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Role of Packaging in LCA of Food Products

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Towards Life Cycle Sustainability Management

Abstract

This article presents the results from life cycle assessment case studies of packed food products made in the Futupack2010EKO Project, where environmental impacts of different food packaging options were investigated. Also environmental impact scenarios resulting from the unutilised food supply caused by food wasted in households as a function of different sizes of packaging were included. The studied environmental impacts were climate change, eutrophication and acidification. A consumer survey was carried out to determine and model the amount of food waste from consumers. The results of the LCA case studies showed that the production chain of the wasted food was usually a more significant source of environmental impacts than the packaging production chain. Packaging solutions that minimise the generation of food will lead to the lowest amount of total environmental impacts over the entire product-packaging-chain.

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Correspondence to Frans Silvenius .

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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

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Silvenius, F., Katajajuuri, JM., Grönman, K., Soukka, R., Koivupuro, HK., Virtanen, Y. (2011). Role of Packaging in LCA of Food Products. In: Finkbeiner, M. (eds) Towards Life Cycle Sustainability Management. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1899-9_35

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