Carbon Footprints of Recycled Plastic Packaging and Household Food Consumption by Gender in Spain

Abstract

Households’ behaviour and consumption patterns are ultimately responsible for most global carbon emissions and therefore should be one main focus of sustainability policies. Detailed information provided by carbon footprints can help in that process by identifying factors and quantifying the environmental potential from changes. This chapter presents the calculated carbon footprints for Spanish single-person and average households using a multiregional input–output (MRIO) model and data from the Household Budget Survey (HBS). This allows us to analyze the differences in consumption and emissions by gender and compare it to the baseline of the average consumption unit. We find a higher carbon footprint for men (5049 vs. 4947 kg CO₂), resulting mainly from their higher level of consumption and their expending in transport, alcoholic beverages, tobacco and restaurants. This carbon footprint for single-person households is still lower than for the average consumption unit (5123 kg CO₂). When we focus on emissions from food consumption, we find however a larger carbon footprint for women as they tend to cook more at home, but double emissions from restaurants for men compared to women. Together with reducing consumption and changing patterns away from specific products and services like transport, recycling is a crucial part of the environmental strategies. In this chapter, we use data from HBS food expenditure and life cycle emissions from PlasticsEurope (The circular economy for plastics—a European overview, 2020), emissions shares from plastic packaging by Poore and Nemecek (Science 360:987–992, 2018) and total and percentages of recycled packaging from Ecoembes (Las cifras del reciclaje, 2019). We compare the carbon footprint from recycled versus new plastic and calculate the potential reductions in emissions from increasing the share of recycling for households’ packaging.