Prioritizing Cleaner Production Actions towards Circularity: Combining LCA and Emergy in the PET Production Chain

Abstract

Petrochemicals, which convert oil and gas into products such as plastics, are fundamental to modern societies. Chemists recognize their role in designing materials and the adverse effects that these may have on the environment, preventing sustainable development. Several methodological frameworks and sustainability assessment approaches have been developed to evaluate the resources used in the petrochemical sector in terms of environmental costs. Still, there is a need to evaluate these systems in terms of environmental costs deeply. A combination of life cycle assessment and emergy accounting—to assess the environmental support for resource use—is applied in this study of the PET production chain in Europe. The unit emergy values of several intermediates are calculated or updated to facilitate the discernment of the quality of energy used and the processes’ efficiency. Several routes for synthesizing renewable para-xylene and ethylene glycol from biomass are discussed and confronted with the efforts focused on recycling and recovering the final product, providing concurrently a procedure and a valuable data set for future CP actions. The results show that understanding the efficiencies changing across the production chain may help stakeholders decide where and when interventions to promote a circular economy are most effective along a petrochemical production chain.