Brasil Pack Trends 2020

BrasilPackTrends2020 183 sustainabi l ity & ethics and Chemistry (SETAC). That partnership resulted on the establishment of the methodological structure of the Life Cycle Assessment. In 1993, leaded by SETAC, the standardization process started, with the publication of the document “A Code of Practice”, and the LCA methodology structuring. The development of the environmental impact methodology CML, coordinated by Helias Udo de Haes, allowed transforming the LCA into a powerful tool for environmental evaluation of product systems. SETAC officially joined the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2002, helping the dissemination of the LCA methodology around the world (KLÖPFFER, 2006). Between 1997 and 2000, the ISO standards series (14040, 14041, 14042 e 14043) were published aiming to avoid the bad use of the LCA methodology and establish rules for the harmonization of the studies. In 2006, the standards were reviewed and grouped in two only: ISO 14040 and ISO 14044. The ISO 14040 describes the principles and the LCA studies structure and the ISO 14044 describes the essential requirements and the rules to be used in those studies (ISO, 2006a and 2006b). In 2009, the translation to Portuguese of the ISO 14040 was published in Brazil as ABNT ISO 14040 (ABNT, 2009). The Life Cycle Assessment studies have allowed increasing the debates related to the environmental issues that used to be aspects such as energy consumption, use of renewable or fossil resources, recycling, biodegradation and/or composting only, among others. Those studies give a new dimension to the debates, hence they can integrate many environmental aspects in one functional unity only associated to a product or service. In its ideal form, that instrument is founded in an environmental registering that starts and ends in the nature. According to the standard ISO 14040, the term Life Cycle Assessment is defined as the compilation and assessment of the inputs and outputs and the potential environmental impacts of a product system all over its life cycle. The product system is defined by all its unitary processes with elementary fluxes and of products that has one or more defined function, which models the life cycle of a good. The natural resources that are consumed along every phase of the product life cycle (including transportation) are registered to the given production such as petroleum, water, log, land occupation, sand, iron ore, bauxite, coal reserves etc. And, after the sequence of productive phases for the given product manufacturing, the remainder of the process in relation to what it returns to the nature is registered, in the form of solid residue, gas or liquid emission. That product/nature assessment interface allows a deeper understanding of the environmental cost for the existence of any product (MOURAD et al., 2002). The FIGURE 7.4 is a schematic representation of the phases included in a package LCA, in which ellipses represent the many unitary productive processes involved in the package life cycle and the trucks mean the phases of material transportation. It is observed that the registering is initiated in the natural resources consumed for obtaining the given products: ore, petroleum, solar energy, carbon dioxide etc. In that representation, for example, the phases for obtaining the conditioned product have not been included, since for this case, the study is limited to a package LCA. The principles of the LCA methodology