Recycling paper and board from mixed waste streams: Determining data requirements for a reliable environmental assessment

In existing LCAs, the recycling process has often been calculated generically. However, to adequately model newly developed recycling processes, a broad data basis is needed, which can be obtained by primary data collection or from the literature. To qualify the influence of data sources on LCA results, we built LCA models for recycling paper and board from lightweight packaging waste based on both primary data – measured during production trials – and secondary data from the literature. We showed that unlike the model based on data from the literature, the model based on primary data described the recycling process on plant scale more accurately as the literature provided averaged and sometimes outdated data. The differences in the environmental impact assessments were mainly due to the high sensitivity of the parameters for energy consumption and reject compositions. We also showed that the parameter uncertainty was mainly caused by database processes from the background system.