Food packaging: Sustainability through design – minimizing total system waste - Sponsored Whitepaper

susTainabiliTy Through Design—Minimizing Total system Waste

It seems that the prevailing societal view of packaging is that of wasted resources. Corporate sustainability goals almost always include a focused effort to reduce packaging in general and packaging waste in particular. It should then be surprising to learn that substantially more damage can be done to the environment and to society’s limited natural resources when the sole goal is to reduce waste through reductions in packaging. Intelligent use of innovative packaging films and modest increases in packaging weight can actually result in substantial environmental impact reductions for the total system.

Packaging has been referred to as the science, art, and technology of enclosing or protecting products for distribution, storage, sale, and use (Soroka 2002). This big-picture view belies the actual complexity of the many competing agendas that the packaging engineer must manage coherently. The packaging engineer is challenged with balancing the industry’s complex and often diverging goals of

• Promoting consumer safety • Promoting product protection • Promoting quality assurance • Promoting convenience features (easy open, portion sizing, tamper evident) • Providing presentation and branding (marketability) • Increasing processability • Enabling efficient product distribution • Providing environmental compatibility (achieving sustainability goals)

In essence, packaging engineers must design packaging systems in such a way as to deliver products to consumers and help to minimize total system waste.