Original Article · English
Quantifying the Net Environmental Benefits of Food-Grade Recycled PET in Cameroon: Application of the Circular Footprint Formula to Mid-Scale Mechanical Recycling
National Advanced School of Public Works; University of Yaoundé 1, Faculty of Sciences
01Abstract
Mechanical recycling is often assumed, rather than demonstrated, to deliver a net environmental benefit relative to virgin plastic production, particularly in Sub-Saharan African contexts where primary process data are scarce. This study quantifies that benefit for food-grade recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET) produced at mid-scale in Cameroon, using the European Commission’s Circular Footprint Formula (CFF) applied to a gate-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA; ISO 14040/14044) of the Opur and Supermont mineral-water bottle streams recycled at Ecogreen Sarl, Douala. Primary inventory data were obtained from a 90-day, three-shift production campaign combining calibrated mass, electricity and water metering; a parallel material flow analysis (MFA) established a mass-balance closure. The Environmental Footprint (EF) 3.1 method, implemented in openLCA with ecoinvent v3.10 background data, characterised the gate-to-gate process impact at 186 kg CO2-eq per tonne of food-grade rPET pellets. Applying the CFF converted this process impact into an effective, credit-adjusted climate-change footprint of approximately 1,600 kg CO2-eq per tonne, corresponding to an avoided impact of 27.2% relative to a linear baseline of virgin production plus landfilling. Comparable avoided impacts were obtained for acidification (28.4%), fossil resource use (29.8%) and particulate matter (27.0%), while human toxicity indicators showed a net increase (-5.8% for cancer effects, -21.2% for non-cancer effects) attributable to ancillary chemical and energy inputs. Freshwater eutrophication and ecotoxicity, driven by wastewater treatment, and climate change and fossil-resource depletion, driven by electricity and diesel-fuelled thermal energy, dominated the normalised impact profile. Material flow analysis identified oversized 10-litre bottles as the single largest documented loss pathway at the flake-production stage (8.3% of PET bottle feed), a design-process mismatch rather than a contamination problem. A ceteris-paribus parametric sensitivity analysis, holding the recycling-process impact, end-of-life recycling rate, allocation factor and quality ratios fixed, shows the CFF-derived climate benefit increasing monotonically with the input recycled-content rate above the 25% baseline; because this response is a mathematical property of the CFF equation rather than independently tested evidence of technical feasibility, it is presented as a policy-relevant scenario rather than a demonstrated ceiling. Uncertainty was propagated through 10,000 Monte-Carlo iterations for the recycling-process inventory. Subject to these caveats, the results indicate that the CFF, parameterised with primary process data, provides a policy-relevant quantification of circularity benefit even where recycling operates below the collection and technology standards of mature economies, and that recycled-content policy, alongside process-level efficiency improvement, remains an influential lever for improving the environmental return of food-grade PET recycling in Cameroon.
02Author contributions
Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; Resources; Software; Writing – original draft; Supervision
Validation; Writing – review & editing
Writing – review & editing; Supervision
03What this study adds
This study provides one of the first primary-data applications of the Circular Footprint Formula (CFF) to mechanical recycling of PET in Sub-Saharan Africa. Previous CFF applications have almost exclusively relied on European of global average datasets from highly automated, high collection rate systems. In constrast, this work is built on primary industrial data collected at a real mid-scale recycling plant in Douala, Cameroon, a rigourously closed material flow analysis, full uncertainty propagation and explicit parametrisation of CFF with allocation factor A = 0.5 on Environmental Footprint 3.1 impact categories. The results demonstrate that food-grade rPET produced under Cameroonian operating conditions delivers a mean net environmental benefit of 43.2% relative to virgin PET (with -44.5 % in climate change) even when a conservative allocation factor is used. This finding cllenfes the assumption that recycling in resource-constrained settings necessarily yields only marginal benefits. The study offers a transparent and replicable framework for applying the CFF in data-scare, mid-sclae African recycling systems. Key methodological contributions include coupling of material flow analysis with gate-to-gate life cycle assessment and use of dual functional units. The findings supply quantitative evidence that can directly inform design of recycled-content madates, calibration of Extended Producer Responsability and development of national protocols for Product Environmental Footprint reporting of rPET. This study shows thet significant circularity benefits are already being achieved with existing mid-sclae technology.
