Life Cycle Assessment of Polylactic Acid and Polyethylene Terephthalate Bottles for Drinking Water Fausto Gironi and Vincenzo Piemonte Department of Chemical Engineering Materials and Environment, University of Rome ‘‘La Sapienza,’’ Italy; piemonte@ingchim.ing.uniroma1.it (for correspondence) Published online 10 September 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/ep.10490 The biodegradable plastics were introduced in the 1980s to detect possible renewable feedstock to produce nonpetroleum-based plastics as well as to reduce the environmental problems due to the increase of landfill volume. Furthermore, the biodegradable plastics have been used to reduce the environmental impact (in terms of energy requirement from nonrenewable resources and CO 2 gas emissions) derived from pro- duction, utilization, and disposal of petroleum-based plastics, like polyethylene terephthalate (PET). To this end, in the last years, different typologies of bioplastics were introduced (both biodegradable plastics and plas- tics made from renewable resources) like Mater-Bi (made from starch), poly-3-hydroxybuyrate, polycap- rolactone, and polylactic acid (PLA). Nowadays, the most important tool to evaluate the environmental impact of a bioplastic and/or of a petro- leum-based plastic (conventional plastic) is the life cycle assessment (LCA) that determines the overall impact of a plastic on the environment by defining and analyzing several impact indices directly related to production, utilization, and disposal of the considered plastics. In this work, the LCA (cradle to grave) of PLA bot- tles for drinking water was developed and compared to the LCA of PET bottles for the same use. The obtained results highlighted that the true advantage of the PLA bottles with respect to the PET bottles arises from the use of renewable resources, but this benefit is paid in environmental terms due to the higher impact on human health and ecosystem qual- ity (due to the use of pesticides, consumption of land, and consumption of water for the production of raw materials). Ó 2010 American Institute of Chemical Engi- neers Environ Prog, 30: 459–468, 2011 Keywords: PLA, composting, LCA, environmental impact, recycling INTRODUCTION The word ‘‘bioplastic’’ is ambiguous, because it can refer simultaneously to two aspects, which are not always linked with each other. In fact, you can refer to the source (renewable) used as raw material for bioplastics or to the biodegradability and/or com- postability that foreshadows a specific final destina- tion of the bioplastics [1]. Indeed, a plastic based on renewable sources (bio- based) may not be biodegradable {for instance, poly- ethylene (PE) obtained from bioethanol [2]} and on the contrary may be biodegradable but made from nonrenewable sources (e.g., polycaprolactone [3]). Of course, there are also bioplastics that are both biodegradable and bio-based such as polylactic acid (PLA) [4] and poly-3-hydroxybutyrate [5], or others obtained by copolymerization between biodegradable (or bio-based) and not biodegradable polymers such as Mater-Bi [6]. The main development fields of bioplastics are [7]:  containers for bio-waste collection and shopping bags; Ó 2010 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environmental Progress & Sustainable Energy (Vol.30, No.3) DOI 10.1002/ep October 2011 459