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Minutes of the Packaging LCA Scoping Group - 29 January 2008

The group met in St. Petersburg, FL

Present were: Joe Cattanio Ram Singhal, Bill Heenan, Keith Christman, Ken Martchek, Dennis Sabourin, Rita Schenck, Jeff Wooster and Gerry Claes.

The purpose of the meeting was to make preliminary decisions about scoping a shelf-stable food package LCA for the Wal-Mart Packaging SVN. In addition to this particular product scoping effort, a document describing how to scope a multi-industry LCA will be developed.

We discussed the basics of LCA and their relationship to a type III ecolabel or Environmental Product Declaration. There are only a few additional things that need to be added to the LCA scoping to identify an EPD scoping—these relate to communications and work with interested parties. While no decisions were made on whether a Type III ecolabel, we agreed to keep the effort open.

It was noted that there had to be consensus on this project. Several preliminary decisions were made, subject to review by the organizations all parties represent. The list below shows the decisions taken, to be verified at our next meeting.

  1. The audience for this LCA is primarily Wal-Mart, and their vendors, with secondary audiences including B to B customers and government regulators.
  2. The function is packaging for a shelf-stable food for at least 12 months
  3. The functional unit is still somewhat unclear. It is about 16 oz, but should be a range around this figure: serving size may play a part.
  4. Time coverage (over which data should be collected) is for one year.
  5. Allocation should be system boundary expansion wherever possible, but mass allocation where not possible.
  6. No data more than five years old should be used, unless it can be represented that the technology has not changed since the data was collected.
  7. The geographic coverage should be packages whose last conversion step is produced in the USA and Canada.
  8. Data should be collected via a statistically valid sampling of the facilities, which may include stratified random sampling.
  9. Data reported should include mean, standard deviation, number of sites sampled, and the results of a test for normality of the data.
  10. Completeness should be at 98% of the mass and energy of the system, and all known toxicological concerns.
  11. Sources of background data were not identified. Most of the organizations in the room were using GaBi, but the data sources in Gabi are varied, and not all of it is PE- specific data.
  12. We should use standard international units (i.e. metric units)
  13. We have chosen the following impact categories: Climate change, acidification, eutrophication, photochemical smog, human toxicity and ecotoxicity, water resource depletion, mineral resource depletion, fossil fuel depletion, land use/biodiversity, and soil depletion. We have eliminated stratospheric ozone depletion because this impact is regulated via the Montreal Protocol and the concentration of ozone depleters in the atmosphere is no longer growing.
  14. We should recommend that the upstream agricultural uses should be characterized and included in the LCA.
  15. We will use the Wal-Mart Climate change factors, and toxicity models, but note that we recommend the USE-tox models.
  16. For mineral reserves we should ignore the reserves that are less than 200 years and only collect data on these minerals.
  17. We should follow the ISO standards for critical review.
  18. Our goal should be a simplified “mix and match” approach for packages

It was noted that there are several stakeholders who could add to our discussion, notably:

• The Grocery Manufacturers Association
• The Closure Manufacturers Association
• The Sustainable Packaging Coalition
• Regulators (EPA/State)
• Avery-Dennison (or another representative of the label manufacturers)

Rita will attempt to get contacts into these groups and invite them to join us.

Rita will also provide for the group interest:

• A summary of the TRACI indicator, with an assessment of how they stand in international practice.
• A summary of other approaches for the other approaches.
• A description of the databases available.

The members of the group should update their flowcharts as needed, sending them to Rita. They should also vet the decisions described here within their organizations.

Our next meeting is by phone February 21 at 8 Pacific, 11 Eastern.