04Introduction
Global plastic production now exceeds 400 million tonnes per year, and single-use packaging - polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles foremost among it - accounts for a large and growing share of that total (Geyer et al., 2017). Bottles designed for weeks of use persist in the environment for centuries, fragmenting into microplastics that enter food chains and freshwater and marine ecosystems (Crawford & Quinn, 2017). The crisis is most acute where waste-management infrastructure has not kept pace with urbanisation and plastic consumption: across Africa, mismanagement rates for plastic waste commonly exceed 80-90 % (Yeboaa et al., 2025; Godfrey et al., 2019), and Sub-Saharan economies face the additional constraints of informal collection systems, weak regulatory enforcement and negligible formal recycling capacity (Barnes, 2019). Cameroon exemplifies these constraints. The country generates approximately 600,000 tonnes of plastic waste annually, yet formal recycling rates remain below 10 % (Afrik21, 2023; Business in Cameroon, 2026; MINEPDED, 2024). PET bottles for mineral water - led by the Opur and Supermont brands, which together held a 61.7 % market share in 2017 (Business in Cameroon, 2017) - constitute a highly visible fraction of this stream, most of which ends in open dumps, waterways or uncontrolled burning. In response, national policy has begun to embrace the circular-economy paradigm, most notably through the 2024 National Strategy to Combat Plastic Pollution and an emerging extended-producer-responsibility (EPR) framework (MINEPDED, 2024). A formal manufacturer-recycler partnership between Source du Pays S.A. (producer of Opur and Supermont) and Ecogreen Sarl, a mid-scale recycling facility in the Bonabéri industrial zone of Douala, represents an early, empirically observable instance of this transition. Whether such partnerships deliver a genuine net environmental benefit, however, is an empirical question that circularity rhetoric alone cannot answer. Recycling is not axiomatically superior to virgin production: energy-intensive reprocessing, water-intensive washing, and diesel-fuelled thermal drying can each erode the credit that recycled content is assumed to generate (Corona et al., 2019; Haupt & Hellweg, 2019). Quantifying the net benefit requires an accounting framework capable of apportioning burdens and credits between virgin and recycled material streams in a transparent, comparable manner. The Circular Footprint Formula (CFF), developed by the European Commission for the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) initiative, was designed for exactly this purpose: it combines the impact of virgin material displaced, the impact of the recycling process itself, and the quality of the recycled output relative to the primary material, weighted by an allocation factor A that apportions burdens and credits between the supplier and the user of recycled content (Allacker et al., 2017; European Commission, 2013). The CFF has been applied extensively to European PET recycling systems operating within mature, largely electrified, high-collection-rate infrastructures (Eriksen et al., 2020; Jeswani et al., 2024; Rigamonti et al., 2024). Its application to a mid-scale, primary-data-verified recycling operation in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the counterfactual (open dumping, uncontrolled burning, or virgin substitution under a hydropower-dominated grid) differs structurally from the European case, has not, to the authors' knowledge, previously been reported with comparable methodological rigour. This gap matters because policy instruments (recycled-content mandates, EPR fee structures, eco-labelling) increasingly rely on CFF-type metrics, yet their local calibration in low- and middle-income countries remains largely untested. This article addresses that gap. Building on a gate-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) and material flow analysis (MFA) of the mechanical PET recycling line in Cameroon, it pursues three objectives specific to the quantification of circularity benefit: (i) to characterise, with primary industrial data, the gate-to-gate environmental profile of food-grade rPET production at mid-scale in Cameroon; (ii) to apply the Circular Footprint Formula, with an allocation factor A = 0.5 consistent with European Commission guidance, to convert that process-level profile into an effective, credit-adjusted footprint directly comparable with virgin PET; and (iii) to quantify, through a parametric sensitivity analysis of the CFF itself, the maximum net environmental benefit achievable by varying the recycled-content rate, independently of any change in recycling-process technology. In doing so, the study provides one of the first primary-data-based CFF applications for mechanical plastics recycling in Sub-Saharan Africa and a transferable template for similarly resourced facilities across the region
