School of Emergent Priorities researchers costed a promotional foam drink sleeve from moulding to landfill, then compared the service life its recipients gave it with the life nominated on the order that bought it.
A cradle-to-grave assessment of 214 giveaway drink sleeves, and the twelve-month diary that followed 148 of them home
A promotional foam drink sleeve carries 644 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent before anyone puts a can in it. How much of that lands against each use depends entirely on how many uses there turn out to be.
Amortising the Stubby Holder, a research poster released this week by the School of Emergent Priorities, follows 214 sleeves collected from 26 trade stands through a full cradle-to-grave assessment, and 148 of them into a twelve-month diary kept by the people who took them home. Foam sheet production accounts for three-fifths of the footprint, with no other stage above a seventh. The median sleeve is used three times. The median life nominated on the order that bought it is sixty.
The Schools have spent a good deal of effort on what things cost to make and rather less on how long anybody keeps them. This gives us somewhere to start on the second question, which is the more interesting of the two.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register
The assessment pairs a mass-balance teardown of each unit with a modelled background inventory and a thousand-run uncertainty analysis, holding the functional unit fixed at a single chilled can. Diarists recorded each use as it happened rather than recalling it afterwards, giving the University a use record for an object that is ordinarily counted only at the moment it is handed across a table.
The resulting figure has since been carried into the University’s own merchandise approval, where a requesting unit’s allocation is assessed against the service life it nominates. Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor of the Living Dashboard, said the study had been improved throughout by the exhibitors who let their stands be counted, and that she was glad to see an ordinary object asked to account for itself.
The University counts the work among the research it is pleased to have underway in settings that keep no records of their own.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ni4xcp.