Consequential Life Cycle Assessment of Banning Single Use Plastics within the EU : Straw Wars: A Consequential Saga

Sammanfattning: The European Union have decided to ban and phase out several Single Use Plastics starting from 2021 and claim that it will lead to avoided CO2-e emissions equivalent to 4.2 million tonnes. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the potential environmental impacts of the decision to ban Single Use Plastics within the EU and its synergy with the Paris Agreement and uses drinking straws sold by Coop Sverige as a case for the assessment. The results of the study highlights that the potential substitution will lead to significant increases of CO2 emissions followed a change in extraction of feedstock and production of biobased alternatives and highlights the issue of dependent and determining production when producing feedstocks. The majority of the total CO2 emissions come from the individual life cycles of the biobased alternatives, 89-83%, and have large associated emissions related to indirect land use change, 11-17%, for the PLA and paper drinking straws respectively.