05Materials and methods
A gate-to-gate system boundary was adopted, beginning at the reception of post-consumer PET bottle bales at the Ecogreen facility gate and ending at the production and storage of food-grade rPET pellets. The processing line comprises de-baling and feeding, pre-washing, manual/visual sorting, grinding and air separation, hot caustic washing and rinsing, centrifugation, thermal drying, final optical separation, and flake-to-pellet conversion by crystallisation, extrusion and underwater pelletising. Collection and transport of bales, upstream remanufacturing, and end-of-life management of the rPET pellets fall outside the recycler's operational control and were excluded, consistent with the draft PEF Category Rules for Plastic Products (2023). Two nested functional units were defined, following the dual-functional-unit approach recommended by Fleischer et al. (2001) for multi-stage recycling systems: an intermediate functional unit of 1,000 kg of clean, colour-sorted PET flakes, isolating the upstream stages most exposed to sorting and contamination losses, and a final functional unit of 1,000 kg of food-grade rPET pellets, encompassing the full recycling value chain and serving as the reference flow for the Circular Footprint Formula and its recycled-content sensitivity analysis. Foreground (primary) data were collected during a representative multi-day, multi-shift production campaign using calibrated industrial platform scales (± 0.5 kg precision), in-line electromagnetic water flow meters, and shift-level electricity metering. Arithmetic means and standard deviations recorded during measurement were converted to geometric means and geometric standard deviations to reflect the log-normal distribution characteristic of environmental process data (Weidema et al., 2013; Ciroth et al., 2016), consistent with pedigree-based uncertainty propagation. Every foreground and background flow was scored against the pedigree matrix (Table 2; Weidema et al., 2013) for reliability, completeness, temporal, geographical and technological correlation, in accordance with ISO 14044:2006 §4.3. Background data were sourced from ecoinvent v3.10 (Wernet et al., 2016), with the national electricity grid mix adapted to Cameroon's predominantly hydroelectric generation profile (approximately 64 % of installed capacity) using regional energy datasets (Jolliet et al., 2016); where Cameroon-specific data were unavailable, the closest Central African regional proxy was applied. Material flow analysis, based exclusively on the primary life cycle inventory (no secondary data), quantified inputs, outputs, residues and process-specific recycling efficiency at each unit-process stage, targeting a mass-balance closure exceeding the 95 % benchmark for high-confidence flow quantification identified by Brunner and Rechberger (2016). Sankey diagrams, constructed in STAN 2.0 (ifu Hamburg) and rendered in SankeyMATIC, visualised flow paths and loss points across the recycling chain, providing the physical backbone subsequently transferred into the life cycle inventory to ensure full MFA-LCA consistency (Lavers Westin et al., 2019; Barkhausen et al., 2022) The life cycle impact assessment was performed in openLCA (v2.3.1) using the Environmental Footprint (EF) 3.1 characterisation method (European Commission, 2021), which provides harmonised characterisation factors, midpoint indicators and normalisation references across sixteen impact categories (Table 3). Normalisation was performed relative to the average annual impact of a European citizen, as recommended for PEF-compliant studies (European Commission, 2021). Uncertainty was propagated through 10,000-iteration Monte-Carlo simulation using pedigree-derived geometric standard deviations; for impact categories exhibiting a coefficient of variation greater than 1.0, the median rather than the arithmetic mean was reported as the central estimate, following the statistical guidance of Rousselet and Wilcox (2020) and Igos et al. (2019) for strongly right-skewed distributions. The Circular Footprint Formula quantifies the effective environmental impact of a material stream that incorporates both recycled input and end-of-life recyclability, apportioning burdens and credits between the supplier and the user of recycled material through an allocation factor A (European Commission, 2013; Allacker et al., 2017).
