LIFE CYCLE

ASSESSMENT
OF CHEMICAL
RECYCLING
First Steps Towards Harmonization

By Christoph Koffler, Fabian Loske, Martin Baitz, Ulrike Bos,

Thilo Kupfer, Maike Horlacher
Background

lastic pollution has emerged as one of today’s most pressing environmental concerns next to
climate change, biodiversity loss, air quality, and water as well as land availability. This serious
problem is well understood by the public due to frequent media reports. A recent study that estimates
there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish by 2050 serves as another compelling argument for
the public to take this problem seriously. It was further estimated that most of all plastic ever produced
ended up in the natural environment, where it negatively affects wildlife through entanglement and
ingestion, slowly breaks down into ever smaller particles, and ultimately makes its way up the food chain
back onto our plates.

The pollution of the world’s oceans as the ultimate sinks for plastics entering nature continues despite
the recent political push for more circular ways to produce, consume, and dispose of these materials. The
chemical industry is under intense pressure and has, through various initiatives, committed to developing
new ways to reduce plastic pollution and avoid the loss of the material by the economy. Closing material
loops by, first, pushing for more stringent waste management and collection schemes and, second,
introducing novel recycling technologies that match the quantity and quality of current and future waste
streams are some of the key strategies towards the vision of a New Plastics Economy spearheaded
by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Here, chemical recycling offers the opportunity to complement
the existing set of recycling and waste treatment technologies. Chemical recycling avoids the material
degradation that often characterizes mechanical recycling by turning plastic wastes into monomers that
are identical to their virgin counterparts.

Nevertheless, chemical recycling represents a significant physiochemical effort that comes with its
own environmental challenges concerning energy, water, emissions, and waste management. To avoid
unintended consequences and burden-shifting between environmental impact pathways (e.g., from
marine litter to climate change), it is therefore imperative that the chemically recycled material causes
overall lower environmental burdens than its virgin counterpart across the whole life cycle. Life cycle
assessment (LCA) is the internationally standardized environmental management tool that can quantify
the environmental performance of both contenders in a science-based and transparent manner.

Sphera’s Sustainability Consulting practice1 has a 30-year track record of performing LCA studies for and
with industry and is the world’s premier provider of LCA software and data. This Whitepaper serves to
inform discussions taking place in public and private forums regarding the methodological choices to be
made when scoping and conducting LCA studies on chemical recycling processes. We will discuss pros
and cons of different approaches without dogmatism and provide recommendations for a possible future
standardization in industry standards or certification protocols.

1
formerly thinkstep, formerly PE INTERNATIONAL
Life Cycle Assessment of Chemical Recycling

Chemical Recycling
& Multi-functionality
t its core, chemical recycling represents a multi-functional process, just like any other recycling
activity. That means that it provides multiple functions, at a minimum those of (1) material recovery
and (2) waste management (Figure 1). As such, comparing such a multi-functional product system (A) to a
mono-functional one—which produces solely the same quantity of the virgin counterpart of the recovered
material (B)—would be incomplete.

FU2: X tons of FU1: Y tons of

waste managed material produced

Product
system A
Chemical recycling

Product
system B ?
Status quo
Figure 1: Multi-functionality of chemical recycling
Add or subtract?
he solution to this problem in LCA is known as “system expansion”, which means that the mono-
functional product system is expanded by one or more additional activities that provide the missing
functional unit(s). Hence, the waste management function is added to product system B in the example
(Figure 2). With that, one can compare the two, now multi-functional product systems on an equal footing.

FU1: X tons of FU2: Y tons of

waste managed material produced

Product
system A
Chemical recycling

Product
system B

System expansion
Status quo

Figure 2: System expansion by addition

The main drawback of this approach is that the comparison now is based on multiple functional units, which
can be more challenging to communicate (more on that later). It is, however, entirely legitimate under the
governing international standard ISO 14044, which states that “comparisons between systems shall be made
on the basis of the same function(s), quantified by the same functional unit(s)” [underscoring added by the
authors]. In addition, ISO 14044 prefers system expansion over other forms of allocation if subdivision of the
multi-functional inventory into several mono-functional ones is not feasible.

