The Impacts of Two Milk Packages on Climate Change in the Life Cycle Perspective

Several food companies are implementing effective strategies to evaluate the environmental impacts of their products or processes and to estimate the greenhouse gases emissions (GHG) using a life cycle approach. Particularly, a sector which can play an important role to reduce the impact on the environment through the life cycle thinking is the beverage packaging. In this context, the aim of this study was to use the life cycle assessment (LCA) method to investigate the consistency of the preference order across two alternative beverage packages through the application of two impact assessment methods, namely the IPCC 2007 which is focused on the GHG emissions estimation and the EcoIndicator 99 which considers several environmental categories including impact on climate change. The results showed that the life cycle approach employment was a useful strategy to investigate the consistency of the
preference order across two beverage packages, especially, whether the results are made more reliable by the utilization of primary data. The investigation on climate change conducted on two level, initially, the quantification of the GHG emissions and secondly the estimation of the related diseases and mortality, demonstrated that the laminated carton presents lower impacts than the high-density polyethylene (HDPE) bottle.