Life Cycle of Aluminium Packaging

Abstract

Aim is to analyze environmental load with aluminium packaging, used in food industry. especially with aluminium cans. LCA shows origin of materials, aluminium production, as basic materials, emission to air, water and soil and quantitz of wasting materials, as a result of production of 1000 aluminium cans.
This study includes:
raw material for aluminium production
aluminium production
aluminium cans production
usage and recycling of aluminium cans.
For this study we gathered data for fuel and energy consumption, amount of raw materials, products and byproducts, emission to air, water and soil, and a quantity of waste material. Within a metode of calculation of influences to environment as indicators was used:
global warming (kg CO2-ekv.), eutrophication (kg P-ekv), acidification (kg SO2-ekv.), ekotoksicity (kg 1,4 DB-ekv.), reserves shortage of nonrenewable resources (kg), water consumption (kg), toksicity for humans (kg 1,4 DB-ekv.), oyone layer destruction (kg R11-ekv.) soil occupation (m2·god.). LCA model is made by GaBi 4 software system (verzion GaBi 4.3) [8].
In order to have relevant estimation of influence to environment, we defined cut-off proces value. In this case as cut-off value was used value of weight ratio less than 5%, and in that case proces disregarded.