Overview
The Post-Consumer Waste End-of-Life (EoL) module calculates the environmental impacts associated with the final treatment of your products and packaging materials after consumer use. This comprehensive methodology incorporates the main treatment pathways that materials follow at the end of their useful life, using the scientifically-validated PEF Circular Footprint Formula (CFF).
Impact Stage Coverage
This estimation function covers the End of Life (EoL) Impact Stage for the Post-Consumer Waste Altruistiq activity, representing the final phase of your product's lifecycle journey.
Treatment Pathways Covered
The system models four primary end-of-life treatment scenarios:
1. Material Recycling
Processing of materials into new products
Associated impacts from collection, sorting, and reprocessing
Considers quality differences between virgin and recycled materials
2. Incineration
Waste-to-energy facilities that generate heat and electricity
Base incineration emissions calculation
3. Landfill Disposal
Direct disposal in managed landfill facilities
Long-term emissions from decomposition processes
4. Reuse
Direct reuse of packaging and products without reprocessing
Applied to packaging input, inbound logistics, and EoL calculations
Required Input Data
Essential Data
The following additional data should be added to the Product List reference data file:
Material type
Glass Bottles
Aluminium Cans
Paper packaging
PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate)
Rigid Plastic packaging
Mixed Plastic materials
LDPE (Low-Density Polyethylene)
Reuse rate (the number of times the packaging material is reused, otherwise known as the trip rate. This is set to 1 by default)
Optional Custom Data
Landfill rate (% of waste sent to landfill)
Incineration rate (% of waste incinerated)
Recycling rate (% of waste recycled)
Allocation factor (for impact sharing, set to the 50-50 method by default)
End Of Life Parameters
Default data is pre-populated based on the material category and country of use, using PEF default and world bank country data. (The product production country and disposal country are currently assumed to be equivalent.) You can override these defaults with measured or more accurate estimates if available. You can adjust these by downloading the dataset, making adjustments, and re-uploading.
Each of the following parameters can vary by packaging type, year and country:
Data | Description |
Recycling rate (%) | % of the material that’s recycled |
Incineration rate (%) | % of the material that’s incinerated |
Landfill rate (%) | % of the material that’s sent to landfil |
The default values applied are linked below.
EU defaults:
World defaults:
Circular Footprint Formular Parameters
The Allocation Factor is applied to the inputs and outputs, and determines how impacts are shared between the upstream (recycled content) and downstream (end-of-life recyclability) stages of a material’s life cycle.
By default the Allocation Factor in the Circular Footprint Formula is set to 0.5, “50-50”. You can adjust this by setting it to the PEF default instead for any given product, country and production year combination. You can adjust these by downloading the dataset, making adjustments, and re-uploading.
Data | Description |
Allocation Factor | Can be set to “50-50” or “PEF” the impacts of recycled materials are shared between upstream and downstream |
The Energy Recovery from Incineration element of the Circular Footprint Formula is currently excluded, and the Quality Ratio is set to 1 by default for all materials.