Step-by-step guide: Creating an LCA for a glass bottle

This guide covers the main steps required to perform an LCA of a 33 cl glass bottle.

Connect to Pilario

To create an LCA for packaging, we need to connect to Pilario where we will provide our username and password.

Creating a new bottle

Once we have connected to Pilario we will be brought to the main page which, by default, lists the products we have defined in our system. You can navigate to other assets via the left bar menu. 

If this is your first time using the system, the list might be empty. Don't worry, we are about to create our first product. Follow these steps:

1. Click in the upper right corner button, Add a product.
2. Define the basic product attributes like name, external id, model and labels.
   1. Name is mandatory, in this case we will use Tea Bottle 33 cl. but you can give the name you want
   2. External id can be left empty, it will usually be an internal reference used in your company and/or other systems.
   3. In this guide we are using the model Packaging Glass, you can read more about it in our knowledge base
   4. Labels can be used to categorise products or help searching for them in the future. You can add as many as you want, but can also be left empty.
3. Click on Save

The product will be created, and we will be automatically taken to its page. There we can define other attributes like a description and pictures.

On the left side you will see all the life stages of the product i.e Composition, Glass production, Supply transport, Manufacturing, etc. We will be navigating them in order to provide the information required to perform the LCA.

Defining other product attributes

In the product description section, there are other important attributes that will impact the calculations.  They can be found in the Description section, after the General attributes under the Functional Unit and Reference product section. To see them, you can scroll down or collapse the General section.

There you can define the Product volume and the Functional unit of choice. When selecting a Custom functional unit, you can additionally define the functional unit per packaging and the custom name. 

As an example you could express your results per serving size by choosing "Custom functional unit", name your Functional Unit "A serving size" and input the correct amount of serving sizes per packaging.

Defining the bottle components

We will navigate to the Composition section on the left, this is where we define the different raw materials of the components of our glass bottle. In a real case, we will add all the components used to produce the bottle including the label, sleeves, plastic joints, etc but for the sake of simplicity, we will create a very simple product composed of a glass body (256 g.) and a steel cap  (2.7 g. out of which 32% is recycled).

To define the components, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Composition section, and click on the ➕ button, once per component.
2. If desired, change the name of the component by selecting it from the menu, and clicking on the title where it says Component 1 and give the name you want
3. For each component, define its raw materials. In our example, we are just defining them as:
   1. Body: Glass weight 256
   2. Cap: Steel weight 2.7, Steel recycled content 32%
4. If we go back to the Composition section, we will see that the total weight of the product is the addition of both materials.

Defining the allocation rules for recycling benefits

The packaging LCA model allows the user to choose the allocation to be applied for the main recyclable materials. The allocation must be defined based on the target of your calculation and if you are not sure about what allocation should be chosen, use a predefined Methodological standard for allocation.

These parameteres can be defined by following these steps:

1. Navigate to the Composition section
2. Scroll down to the Expert parameters - Recycling benefits allocation section
3. Choose a Methodological standards for allocation
4. ... or define the A factor and Qs/Qp in and out for your materials

The predefined methodological standards for allocation are covered in the article Available methodological standards for recyclable benefits allocation.

Completing the glass production (furnace) information

The Packaging Glass LCA model allows the user to fill  specific information about the glass production, thus, a specific section Glass production is displayed on the left menu. There, you can enter in detail information related to your glass production

In this example we will assume that all the glass used for the bottle is coming from the same source and following the same specific production, for which we will accept the default values.

