Life cycle assessment of multiple dispensing systems used for cosmetic product packaging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Worldwide, the packaging industry for consumer product goods, including personal care and beauty products, generates over $25 billion in sales. An extremely high environmental impact follows the large demand in the industry. Almost 70% of the plastic waste generated in the cosmetics market is not recyclable. Sustainability in the beauty industry is complex and multifaceted, requiring an evaluation of all factors. Packaging plays an important role in the cosmetics market, and considering the amount of waste it generates, it is essential to understand packaging dispensing systems from an environmental perspective. This study investigated the environmental impacts of three dispensing systems commonly used for cosmetic product packaging: the general dip‐tube pump, the airless pump and the bag‐in‐bottle format. A cradle‐to‐grave life cycle assessment (LCA) was performed to quantitatively analyse the environmental burden of those three different dispensing systems, using a facial cream as a test case. The LCA analysed the environmental impacts generated by the packaging materials and incorporated the environmental impacts created by the facial cream residue left behind in each dispensing system. The system boundary of this LCA included the material production, intermediate processes, distribution, use and end‐of‐life phases of the packaged facial cream products. The LCA complied with the ISO standards, 14,040:2006 and 14,044:2006, and LCA software SimaPro v 9.0 was used to analyse the results. The life cycle inventories used in this LCA included US‐EI 2.2, USLCI and Ecoinvent 3. TRACI 2.1, including ten mid‐point life cycle impact categories, was chosen as the life cycle impact analysis method. Comparative and contribution analyses were conducted to interpret the LCA data. The comparative analysis demonstrated that the airless pump packaging system had less environmental burden than the other two packaging systems for all the life cycle impact categories. The bag‐in‐bottle alternative had the highest environmental impact for eight of the ten impact categories. The contribution analysis results revealed that the packaging material production phase most contributed to the environmental burden of all three packaging formats, followed by the lotion residue.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".