Environmentally sustainable plastic food packaging

Abstract

Enhancing the sustainability of food packaging (FP) is challenging due to the conflicting environmental and functional requirements, even though it leads to many negative environmental impacts over different life cycle phases. Sustainable FP aims to strike a balance in fulfilling protection, facilitation of handling, and communication functions while minimizing the environmental impacts and economic costs. Yet, there is a lack of holistic frameworks that support sustainable FP design decision-making processes based on life cycle thinking. Thus, the objective of this study is to develop a generalizable framework combining life cycle thinking with functional analysis for systematically and holistically comparing sustainable packaging design options, considering environmental, economic, and consumer preference dimensions. The proposed approach was applied to a rigid plastic packaging case study involving ketchup bottles. Kano's theory and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) were used to identify the user requirements, applicable design features, and prioritisation. Then, conjoint analysis, life cycle analysis (LCA), and analytical cost estimation were used to estimate the functional satisfaction, environmental impact, and costs incurred respectively. Finally, the values obtained for three criteria were aggregated using Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the overall sustainability of the design options was compared. The results show that both material quantity, type, and shape majorly influence the functional, environmental, and economic impacts. There is a disparity between the options with the highest functional satisfaction and the lowest environmental impacts respectively. The aggregated score indicates that an option currently available in the market has the highest performance, and yet there are other options with better environmental performance. However, even after the scores are aggregated, the inputs of packaging experts maybe necessary to successfully balance the sustainability requirements with the user expectations. The findings of this research, which proposes a systematic and holistic design process, can support packaging designers, industry decision-makers, and policy planners in enhancing the sustainability of FP.