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Sustainable (food) packaging – an overview David A.M. Russell
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Sustainable Business Innovation, CH-8854 Siebnen, Switzerland Accepted author version posted online: 23 Oct 2013.Published online: 07 Jan 2014.
Click for updates To cite this article: David A.M. Russell (2014) Sustainable (food) packaging – an overview, Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A, 31:3, 396-401, DOI: 10.1080/19440049.2013.856521 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19440049.2013.856521
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Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A, 2014 Vol. 31, No. 3, 396–401, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19440049.2013.856521
Sustainable (food) packaging – an overview David A.M. Russell* Sustainable Business Innovation, CH-8854 Siebnen, Switzerland
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(Received 27 January 2013; accepted 9 October 2013) Packaging has an increasingly essential role to play in preserving the value invested in products by ensuring that they can deliver their designed service with minimum wastage. Food contact materials that deliver more units of service with increasingly fewer inputs of energy and materials, and increasingly fewer negative social, economic and environmental impacts, e.g., from emission of wastes, will be more sustainable both in the food processing machines of the industrial system and as packaging for food. Buzz words, whether bio-, nano-, degradable, or whatever comes next, must be critically examined per unit of service delivered to determine if, over the whole life cycle of the products to which they are applied, energy and resource use are minimised, pollution is reduced (not relocated), ecological benefits are created, and social and economic well-being are increased. Only when this caution is applied can a new solution be described as more sustainable. Keywords: sustainable; sustainability; packaging; food waste; triple bottom line
Introduction Today’s standard of living is based on the services delivered by our industrial system (the technosphere), which includes agriculture. It relies on raw material and energy inputs to produce the products that deliver the services from which we benefit. Unfortunately, the processes of manufacturing products, delivering services and dealing with products at the end of their useful life causes emissions that go beyond the technosphere boundary into the broader environment (ecosphere). Earth’s geological, hydrological and atmospheric processes and the ecological systems that developed over millennia are limited in their ability to accept these emissions without change. Nevertheless, human quality of life depends on both our technosphere and the ecosphere. Environmental impacts already affect the ecosystem services that provide quality-of-life benefits to people today and these impacts are predicted to increasingly limit ecosystem services in the future. Also, amongst the human population, inequality of opportunity and living standards, such as lack of access to education or exploitive labour practices, mean that, for the foreseeable future, groups will strive to change the status quo. Society prioritises quality-of-life benefits through financial values that reflect both our willingness to pay for a service and the effort (human, material, energy) needed to run the industrial system that delivers it. Occasionally, and possibly increasingly, cost estimates of social and environmental impacts external to the technosphere are added. We make sustainability decisions every day, for the most part unknowingly, relying on government, the media, *Email: [email protected] © 2014 Taylor & Francis
brand owners, retailers, International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) scientists, and other groups, believed to be better informed to direct our choices. To quote from a speech by Dr Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the United States Federal Reserve System (Bernanke 2012): In many spheres of human endeavour, from science to business to education to economic policy, good decisions depend on good measurement. More subtly, what we decide to measure, or are able to measure, has important effects on the choices we make, since it is natural to focus on those objectives for which we can best estimate and document the effects of our decisions.
