Life Cycle Assessment of the Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Waste Bottles Recycling Process of a Local Industry in Guayaquil

Plastic materials used by the general population mostly derive from synthetic petrochemical polymers. In Guayaquil, the most generated type of plastic waste is Polyethylene Terephthalate with 15.13 g/day/capita, representing 37% of the total domestic plastic waste, which also represents close to 9.5% of the total domestic waste generation. In addition, 64% of the nation’s plastic manufacturing businesses are located in Guayaquil. Recycling is an effective way to reduce the amount of solid waste reaching landfills, nevertheless, the recycling of PET plastic waste does not assure environmental benefits regarding the traditional take and disposal of the linear economy, since the process to recycle PET materials to reintroduce them into the manufacturing lines beneath the conception of the circular economy has indeed its own economic and environmental impacts. In this context, the objective of the present paper was to perform a life cycle assessment comparison of two end–of–life scenarios of PET post-consumer bottle waste: recycling and landfilling. In order to achieve the objective, the recycling process of a working shift of twenty hours is followed, and a material & energy flow analysis was developed to further measure the environmental impacts. Overall, only the global warming emissions are reduced with the recycling process while the other five impact categories analyzed gave higher values than the landfilling due mostly to the washing phase. Future studies should address the full life cycle assessment from the extraction of raw materials through end-of-life, taking mechanical recycling into account and using flakes as raw material to reduce the demand for fresh pellets.