To enter that information we will follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Glass production section, and click on the ➕ 
2. Change the default name of Furnace 1 to Bottle production by clicking on the heading
3. Enter the following values (you can adapt to your needs) in the Glass description section:
   1. Glass share: 100%
   2. Internal cullet: 10%
   3. External cullet: 40%
4. Enter the following example values in the Raw materials section:
   1. Natural soda: 210 kg / ton
   2. Silica sand: 710 kg / ton
   3. Feldspar: 70 kg / ton
   4. Limestone: 185 kg / ton
5. Enter the following values in the Energy consumption section (we will assume here that our furnace uses only natural gas):
   1. Metling - Natural gas: 4.3 GJ / ton
   2. Non-melting - Natural gas: 1.2 GJ / ton
   3. Recovered energy: 0.8 GJ / ton

Completing the bottle manufacturing information

In case the manufacturing of your bottle would include other processes like decoration, labelling etc, we could include them in the Manufacturing section on the left. For the sake of simplicity in this example we are not adding any additional process(es).

Adding end-of-life information

The last stage in the life of a product is the end-of-life where we should specify what will happen to it (or its components). Pilario contains an extended list of default values for most of the countries in terms of recycling and incineration rate, but as a user you can always change them to match your sources.

As explained before, we can see that for each component a new subsection has been created under the End-of-life section, we will verify that the default values are adequate so we will folllow these steps:

1. Navigate to the End-of-life section, and select the Bottle
   1. Notice how Glass  has been selected automatically the Identified main recyclable material
2. Select the country, in this case we will use Belgium
3. Verify that the Recycling rate and Incineration rate match your sources
4. We should repeat the steps for the Lid

Filling other information

For simplicity and to keep this guide short, we haven't filled the information in other stages like Supply transport, Manufacturing, Filling, Distribution and Collection but in order to perform a full LCA you should complete the information in those sections:

• In the Supply transport you should fill the information regarding the transportation of the materials (components) to other factories but in this specific model it is likely that you leave them empty as your bottles are ready from your Glass production stage and they could go straight to their Filling stage. In fact, in this example we have set the distances to zero for the Bottle and Lid as by default they contained some values. You cand do the same to achieve the same results below:
  • Go to Supply transport and select Bottle
  • Modify the truck distance to 0 km
  • Repeat the step for the Lid
• In the Filling you should include the information regarding the filling of the bottle (using at the beverage factory), the labeling, the sealing, etc
• In the Distribution you should fill the information regarding the distribution of the manufactured cans. This could involve distribution to retailers or filling factories.
• In the Collection you should include the information related to the collection for recycling or disposal.

Viewing the results

At any time in the process we can see the results of our LCA in the results tab. To open the results you can click on the arrow in the upper right corner which will expand the results column.

The results column contains three tabs which allow us to display the results in different ways: a grid, a graph and stacked graph. By default the results will display the Climate change indicator of our LCA but we can select which ever we want. For the grid, we can disaggregate per component by expending each stage.

In this example we will see that our Supply transport , Manufacturing, Filling, Distribution and Collection are empty because we did not fill that information and so, we can consider our results incomplete.

Making a test scenario

One of the most powerful features of Pilario is the ability to create scenarios, that is, perform  ecodesign improvements to see the impact of those changes against the original product.

Let's continue with our glass bottle can example. In this scenario, we would want to evaluate what would be the impact of making the bottle a bit thicker so we can reuse it 50 times instead of 30.

Let's see the steps needed to create a scenario and see the results:

1. In the upper right corner, go to the Actions button and select Create scenario
   1. Notice how we have changed from the Product page to the Scenarios in the left menu
      
2. This will duplicate our product and will bring us to its page, we can change the name an description to identify our scenario later
   1. In the name append Thicker glass for 50 uses
   2. In the description you could include something that could help you understand better this scenario, in this case, we don't add anything as the name is descriptive enough
3. Perform now the changes described, in a real life scenario this might involve many changes, but in this case, we will just increase the weight of the glass needed and the number of uses.
   1. On the left menu, go to the Composition > Bottle
      1. In the Component description section, increase the number of uses, from 30 to 45
      2. In the Glass section, increase the weight to 300 g.
4. Expand the results tab (via the arrow on the upper right corner)
5. Navigate through the results and compare the fictional product and the real one in any of the tabs.