This is just as true for sustainability as it is for income and wealth. For sound sustainability decisions, whole life cycle measurements and holistic thinking that considers both the services society requests today and what is likely to be required in the future are needed. This theme of good decisions depending on good measurement is fundamental to sustainability. Sustainable innovation By 2050, the world’s population will have reached 9 billion; barring an unforeseen catastrophe, that number is more or less a certainty. If all these people are going to have enough to eat, many innovations will be needed; not only increases in food production but also changes in consumer behaviour, attitudes to fresh water and successful adaption to climate change. Increasingly sustainable approaches are not necessarily intuitive. The following
Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A
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examples from a discussion among sustainability experts reported on The Guardian newspaper’s ‘Sustainable Business’ website (Balch 2012) illustrate this point. ● The adage ‘Think global, act local’ is often interpreted to mean that food miles (how far food has to be transported from farm to grocery store) must always be minimised if we are to feed the world. Yet analysis by Unilever (2013) has found that only 2–3% of the global carbon footprint of the average food product comes from transport, in contrast to previous studies such as Madival et al. (2009) or Roy et al. (2009), albeit with different boundaries and assumptions, which suggested that transport was a major source of emissions. Richard Perkins, a senior commodities adviser for the environmental charity World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), made the point that the case for going local is not as simple as it sounds and he suggested that it made sense to “Grow things where they grow best … and trade them.” (WWF-UK has published a discussion on this point (Williamson 2012).) ● While feeding 9 billion people by 2050 may require a revolution in agricultural productivity, simply stopping waste in the food chain will make a significant contribution. During The Guardian debate, Argentinean agronomist and farmer Santiago del Solar pointed out how many farmers in Argentina do not own grain silos so instead use huge plastic storage bags to prevent loss and spoilage of their stored grain: a “cheap and clean” local solution to missing silos. In fact, it is a packaging solution that preserves value for farmers by preventing waste, albeit packaging on a larger scale than might normally be considered (the bags are typically 2.7 m diameter by 60 m long and can hold over 200 tonnes of grain). ● As a follow up comment, Jan Kees Vis, Global Director for Sustainable Sourcing Development at Unilever, explained that reducing waste at the consumer end of the value chain is equally important and that means food should be affordable, but not cheap. “Cheap food leads to waste,” he cautioned in the debate (Balch 2012). Improving sustainability requires knowledge of whole value chains; a focus on only one section is insufficient since solving a problem in one place can result in the creation of a different problem somewhere else. For example, switching from fossil-based to agriculture-based raw materials for the manufacture of, say, polyethylene used in packaging may seem like a good way to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions when waste management by incineration is practised. The idea is that the CO2 emitted during combustion of a bio-based polymer package will be
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balanced by the CO2 uptake that occurred when the plants that provided the raw material for the polyethylene were growing. The challenge for bio-based raw materials is that the molecules typically obtained from plants are further removed from the molecules that are needed to manufacture many commodity chemicals and plastics than are fossil fuel derivatives. When that is the case, more chemical conversions are required to turn the bio-raw materials into useful molecules. Typically, that requires more energy (about twice more energy for polyethylene from sugarcane; Hunter et al. 2008), and if that energy is supplied by fossil fuels, then CO2 emissions can be increased by switching to bio-raw materials, not decreased. To ensure the best decisions are made about packaging raw material changes intended to make packaging more sustainable, good measurements over the whole life cycle are required.
The Triple Bottom Line of sustainability Sustainability is about much more than our impact on the environment. It is as much about the associated social and economic aspects as it is about environmental considerations. Today, 2740 km3 of fresh water are used for agricultural irrigation annually. In fact, 70% of all fresh water withdrawn by humanity (from lakes, rivers, aquifers, etc.) is used in agriculture (Food and Agriculture Organization 2011). At the 2012 World Water Week in Stockholm, Torgny Holmgren, Executive Director of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI; 2012), told the assembled global leaders: More than one-fourth of all the water we use worldwide is taken to grow over one billion tons of food that nobody eats. That water, together with the billions of dollars spent to grow, ship, package and purchase the food, is sent down the drain. … Reducing the waste of food is the smartest and most direct route to relieve pressure on water and land resources. It’s an opportunity we cannot afford to overlook.
The expert advisors to the United Nations estimate that, worldwide today, about 30% of the food grown is lost due to spoilage (Gustavsson 2011). Packaging can help to reduce this. Although avoidable food waste tends to be higher in high-income countries (UK consumers throw away 7.2 million tonnes of food and drink from their homes every year, more than half of which could have been eaten; Waste & Resources Action Programme 2012) there are opportunities for appropriate packaging to help reduce waste in all regions. Sustainability is about humanity obtaining a balance between human social and economic needs, and all the services provided to us by our ecosystems. In 1994, the sustainability expert John Elkington named this balance the Triple Bottom Line to contrast it with an organisation’s (traditional) financial bottom line. Elkington describes the
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Triple Bottom Line in detail in his book Cannibals with Forks (Elkington 1997) in terms of an organisation’s relationship with:
● humans are not harmed; and ● the economics of value chain service provision to end users is improved.
