The US PET Bottle Market: A Mismatch between Product Circularity, Material and Environmental Efficiency

The Circular Economy (CE) movement is inspiring new governmental policies along with company strategies. This led to the emergence of a plethora of indicators to quantify the “circularity” of individual companies or products. Behind this approach at micro scale to quantifying circularity, the CE supports mainly two implicit assumptions we tested with a large-scale case study on the circularity of PET in the US market within the bottle market and across all sectors. First, closing the material loops at the micro scale within the same product is expected to lead to improvements in material efficiency for the economy as a whole. Second, maximizing material circularity contributes to mitigate environmental impacts. Material Circularity Indicator (MCI) reveals that closing the material loops at the product level increases product circularity and lead to higher material efficiency in the US plastic bottle market but not in the US PET market across all sectors using PET. Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) results reveal that rPET in bottle manufacturing seems environmentally beneficial from an attributional standpoint but not from a consequential, market-wide viewpoint. By adopting a broader approach than product level circularity, we contribute:

• to invalidate the assertion that improving one product improves products average and,
• to break the implicit link between environmental performance and material efficiency supported by the CE movement.

We further discuss methodological aspects for CE assessment.