Life Cycle Analysis for Glass bottle versus plastic bottle

by: Mirjam Visser, 2010-07-27 09:06:02 UTC

mineral water bottled in belgium or italy and transported to shanghai. My first thought about the difficulty to design for sustainability. of course it is ridiculous to ship water over the globe but in the chinese dont like drinking carbonated water so one needs to do something. So what to buy plastic or glass bottles?

glass bottle
Plastic bottle
Compare Scenarios

Item	Cost per unit	Unit	Quantity	Total Cost
Tap water, at user/CH S	0.0	kg	1.5	0.0
Packaging glass, green, at plant/DE S	0.102	kg	0.45	0.0459
Aluminium, production mix, at plant/RER S	2.801	kg	0.006	0.016806
Total Cost				0.062706
Weight Adjustment		[kg]	0.0
Total Weight		[kg]	1.96

Item	Cost per unit	Unit	Quantity	Total Cost
Rolling aluminium foil	0.186	kg	0.006	0.001116
Tempering, flat glass/RER S (kg)	0.044	kg	0.45	0.0198
Total Cost				0.020916

Item	Cost per unit	Unit	Quantity	Total Cost / [1000 kg]
Bulk carrier	0.005	tkm	Ghent, Belgium -> Shanghai, China 9037.29	45.1865
Total Cost				0.08856554

Lifetime [years]	0.0
Usage per day [times/day]	1
Usage per time [hours/time]	0
Usage per week [days/week]	0
Electrical Wattage [kWatt]	0

Item	Cost per unit	Unit	Quantity	Total Cost
glass/RER S	0.0	kg	0.45	0.0
aluminium/RER S	0.0	kg	0.006	0.0
Total Cost				0.0
Total Weight			1.96 kg

Life Cycle Analysis for Glass bottle versus plastic bottle

Materials used in the product

Processing Steps

Transport

Usage Patterns over the lifetime of the object

Consumables per use of the product

Disposal, Recycling and Waste Treatment