| Resumo: | The present study was asked by the Symington Family Estates (SFE) in order to determine which of the three alternative decorations of a Cockburn’s 75 cL Port wine bottle has the lowest environmental impact. The aim of this study was to compare the environmental impacts of the alternative decorations of the wine bottle, applying the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. The three alternative decorations consist of sleeve application, paint and screen printing or screen printing. The system boundaries include the transport of the raw materials (to the decoration unit) and the decoration process; the utilization phase and the disposal of the decorated bottles are not included in the system boundaries. It is important to highlight that only the decoration processes are focused on this study, the bottle production is not included. The primary data was collected with the support of a SFE supplier, BA Glass; the secondary data was collected in ecoinvent v.3.4 database, available in SimaPro software version 8.5. The ReCiPe 2016 v.1.01 impact assessment method was used to compare the alternative decorations. The analysed impact categories were the following: global warming, ozone formation (impacts on human health and on terrestrial ecosystems), terrestrial acidification and fossil resource scarcity. The results showed that, for all the systems assessed, the burning of natural gas during the process of decoration is the main contributor for all the impact categories, with exception of fossil resource scarcity. Concerning this impact category, the main contributor is the natural gas, regarding its production and extraction. It was verified that, for all the assessed impact categories, the alternative decoration, paint and screen printing, has the highest environmental impact, followed by screen printing; sleeve application turned up to be the alternative with the lowest environmental impact.
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