Life cycle assessment of a cosmetic facial moisturizer jar

Abstract

Packaging industry grows every year and among the packaging waste that is generated. The main purpose of packaging is to protect, contain, handle, deliver or present goods. Plastic packaging is used due to its versatility and countless shape and size options. The cosmetic industry utilizes plastic packaging widely, and due to high demand of appealing packaging, structure can be complex and materials not recyclable. Many brand owners are committed to a sustainable packaging initiative and packaging sustainability is high on brand owners agen-das. Legislation updates give guidelines to brand owners for example regarding materials and size options. In February 2025 Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) entered into force. The target of the regulation is to reduce, reuse and recycle packaging.

This master’s thesis is made for Finnish cosmetic company Lumene, and the aim was to identify the hotspots of a cosmetic jar, secondly to search whether alternative material solu-tions would have smaller environmental impact, such as chemically recycled plastic that are not commercially widely available currently. A life cycle assessment (LCA) is performed to find the hotspot of a 50 ml cosmetic jar. Different materials studied were virgin polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET) plastic, and glass. Additionally, reduction of material was studied in PP option. Impact as-sessment was conducted as midpoint approach and the studied categories were climate change, water consumption and marine eutrophication. Raw materials, manufacturing and transportations were reviewed separately.

According to the comparative LCA the biggest impacts came from raw materials phase in all categories. Recycled PET option had the lowest impacts in all categories, however in litera-ture there were findings that the water consumption and eutrophication would be larger in re-cycled PET due the burdens recycling process takes. The selected approach was cut off, the recycled material didn’t have the burden of the production, but the burdens from recycling and reprocessing are allocated to the recycled one. Heavy weight PP and glass option had the largest impact. In climate action category, recycled PET had 77 % smaller impact compared to heavy weight PP, and when compared the different weight options in PP, the lighter version had 39 % smaller impact. At the manufacturing phase, the glass manufacturing couldn’t be modelled correctly to used software due the limitations of library used. When compared differ-ent plastics, the results showed that the amount of material produced had the largest impact. PP packaging has bigger wall thickness compared to thin wall PET packaging. From transpor-tation phase, glass had the biggest impact, mainly due the weight of the jar component. The glass jar is 74 – 89 % heavier than plastic options, additionally glass must be stacked into transportation shippers carefully to avoid scratching and breaking.

Chemically recycled plastic was evaluated in theoretical way. Chemically recycled plastic was compared to mechanically recycled plastic and studied whether there are differences be-tween these two. The findings from the literature comparison were that the chemically recy-cled plastic is high in quality and the overall look of chemically recycled plastic components are close to virgin one. The environmental impacts are similar in chemically and mechanically recycled options when considered climate change, however, chemically recycled option has higher impact on eutrophication, acidification, photochemical and ozone formation. Additionally, chemical recycling is energy consuming process.