Abstract
Food packaging is important to the modern society, to ensure healthy and safe distribution of food to the consumers. Also, packaging is the way that food producers can communicate with the consumer, being an important marketing tool. However, packaging, mostly plastic packaging, when wrongly managed, has been identified as one of the biggest environmental problems facing today, including the marine plastic litter problem. This study intends to present an overview of the existing methodologies to design sustainable packaging, which could prevent the environmental problems from packaging life cycle. Most methodologies are based on life cycle assessment (LCA) or combine life cycle assessment with indicators from sustainability spectrum. Nevertheless, the drawbacks of life cycle assessment are related with the incomplete inclusion of environmental impacts related to littering, as well with the missing indicators to measure packaging circularity. In the future, the food packaging must clarify the dichotomy food-packaging study strategy, to quantify the impacts from plastic litter in the short term and to relate circularity as an impact category, where the management of end-of-life phase must be mandatory.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Martinho, G., Pires, A., Portela, G., Fonseca, M.: Factors affecting consumers’ choices concerning sustainable packaging during product purchase and recycling. Resour. Conserv. Recycl. 103, 58–68 (2015)
UN homepage. https://www.un.org/. Accessed 31 Jan 2021
Eur-Lex Homepage. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A01994L0062-20180704. Accessed 31 Jan 2021
Pires, A., Martinho, G., Rodrigues, S., Gomes, M.I.: Sustainable Solid Waste Collection and Management. Springer International Publishing, Switzerland (2019)
Watkins, E., Hogg, D., Mitsios, A., Mudgal, S., Neubauer, A., Reisinger, H., Troeltzsch, J., van Acoleyen, M.: Use of economic instruments and waste management performances – final report. Report for the European Commission (DG ENV) (2012)
Dempsey, M., van Rossem, C., Lifset, R., Linnell, J., Gregory, J., Atasu, A., Perrym J., Sverkman, A., van Wassenhove, L.N., Therkelsen, M., Sundberg, V., Mayers, C.K., Kalimo, H.: Individual producer responsibility: a review of practical approaches to implementing individual producer responsibility for the WEEE Directive. INSEAD working paper no. 2010/71/TOM/INSEAD Social Innovation Centre (2010)
European Parliament and Council. Directive 2008/98/EC on waste and repealing certain Directives. Off. J. Eur. Union L312, 3–30 (2008)
Merrild, H., Damgaard, A., Christensen, T.H.: Life cycle assessment of waste paper management: the importance of technology data and system boundaries in assessing recycling and incineration. Resour. Conserv. Recycl. 52, 1391–1398 (2008)
Circular Economy Action Plan EUR-Lex - 52020DC0098 - EN - EUR-Lex (europa.eu)
Pires, A., Martinho, G., Ribeiro, R., Mota, M., Teixeira, L.: Extended producer responsibility: a differential fee model for promoting sustainable packaging. J. Clean. Prod. 108A, 343–353 (2015)
Huang, C.-C., Ma, H.-W.: A multidimensional environmental evaluation of packaging materials. Sci. Total Environ. 324, 161–172 (2004)
Pires, A., Martinho, G.: Waste hierarchy index for circular economy in waste management. Waste Manage. 95, 298–305 (2019)
RecyClass Homepage. https://recyclass.eu/. Accessed 31 Jan 2021
Civancik-Uslu, D., Puig, R., Voigt, S., Walter, D., Fullana-i-Palmer, P.: Improving the production chain with LCA and eco-design: application to cosmetic packaging. Resour. Conserv. Recycl. 151, 104475 (2019)
Foschi, E., Zanni, S., Bonoli, A.: Combining eco-design and LCA as decision-making process to prevent plastics in packaging application. Sustainability 12, 9378 (2020)
Trayak Homepage. https://trayak.com/solutions/packaging-solutions. Accessed 31 Jan 2021
RDC Environment Homepage. https://packaging.instantlca.com/. Accessed 31 Jan 2021
Earthshift Global Homepage. https://www.earthshiftglobal.com/software/packagesmart. Accessed 31 Jan 2021
Elipso Homepage. https://www.elipso.org/en/eco-design/. Accessed 31 Jan 2021
CONAI Homepage. https://www.ecotoolconai.org/. Accessed 31 Jan 2021
Pack4Ecodesign Homepage. pack4ecodesign.org/index_en.html. Accessed 31 Jan 2021
De Koeijer, B., Borgman, I., Henseler, J., ten Klooster, R., de Lange, J.: Embedding a sustainability focus in packaging development processes. In: Kishita, Y., Matsumoto, M., Inoue, M., Fukushige, S. (eds.) EcoDesign and Sustainability, vol. II, pp. 49.60. Springer, Singapore (2020)
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the financial support of Sociedade Ponto Verde, Portugal, through the research project Pack4Sustain and the strategic project UIDB/04292/2020 granted to MARE – Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pires, A. (2021). Eco-Design and Sustainable Packaging: Challenges, Trends and Perspectives in the Food Sector. In: da Costa Sanches Galvão, J.R., et al. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Water Energy Food and Sustainability (ICoWEFS 2021). ICoWEFS 2021. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75315-3_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75315-3_25
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-75314-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-75315-3
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)