Eco-Design and Sustainable Packaging: Challenges, Trends and Perspectives in the Food Sector

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.