POLYPROBLEM report: The Circularity Code

How plastics processors will design more sustainable components in the future KNOWING WHAT WORKS Ecological assessment and digital twins Function and performance, sustainability, and pricing – in this triad, sustainability is becoming increasingly important for plastics processors in developing products for their partner industries. This requires a new, holistic view of products – a task hardly possible without digital support. Due to increasing regulatory requirements coupled with consumers’ growing sensitivity, industrial clients now require their suppliers to provide an ecological assessment, a so-called life cycle assessment (LCA), of the components they deliver. With a plethora of different parameters at play, it seems almost impossible to develop a product today without resorting to data-supported modeling. How much greenhouse gas does the production process release? How does the weight of different materials affect the sustainability of the product? And what happens after the product’s use stage? Is it possible to recycle or even reuse a certain component? These are just some of the many questions product developers have to answer. “A plastic product’s high degree of sustainability does not automatically translate into its recyclability. Sustainability is the result of the sum of many parameters, and a high degree of recyclability or reduced resource consumption due to recycling is only one aspect,” Hans-Josef Endres says in explaining the problem. Endres is a professor at Leibniz University in Hanover where he heads the Institute for Plastics and Recycling Technology. The scientist gives a few examples to illustrate the problem: “Multi-layer plastic films are generally considered to be harmful to the environment because it’s almost impossible to recycle them. In contrast, a mono-material is easier to recycle, but has to be much thicker in order to achieve similar barrier properties, which means it requires more material which in turn adds weight. To come up with a more sustainable alternative would require that each application of the product be assessed on a case-by-case basis.” Take polyamide which causes nearly three times more CO₂ emissions during production than polypropylene. However, it allows the wall thickness of a product made from it to be several times thinner. At the end of the day, which property will ultimately matter more in terms of environmental compatibility? In short: it all depends on the ecological assessment. But asking such questions during product development is not yet common practice. “Until recently, it was normal for plastic products to be designed with functional and economic aspects in mind and for another department to assess the sustainability of the produced component afterwards,” says Endres. This is changing. However, the idea of using comprehensive data sets for an overall ecological assessment is by no means new. LCA databases have been around since the early 1980s. The most comprehensive and widely used database of this type today is GaBi, a platform created by U.S. based Sphera. Others include Ecoinvent from Switzerland and cm.chemicals, a database originally developed in Aachen, Germany. The range of software compatible with this data is huge. The phalanx of providers ranges from large software groups to small start-ups and open-source projects such as openLCA. 5

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODI5MzU=