the new values will override the ones that you set on the process level. but it will not change the values that are saved on the process level. So if you open the process up again, it's still going to say 200 even if you change it to 800 here.

But let's just leave them as we are. And we can go to the general information tab and select calculate. Now for this study, we decided to look at the impact assessment method CML baseline.

But I just realized that I don't have any impact assessment methods imported into this database. So I will do that and get right back to you. Okay, I'm back and now I have impact assessment methods imported into my database.

So I can select calculate and select the impact assessment method CML baseline and we're going to do a full analysis for this calculation. So then select calculate. So here are the results that we came out at a glance.

The flow contributions, impact contributions, inventory results, impact assessment results, and so on and so forth. But since this video is already getting a bit long, we're going to split it up for now and talk about the actual um results and the interpretation in a later video. In the next video, I'm going to talk about how you can model the supply chain by splitting up the product into different processes, which is especially interesting if you're working with very complicated production systems and not just a more simple case like the one we're looking at today.

So, that'll be the next video. And the video after that, we're going to go into detail on the results and analysis. Thanks for being here with us and we'll see you soon.