Optimizing the environmental performance of food product package systems: A life cycle assessment of the tradeoff's between packaging design and food waste

Abstract

Food waste is a critical contemporary issue, both in the U.S. and internationally, in terms of food security and food system sustainability. Addressing this intricate problem will require multi-faceted approaches from corporate, government and personal fronts. Food packaging is ubiquitous in modern food systems, serving the primary function of protecting and distributing the right product to the right end-user in a safe, cost-efficient and user-friendly way. As a highly engineered and designed interface between food and the end user, food packaging offers an acute lever for influencing food wastage, both by inhibiting physical and bio-chemical degradation of food, but also by “scripting” individual behaviors around food handling, preparation, preservation and disposal. Yet, in the sustainable food packaging conversation to date, very little attention has been given to packaging’s ability to contribute to net reductions in the environmental impact of food life cycles by reducing food waste.

A primary goal of this research project was to demonstrate the use of life cycle assessment in elucidating the environmental trade-offs between food waste and food packaging. A thorough review of the literature (Section 3) grounds this work in a solid academic foundation among food waste, food packaging, and food life cycle assessment. The major deliverable from the project was development of a life cycle assessment model capable of investigating the influence of both food waste and food packaging on the full life cycle environmental impact (focused on the indicators of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) and non-renewable energy demand) for specific food products and packaging configurations. This model was first used to map a wide variety of food types and their typical packaging configurations in order to elucidate general principles dictating the environmental trade off between food waste and food packaging (Section 7). Three specific case studies were also developed based on empirical food waste rates at retail in order to explore how changes in packaging effect food waste and full life cycle environmental performance.