The US PET beverage bottle industry could reduce lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions intensity by approximately 57 per cent by 2050, according to a new decarbonisation roadmap developed by Eastern Research Group (ERG) for the National Association for PET Container Resources (Napcor).
The ‘PET Forward: A Decarbonization Roadmap for the PET Packaging Value Chain’ study also models a reduction of approximately 42 per cent in total annual GHG emissions, even as PET bottle production increases.
The analysis covers four US PET beverage bottle systems: 16.9oz water bottles, and 16.9oz, 20oz and 2-litre carbonated soft drink bottles. It assesses their carbon footprints from 2025 to 2050, taking account of projected demand growth and the phased adoption of decarbonisation measures.
Areas for reducing emissions
Under the modelled pathway, total emissions from the systems studied fall from about 3.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to 1.9m/t by 2050.
The roadmap identifies six key decarbonisation levers across the PET bottle value chain. These include improving energy efficiency and manufacturing processes, switching to low-carbon and renewable energy, increasing collection and recycling rates, using more rPET, lightweighting bottles and improving bottle design.
It identifies lightweighting and the transition to renewable energy as the measures with the greatest potential to reduce emissions. Increased recycling and rPET content also contribute to reductions by lowering demand for virgin PET and increasing the amount of material kept within the recycling system.
The roadmap also identifies industry leadership, supportive policies, infrastructure investment and market incentives as important enablers, particularly for improving collection and recycling and increasing the availability of rPET.
Multiple strategies
“The analysis is designed as a roadmap,” said Dr Mariya Absar, senior lifecycle assessment expert at ERG. “It models the cumulative impact of multiple strategies over time and includes sensitivity analyses to account for variables such as future production growth and different approaches to measuring the benefits of recycling.
“The result is a framework for identifying where the PET industry can act today and where collaboration across the value chain will be necessary to achieve further progress.”
The roadmap notes that actual adoption is likely to be uneven rather than following the linear progression used in the model, with policy, market conditions, technology readiness and investment decisions all affecting the pace of change.
Importance of infrastructure
It also identifies collection, sorting and recycling infrastructure as important to increasing the availability of high-quality recycled PET.
“Efficiency gains matter, but deeper reductions require reliable access to high-quality recycled PET,” said Tom Busard, board chair of Napcor, chief polymers and recycling officer at Plastipak Packaging, and president of Clean Tech, the company’s recycling affiliate.
“That makes stronger collection and domestic recycling capacity essential to delivering lower-carbon packaging at scale,” he added.
The roadmap builds on Napcor’s 2023 peer-reviewed, ISO-compliant lifecycle assessment of predominant US PET beverage bottle systems. ERG developed the analysis using industry data, current technologies and projected adoption scenarios, with the final roadmap reviewed by an independent third-party industry expert.
The full report can be downloaded here.