06Results
The mass balance closed at 99.8 %, reconciling 1,388.87 kg of incoming bottles and preforms against 1,000.00 kg of clean PET flakes plus 388.87 kg of documented losses per functional unit. Overall bottle-to-pellet yield reached 70.66 % (72.0 % from bales to clean flakes, 98.45 % from flakes to pellets). Four loss categories accounted for the full 28.0 % shortfall at the flake-production stage: oversized 10-litre bottles rejected at feeding and sorting (104.59 kg, 8.3 % of input - the single largest category), labels, caps and non-PET contaminants (86.00 kg, 6.8 %), dust and fines from grinding and drying (41.30 kg, 3.3 %), and optical rejects at final separation (27.70 kg, 2.2 %). The Sankey diagram (Figure 1) visualises these flows across the full processing chain. Auxiliary resource intensity was dominated by process water (714.46 L per tonne of clean flakes, concentrated at filtration and washing) and diesel-derived thermal energy; mean daily electricity consumption reached 19,569.8 ± 3,412 kWh (Figure 2). The characterised impact profile of the baseline process, per tonne of food-grade rPET pellets, is reported in Table 5. Mean climate-change impact was 174 kg CO2-eq, with acidification at 0.407 mol H+ eq, freshwater eutrophication at 0.0311 kg P eq (median, given a coefficient of variation of 1.74), and water scarcity at 25.3 m3 deprived. Several categories exhibited strongly right-skewed Monte-Carlo distributions (coefficient of variation > 1.0), for which the median was retained as the representative value. Normalised results (Figure 3) identified freshwater eutrophication, climate change and freshwater ecotoxicity as the three dominant categories in person-equivalent terms. Contribution analysis attributed climate change primarily to electricity and diesel thermal energy, and attributed freshwater eutrophication, freshwater ecotoxicity and both human-toxicity categories primarily to wastewater treatment associated with the caustic washing and rinsing stage. Application of the CFF (Equation 1, A = 0.5) converted the gate-to-gate process impact ER into an effective, credit-adjusted footprint E directly comparable to virgin PET production for each of the sixteen EF 3.1 categories (Table 6). For climate change, the process impact of 174 kg CO2-eq combined with an EV benchmark of 2,150 kg CO2-eq and a landfilling benchmark of 42 kg CO2-eq yielded an effective CFF impact E of approximately 1,220 kg CO2-eq, a net benefit of -44.47 % relative to virgin PET production. Comparable net benefits were obtained across the impact suite: -46.9 % for freshwater ecotoxicity, -45.6 % for terrestrial eutrophication, -47.9 % for fossil resource use, and -49.0 % for land use, with the smallest benefits recorded for human toxicity non-cancer (-15.9 %) and human toxicity cancer (-25.7 %), reflecting the residual contribution of wastewater-treatment-related toxicological burdens even after CFF crediting. The mean net benefit across all sixteen categories was -43.16 %. Because E is linear in R1 for a fixed process impact (Equation 1), net climate-change benefit deepens monotonically and without diminishing returns as recycled content increases: from -31.9 % at R1 = 0 % (a hypothetical, unincentivised baseline) through -43.4 % at the case-study rate of R1 = 25 % - closely reproducing the -44.5 % obtained by direct CFF calculation in §3.3, the small residual difference reflecting rounding in the reported process-impact inputs - to a maximum of -77.9 % at R1 = 100 %, corresponding to an effective impact of approximately 476 kg CO2-eq per tonne against the 2,150 kg CO2-eq virgin-PET benchmark (Figure 4). Each 10-percentage-point increase in recycled content yields a further ~99 kg CO2-eq reduction in effective impact, a constant marginal return that follows directly from the CFF's linear structure rather than from any assumption about diminishing process efficiency
07Discussion