● People: fair, ethical and beneficial business practices. ● The planet: environmentally sound products from sustainable manufacturing. ● Profits, which includes the economic benefits not only for a company but also for its employees, shareholders and value chain.
Economic incentives and market drivers are at least as important for the success of more sustainable products as they are for the products against which these compete. All these points need to be addressed from a holistic perspective, considering the complete life cycles of all the components and services that come together in a value chain to provide a specific product or service to a consumer. For example, bio-based raw materials are currently mostly made from agricultural products that could also be foodstuffs (e.g., maize) because the chemical conversions from such products are generally easier and the economics are reasonable. These are referred to as Generation 1 bio-based materials. By contrast, the processing of agricultural wastes (e.g., sugar cane bagasse) into useful (Generation 2) materials, a potentially more sustainable concept, is currently challenging. The sustainability prize will be won when the molecular precursors of useful materials can be economically grown in areas, such as previously degraded land or sand deserts, that are neither needed for food production nor deliver important ecosystem services (Generation 3).
Measuring each of these aspects is challenging. Many sustainability metrics are cross-cutting, contributing to two or sometimes all three dimensions of this Triple Bottom Line. The environmental dimension in particular is often given a broad definition where ecologically focused metrics fail to measure the social and economic sustainability consequences of an environmental impact. The story of Gadus morhua is a case in point. G. morhua, better known as the Atlantic codfish, sustained the people of Newfoundland on the eastern seaboard of Canada since at least the sixteenth century. The Northern Cod population inhabiting the continental shelf off Newfoundland’s east and northeast coasts used to be one of the world’s richest fishery resources. But during the 1970s and 1980s the fishery was decimated by overfishing, first by foreign trawlers and then by local boats, so that by 1992 the Northern Cod biomass had fallen to just 1% of its earlier level (Hamilton & Butler 2001). Clearly, this was an environmental disaster. As a result of the fishery’s rapid decline, 22 000 fishermen and plant workers from over 400 coastal communities in Newfoundland became unemployed; the environmental disaster became a social disaster. This cost the Canadian government over C$3 billion in community aid throughout the 1990s (Hamilton & Butler 2001) and so the environmental and social disaster also became an economic disaster. Today, other marine species have colonised the area and provide a livelihood for the Newfoundlanders, but the cod fishery has not yet recovered (Swain 2012). Clearly, when we evaluate sustainability we need to consider all three dimensions of the Triple Bottom Line and consequences for the future as well as today. Sustainable products and services A narrower sustainability focus on value chains and their products and services makes it possible to conclude that the long-term commercial success of a product or service is likely to increase if, from a holistic, life cycle perspective: ● the biosphere is conserved; ● resources remain available; ● society is enhanced;
Sustainable food packaging There are many attributes that can potentially contribute to more sustainable food packaging, such as being made from a material that has been recycled, or which minimises water usage, generates zero landfill waste, has the potential to be reused, is made using renewable energy, results in no air pollution, creates no greenhouse gas emissions, protects human health, etc. In fact, all such attributes can be valid and valuable; however, no one solution meets every criterion for sustainability, and the single most important sustainability attribute that packaging needs to have, the one almost never talked about in the popular press, is missing from this list. Namely, that any packaging (and especially food packaging) must succeed in doing its job of protecting the packed goods and delivering them in good condition (which for food packaging means without posing a sanitary risk to human health), together with relevant information, cheaply and conveniently to consumers. Packaging is an essential component of the supply chain and to be sustainable it must deliver, above all else, its contents to the consumer in good condition because packaging, in fact, has a minor environmental impact compared with that of its contents – contrast, for example, the life cycle inventory (LCI) of food products (Nielsen et al. 2003) with that of typical packaging materials (PlasticsEurope c1996–2013). This is not to say that reducing the impact of packaging itself is not a worthy exercise but rather that this should be
