Glass vs recycled PET for olive oil
A life cycle assessment of olive oil packaging, plus a lighter rPET bottle redesign checked with drop-test simulations.
glass bottle: 7× heavierfiled underSustainability
The question
Studies of olive oil’s environmental footprint focus on farming and pressing, and tend to skip what happens after: packaging and distribution. Almost all olive oil ships in heavy glass, and an empty glass bottle weighs more than seven times its PET equivalent. That weight rides along on every truck and ship. We asked whether a 100% recycled PET (rPET) bottle would do better over its whole life.
Redesign criteria
Before running any numbers we set what a better bottle had to do:
- Lower impact across the key categories: global warming, fossil resource scarcity, acidification and particulate matter.
- Still protect and store the oil safely.
- Use less material per litre.
- Cut transport burden through lower mass and better pallet use.
- Be made on existing bottling lines.
- Work with real recycling systems.
Does the light bottle survive?
A lighter bottle only helps if it doesn’t break. We modelled both glass and rPET bottles in SolidWorks and ran drop-test simulations, checking that the rPET design could take handling and transport loads.
The assessment
We followed the standard four LCA stages: goal and scope, inventory, impact assessment and interpretation.
- Functional unit: the packaging needed to deliver 1,000 L of olive oil, so both options are compared like for like.
- Boundary: cradle to grave for the packaging — raw materials, processing, bottle making, secondary and tertiary packaging, bottling, transport and end of life — leaving out the oil itself and the consumer’s use.
- Scenarios: glass and rPET compared across several regional supply-chain scenarios.
The answer
rPET came out ahead: lower greenhouse gas emissions, lower energy demand and lower transport impacts across the boundary we studied. Glass keeps its edge in recyclability and in what shoppers expect a premium oil to come in, so the redesign also needs clear, honest labelling to get past the idea that rPET is cheap or unsafe. On the measures that drive environmental impact, though, the lighter bottle wins.
Scraps from the build