The central finding of this study is that food-grade rPET produced by a mid-scale Cameroonian recycler generates a substantial, CFF-quantified net environmental benefit relative to virgin PET - a mean of -43.2 % across sixteen impact categories, and -44.5 % for climate change specifically - despite operating with a diesel-supplemented thermal energy supply, an open, once-through water circuit, and a conservative allocation factor (A = 0.5) that credits only half of the achievable circularity benefit to the recycled material stream. This result is more conservative than the up-to-70 % carbon savings reported for fully closed European bottle-to-bottle loops evaluated under 0:100 end-of-life allocation (Benyathiar et al., 2022), which is the expected and methodologically appropriate outcome of applying a mid-point allocation factor to a system in which recycled content displaces, but does not yet fully substitute for, virgin material across all downstream applications. The finding is nonetheless robust: it rests on primary, calibrated, pedigree-scored process data with 99.8 % mass-balance closure, propagated through 10,000-iteration Monte-Carlo simulation, and it identifies the CFF-effective footprint (~1,220 kg CO2-eq per tonne rPET) as an order of magnitude below the un-credited virgin-PET benchmark (2,150 kg CO2-eq) even before any circularity allocation is applied - the raw gate-to-gate process impact alone (174 kg CO2-eq) already sits far below the 500-1,500 kg CO2-eq range typically reported for European mechanical PET recycling under comparable system boundaries (Shen et al., 2010; Eriksen et al., 2020), owing to Cameroon's hydropower-dominated electricity grid and the exclusion, by design, of collection- and transport-stage burdens from the gate-to-gate scope. The CFF's residual, credit-adjusted footprint is explained by two structurally distinct hotspots. First, wastewater treatment associated with the caustic hot-washing and rinsing stage dominates freshwater eutrophication, freshwater ecotoxicity and both human-toxicity categories - a pattern that converges with contribution analyses reported for geographically and institutionally distinct PET recycling systems in Jordan (Bataineh, 2020) and the United States (Chaudhari et al., 2022), confirming that this hotspot is a structural feature of mechanical PET recycling chemistry rather than an artefact specific to the Cameroonian context. Second, the 8.3 % material loss attributable to oversized 10-litre Opur/Supermont bottles at feeding and sorting is, by contrast, a site-specific finding with no precedent in the reviewed literature on comparable facilities, where yield losses are typically attributed to adhesive label residues, colour mixing or additive-driven decontamination failures (Santomasi et al., 2024; Hahladakis et al., 2018). At Ecogreen, the feeding hopper and sorting table were dimensioned for small- to medium-format bottles (0.35-1.5 L); both focal brands are also sold in 10-litre and 20-litre formats. This is a design-process mismatch, not a chemistry problem, and it carries an immediate, low-cost policy implication: a bottle-format compatibility specification within the EPR provisions of the 2024 National Strategy could eliminate this loss pathway entirely at zero capital cost to the recycler. The sensitivity analysis (§3.3) reframes the policy question from "does recycling help" to "how much recycled content should be mandated." Because the CFF's effective impact declines linearly and without saturation across the full 0-100 % range of R1, there is no technical ceiling, within the scope of this model, beyond which further recycled-content increases cease to deliver additional benefit - a materially different conclusion from process-efficiency interventions, which typically exhibit diminishing returns as the most accessible losses are addressed first. The current case-study rate of 25 % - the minimum threshold already voluntarily adopted by Opur and Supermont - captures only 56 % of the maximum achievable benefit (-43.4 % of a possible -77.9 %), implying that raising mandated or voluntary recycled content toward 50-75 % would, on the same production technology and energy mix, roughly double to triple the climate benefit currently realised, without any capital investment in the recycling process itself. This finding does not diminish the value of process-level improvements - reducing ER further would steepen the sensitivity curve's intercept and improve the benefit at every level of R1 - but it identifies recycled-content rate as the lowest-cost, highest-leverage variable available to manufacturers and regulators in the near term, ahead of, and complementary to, any investment in recycling-process technology. Three policy-relevant conclusions follow directly from the CFF quantification. First, because the sensitivity analysis shows no diminishing return to recycled content within the modelled range, a phased regulatory pathway raising the minimum recycled-content threshold for PET beverage bottles from the current 25 % toward 50 % and eventually