Material selection for environmental responsibility: the case of soft drinks packaging in Brazil

The unprecedented scale of packaging waste in global soft drinks supply chains is attracting increasing attention due to its environmental, social and economic impacts. The selection of the most feasible packaging options is one of the key approaches towards reducing resources depletion and packaging disposal. From an environmental point of view, selection requires knowledge of all product life stages including the type and the amount of materials used and the manufacturing practices such as recycling and reuse. In this context, decision makers in industry are looking for assessment methods that address the problem as a whole and not only as a sum of parts for selecting the most appropriate and reliable option. This paper introduces environmental accounting based on emergy as a tool to assist materials selection. This tool can help decision makers in industry providing information on the environmental cost of each decision. Emergy has low cost compared to other methods that require extensive information databases and commercial software. To exemplify the application of the emergy as a tool for material selection, options for the production of soft drinks are compared. The results obtained for the Brazilian case make it possible to select refillable glass bottles as the best option according to the resources available in the country; establishing the best production model for the selected option and determining when and if a recycling stage should be implemented.