The alternative approach to the above additive one would be to subtract the environmental burdens of waste
management (here: waste incineration, but can be landfilling, mechanical recycling, or other) from product
system A to eliminate the functional unit of waste management and arrive at the mono-functional inventory of
the recovered material.
This approach, however, comes with its own drawbacks:
• Depending on the nature of the subtracted inventory, the overall cradle-to-gate result can become a
net negative number for one or more impact categories, which does not make much sense under an
attributional modeling paradigm which aims to attribute the appropriate share of the absolute global
environmental burden to the product system under study (see also top of Figure 5).

• While it is entirely acceptable to subtract such inventories in the case of multi-output situations where a
process produces more than one physical product output (Figure 3), the function of waste management
is a service, not a physical flow. Given that processes generally interact via mass and energy flows in
attributional LCA, subtracting something without the presence of a physical co-product flow is debatable
and could therefore open the study up to criticism.

• While it has rightfully been argued in the past that the results of a comparison don’t change whether you
add something on one side or subtract it on the other side, this is true only for the absolute difference
between contenders. As can be seen Figure 4, where A represents the chemical recycling product
system, B its conventional counterpart, and C the waste management activity, it can make a very
significant difference when it comes to percentage differences. While the net results of the difference (A
– C) is two units of environmental burden (e.g., kg CO2 equivalents) and the resulting relative advantage
over alternative B then is (A – C – B) / B = -67%, this relative difference is reduced to only (A – B – C) / (B
+ C) = -50% when C is added to B instead. This means that the system expansion by subtraction leads to
a relative advantage of the mono-functional product system (A – C) over product system B that is a factor
1.5 higher than for a system expansion by addition because the identical absolute difference of 4 units of
environmental burden takes place on a lower absolute level.
 Figure 3: Substitution credits in attributional LCA

In order to (a) avoid net negative burdens and (b) avoid overestimating the relative advantages of the chemical recycling
product system, it therefore seems prudent to conduct the comparison on the basis of multi-functional product systems in
an additive fashion rather than subtracting the inventory of conventional waste management from that of the chemically
recycled product (i.e., A versus B plus C in the below example).
10

8
+C

4
B

2 A

0
-C

-2

-4

Figure 4: System expansion by addition or subtraction

Attributional vs.
Consequential LCA
 f subtracting something based on multi-functionality
rather than based on a physical co-product is debatable
in attributional LCA, as discussed above, then consequential
LCA offers another approach to life cycle assessment of
chemical recycling processes and products. Here, activities
are connected via cause-and-effect relationships rather
than physical flows, and the goal is to quantify the change
in the total global environmental burdens due to the
decision of diverting plastic waste from their conventional
waste management and recycling them chemically. These
changes can then be a negative number (decrease in
global environmental burdens) or positive (increase in
global environmental burdens) as the right side of Figure 5
exemplifies.
Figure 5: Conceptual difference between attributional
(top) and consequential LCA (bottom) [source: https://
consequential-lca.org]
As such, the subtraction of the inventory of conventional
waste management can be argued to represent the
avoided burden of diverting the waste from that EoL
pathway to chemical recycling. However, a problem arises
if this avoided burden is the only consequence of chemical
recycling that is accounted for in the study. Other potential
ripple effects may include:
• Conventional waste management processes (like
waste incineration) may not actually reduce their
emissions in direct proportion to the diverted waste
stream; instead, they might switch to other waste
fractions that remain available to maintain their
desired level of capacity utilization;
• Diverting plastic waste away from mechanical
recycling may lead to material substitutions in
applications that currently use mechanically recycled
plastics, which is also why chemical recycling should
focus on waste streams that cannot be mechanically
recycled;
• The increased availability of chemically recycled
material will affect the demand for virgin materials;
this demand may then decrease, but it may also find
new applications and markets and therefore result in
a stable or growing demand.
These examples show that the consequential LCA of
chemical recycling is generally more complex and more
uncertain than its attributional counterpart. It requires
additional tools and data that the average LCA practitioner
is often unfamiliar with, such as general or partial
equilibrium models, system dynamics, or the like. If a
consequential modeling approach is chosen, one should
take care to cover all relevant consequences of a marginal
increase in supply of chemically recycled product to avoid
the impression of willful cherry-picking, and one should
be prepared to address the additional uncertainties
appropriately.
Upstream Burden of
Waste Feedstock
hatever the chosen modeling approach, the practitioner will have to make a value choice with regards
to the end-of-life allocation approach to be applied to the waste feedstock in the study. The two most
widely used variants are known as the substitution approach and the cut-off approach. These will decide what,
if any, environmental burden the waste feedstock should enter the product system with.