higher would deliver a proportionally larger, low-cost climate and resource benefit, complementing rather than substituting for continued investment in recycling-process efficiency. Second, because the residual footprint after CFF crediting remains dominated by wastewater-related categories (§4.2), a discharge fee or water-scarcity pricing mechanism calibrated to the ecological damage quantified in this study would strengthen the business case for process-level water-treatment investment as a second-order lever, once the recycled-content lever has been exploited. Third, because the EF 3.1-compliant, CFF-integrated inventory constructed here provides a ready basis for Product Environmental Footprint declarations, Cameroonian recyclers and their manufacturing partners are positioned to access premium export markets where PEF-based eco-labelling requirements are expanding (European Commission, 2021) - provided a national PET quality protocol is established to standardise CFF reporting across facilities, as recommended in this study's companion thesis (Lele, 2025). Four limitations qualify the CFF results reported here. First, the gate-to-gate boundary excludes collection and transport, which contribute 15-35 % of the full system climate burden in comparable cradle-to-gate assessments (Shen et al., 2010); a cradle-to-gate extension would raise both ER and, to a lesser extent, EV, narrowing but not eliminating the reported net benefit. Second, the CFF benchmark values for virgin PET (EV) and landfilling (ED) were drawn from established international datasets (Franklin Associates; NAPCOR) rather than measured locally, introducing a source of geographic uncertainty common to nearly all CFF applications outside the regions for which such benchmarks were originally developed. Third, the single-facility, multi-day campaign design, while methodologically rigorous within its scope, cannot capture inter-facility variability across Cameroon's broader (and substantially informal) recycling sector, nor seasonal variation in bale quality between Douala's dry and wet seasons. Fourth, the recycled-content sensitivity analysis (§3.3) holds ER, R2 and the quality ratios constant as R1 varies; in practice, sourcing substantially higher volumes of post-consumer bales to raise R1 toward 50-100 % could alter bale quality, sorting losses and therefore ER and R2 in ways this linear extrapolation does not capture, so the reported curve should be read as an upper-bound, process-technology-held-constant estimate rather than a guaranteed outcome of any specific content mandate. None of these limitations alters the sign or the order of magnitude of the CFF net benefit, which was confirmed stable under Monte-Carlo uncertainty propagation, but they bound the precision with which the reported percentages should be interpreted.
08Conclusion
This study provides, to the authors' knowledge, one of the first primary-data-based applications of the Circular Footprint Formula to mechanical PET recycling in Sub-Saharan Africa. Applied with a conservative allocation factor (A = 0.5) to a rigorously verified gate-to-gate life cycle inventory (99.8 % mass-balance closure; 10,000-iteration Monte-Carlo uncertainty propagation), the CFF quantifies a mean net environmental benefit of -43.2 % for food-grade recycled PET relative to virgin material at a mid-scale Cameroonian facility, and -44.5 % for climate change specifically, converting a raw process impact of 174 kg CO2-eq per tonne into an effective, policy-comparable footprint of approximately 1,220 kg CO2-eq per tonne against a virgin-PET benchmark of 2,150 kg CO2-eq. A parametric sensitivity analysis further shows that this benefit is not fixed but scales linearly, without diminishing returns, with the input recycled-content rate: net climate-change benefit deepens from -31.9 % at zero recycled content to a maximum of -77.9 % at full (100 %) recycled content, with the case-study rate of 25 % capturing just over half of this achievable benefit. These findings demonstrate that the Circular Footprint Formula, correctly parameterised with high-pedigree primary data, offers a robust and actionable basis for quantifying and improving the circularity performance of plastics recycling in resource-constrained settings, and that recycled-content policy - rather than process-technology investment alone - represents the single most direct route to closing Cameroon's circularity gap.
03References
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