LCA Case Study on Printed Matter

Previous product life cycle assessments (LCAs) on offset printed matter all point at paper as the overall dominating contributor to the impacts from the life cycle of this product category. The dominating role of paper is primarily founded in the energy-related impact categories: global warming, acidification and eutrophication. These former studies focus on impacts related to energy and the chemical-related impact categories, comprising ecotoxicity and human toxicity, are not included at all or only to a limited degree. In this chapter we present a newer case study that includes these chemical-related impact categories by making use of knowledge about emissions from the printing industry combined with knowledge about the composition of the printing materials used during the production of offset printed matter. The results show that the relative importance of the paper-related energy consumption is significantly reduced when chemical emissions combined with toxicity-related impact categories are included in the impact assessment. By including results from a survey on the presence of hazardous chemicals in the Danish printing industry, some of the potential additives/impurities that may appear in the recycled paper are identified.