Why is this choice particularly important for life cycle assessments of chemical recycling? Because it not only
has the potential to contribute very relevant environmental burdens, but it is also the only way to properly
distinguish between post-consumer and post-industrial waste feedstock. From the perspective of the circular
economy, closing material loops for post-consumer wastes is more valuable than doing the same for post-
industrial plastic wastes, for which other applications often already exist.

So what is the main difference between post-industrial and post-consumer plastic waste? It usually comes
down to price as an indicator for material quality. While a plastic producer may well be able to generate a
revenue with clean post-industrial waste, the consumer usually has to pay municipal waste management fees
to dispose of the post-consumer waste fraction. As such, allocating virgin material burdens to the waste fraction
based on revenue considerations seems to be the most pragmatic way to distinguish between post-consumer
and post-industrial waste in life cycle assessments of chemical recycling. This means that any waste fractions
that the waste generator (e.g., households, businesses, industry) can dispose of without generating a revenue
would be free of any upstream virgin material burden.
Life Cycle Assessment of Chemical Recycling

Comparative LCAs
vs. Footprints &
Declarations
 ven if an attributional approach of system expansion by addition in combination
with an economic allocation between virgin and waste material as outlined above is
chosen, one still faces another dilemma: the footprint of the chemically recycled product is
not directly comparable to the footprint of the conventional counterpart as the comparison
needs to be between the chemically recycled product and the conventional one plus
the conventional waste management. However, Type III Environmental Declarations
in accordance with ISO 14025 as the most common standardized form of footprint
communication are, by definition, not comparative in nature. The risk therefore is that an
environmental product declaration of a chemically recycled product is compared side by
side with the EPD of its conventional counterpart without taking into consideration the
additional function of waste management.

The classic LCA in accordance with ISO 14044 is the most comprehensive and best suited
way to communicate the impacts of chemical recycling in comparison to alternative product
systems. An ISO conformant LCA study report is therefore the safest way to avoid any
risk related to miscommunication of non-trivial results to support any such comparative
assertions.

Type III environmental declarations can then simply refer to the comparative life cycle
assessment in the section on additional environmental information. Here, one is free to
reference the comparative study as long as it conforms to all relevant requirements and has
been critically reviewed by a panel of independent experts. That way, the reader of the EPD
has all relevant information available to make an informed decision between virgin material
and it’s chemically recycled counterpart.
Life Cycle Assessment of Chemical Recycling

Quo vadis?

o where do we go from here?

Sphera intended to volunteer
this Whitepaper to inform current
discussions on life cycle assessment of
chemical recycling. These discussions
need to be formalized and centralized to
result in a consensus-based standard
development process, be it on an
industry level, a national level, or an
international level.

While this Whitepaper cannot claim to

be fully comprehensive with regard to
all possible pitfalls and challenges to be
encountered in life cycle assessment of
chemical recycling, we hope that it will
provide a valuable contribution to these
discussions.

For further questions, please contact

Dr. Christoph Koffler

ckoffler@sphera.com
About Sphera
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