Eco-design of the remembrance poppy: a life cycle assessment study

Abstract

The Remembrance Poppy is an iconic artificial flower that is prevalently worn in Commonwealth countries in the period preceding the Remembrance Day to commemorate their military personnel. The current version of the Remembrance Poppy is a multi-material design made of fossil plastic (i.e., light-density polyethylene, LDPE) and paper; this prevents its widespread recycling and ascribes the Poppy to the realm of single-use plastics. In this study, we quantify the environmental performance of the current and alternative designs of the Remembrance Poppy via a detailed Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), with the objective of supporting decision-making by the Royal British Legion Group, whose group charities provide the Remembrance Poppy across the UK. We consider two alternative designs: (i) one envisaging an increased recycled content (30% for LDPE and 50% for paper) compared to the current design and (ii) a novel, mono-material design fully made of paper. For the latter we consider three sub-scenarios with increasing recycled content from 50% to 100%, as well as two options considering or not recycling of the Poppy at the end of its life. The system boundaries are cradle-to-grave. The inventory data combines primary data collected from RBL group and a paper supplier, and secondary data from LCA databases. The environmental impacts are quantified via the Environmental Footprint 2.0 method. The LCA study indicates that the paper-based design is overall the environmentally preferable option, yielding environmental benefits (after normalization and weighting) ranging from 39% to 59% compared to the current design, according to the specific scenario. The recycled-content plastic-based design is also preferable but by a smaller amount (11%). The study highlights the importance of using increasing percentages of recycled content, as well as that of designing product that are recyclable at the end of their life, which are tenets of the Circular Economy paradigm.