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LCA Backs TerraCycle’s Green Cred
The company’s unconventional recycling models rate better than old-school waste handling per life cycle assessment metrics.
2 Min Read
TerraCycle
At a Glance
- LCA shows TerraCycle’s rigid-plastic recycling is more eco-friendly than municipal alternatives.
- TerraCycle focuses on hard-to-recycle waste, offering an alternative to incineration and landfilling.
A new lifecycle assessment (LCA) comparing TerraCycle’s rigid-plastic recycling solutions to conventional municipal waste management methods in the United States quantifies the lower environmental impact of TerraCycle’s approach.
The third-party verified LCA, conducted by Long Trail Sustainability, evaluated six end-of-life models for post-consumer rigid-plastic packaging and products. The six included TerraCycle’s four core recycling techniques plus municipal landfilling and municipal incineration for waste to energy.
The four TerraCycle models studied were: freight recycling, public collection recycling, Zero Waste Box recycling, and mail-back recycling.
“Our LCAs compare our specialized recycling process for hard-to-recycle waste to traditional municipal waste-handling solutions, like landfilling and incineration,” says Kevin Flynn, executive vice president, operations, TerraCycle.
“Traditional recyclers typically only recycle larger polyethylene terephthalate (PET) packages, and the remaining smaller PET and other non-PET polymers would go to landfill or incineration. TerraCycle guarantees to recycle all accepted waste we receive,” he adds.
Inside look at one of TerraCycle's processing operations. TERRACYCLE
Altogether, the lifecycle analysts looked at the impact of each of the six models on eight dimensions:
Global warming potential, aka carbon emissions;
Ozone formation — human health;
Freshwater eutrophication (a nutrient imbalance leading to overgrowth of algae and freshwater plants);
Freshwater ecotoxicity;
Human carcinogenic toxicity;
Human noncarcinogenic toxicity;
Fossil resource scarcity; and
Water consumption.
On all the measures, TerraCycle’s collection and recycling models were more environmentally favorable than the municipal waste management alternatives. The TerraCycle models prevailed over landfilling by a collective average of 73% and outperformed waste-to-energy incineration by an average of 67% (see table below).
TERRACYCLE, KATE CONNOLLY
The LCA indicated that on carbon emissions alone, TerraCycle’s rigid-plastics recycling models produce 71% fewer emissions than incineration and 53% fewer emissions than municipal landfilling.
Additionally, TerraCycle’s water consumption was 74% lower than incineration and 71% lower than landfilling. Human carcinogenic toxicity for TerraCycle’s models was 78% lower than incineration and 77% lower than landfilling (see table for all comparisons .)
The rigid plastics TerraCycle recycles are typically not polymers that are widely recycled through curbside programs, such as monomaterial PET, high-density polyethylene (HDPE), and polypropylene (PP).
“Our recycling business is focused on recycling hard-to-recycle waste streams, and so we encourage our audience and customers to recycle locally, when possible,” Flynn says. “When we receive these common polymers, they are often components of hard-to-recycle products and packages — like beauty waste — and they represent a minority of the waste we recycle.”
The materials most commonly recycled by TerraCycle are rigid plastics, including food packaging such as bottle caps and polystyrene cups; multilayer packaging, such as coffee pouches, condiment packets, and snack bags; and contact lens packaging.
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