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Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A done in the context of making whole supply chains more sustainable. With food packaging, the package is there to preserve the food. The amount of energy that goes into growing food, manufacturing the fertilisers used to grow that food and to the transport of the food from the field far outweighs the energy and the CO2 footprint associated with food packaging (Madival et al. 2009; Roy et al. 2009). Today’s lighter weight packages need less energy to manufacture and transport so are cheaper and result in lower emissions. It comes down to a balance of performance and value against resource use and environmental footprint considered holistically over the whole life cycle. When the shelf life of a cucumber can be extended from 3 days to over 2 weeks by shrink-wrapping it in 1.5 g of packaging, this makes the cucumber food supply chain much more sustainable and means that the tiny amount of hightechnology polyethylene packaging used is a good candidate to be called ‘sustainable packaging’. Today, food packaging technology advancements can control, for example, ripening or spoilage rate, enabling more food to move through the supply chain to the grocery store, and onwards onto peoples’ plates. Future packaging innovations, for example, in (so-called) intelligent packaging that monitors the state of the food contents and alerts the consumer when the food is starting to spoil or is no longer fit for consumption has the potential to eliminate the wastage that is caused by today’s necessarily conservative ‘use by’ dates. While that packaging may be more resource intensive to produce, the food supply system that it will support will be much more sustainable. While packaging cannot be separated from the product chain in which it participates to supply a service to consumers, consumers and politicians are generally only exposed to two links in the chain: retailing and waste collecting. As a result of this limited view, consumers understandably question the amount of packaging with which they have to deal, seeing it as a drain on resources and wondering why it is not all recycled. The danger of this perception is that it encourages a focus on design for recycling to the exclusion of design for sustainability. This can shift environmental burdens to new points in the value chain rather than reducing overall life cycle impacts. The whole value chain has a responsibility to explain that sustainability is not synonymous with recycling, recyclability, recycled content, biodegradability and other popular buzz words, but that it is the overall resource efficiency of the supply chain that should be the main priority. More sustainable product supply chains are those that optimise material, water and energy use over the life cycle while minimising waste from products and used packaging. They ensure that the maximum value is recovered from waste in the form of material, feedstocks and compost as well as energy, irrespective of whether the packaging is made from paper, glass, metals, plastics or a mixture of materials. No material
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has a monopoly of environmental virtues – all can have pros and cons. For any packaging system there will be a specific amount of a particular packaging material that represents the optimum use of that material in that system; use too little and the under-packaging will result in negative environmental impacts (e.g., from spoilt food) while overpackaging will also increase the environmental impact by using unnecessary packaging material (Consumer Goods Forum 2011). Optimum amounts of different materials will have different environmental footprints such as greenhouse gas emissions, air, land or water pollution, minerals depletion, water abstraction, etc., and these impacts can occur at different stages of the life cycle. There is a similar optimum in terms of the mechanical recycling of packaging materials. Collecting and recycling used packaging helps to preserve the financial and energy inputs that went into creating the material and to reduce environmental burdens by not requiring new packaging material to be created, but only up to the point where collection, sorting, cleaning and reprocessing is cheaper, requires less energy and causes fewer unwanted emissions than the production of the virgin packaging. The more dispersed or contaminated packaging material becomes, the less sustainable its mechanical recycling will be (Pilz et al. 2010). Assessing sustainability In order to understand if one packaging innovation is more sustainable than an alternative we need the good measurement alluded to by Ben Bernanke. Not only must we assess the life cycles of the packaging materials concerned but also the whole supply chain that utilises the packaging to deliver equivalent amounts and quality of packed product to the consumer. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an internationally standardised technique (ISO14040) to manage such an analysis. Although it is necessary to account for all inputs of energy and materials and all outputs of products, co-products and wastes at every life cycle stage from materials out of the ground, through refining, manufacturing, delivery and use, to end-of-life waste management, there are excellent computing tools to facilitate this process. LCA computer programs such as SimaPro (developed by PRé Consultants), GaBi (PE International) and Umberto (ifu Hamburg GmbH), are available as well as LCI databases such as those from EcoInvent or the European Union’s European Life Cycle Database (ELCD). Also, many industry associations provide thirdparty reviewed eco-profile (cradle-to-gate) datasets of their materials free of charge, e.g., PlasticsEurope (PlasticsEurope c1996–2013), The European Federation of Corrugated Board Manufacturers and Cepi Containerboard (FEFCO & CCB 2012), and WorldSteel (WorldSteel Association 2011). For data on food
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production the Danish LCA Food database, Nielsen et al. (2003), is a useful resource. The cost and effort of LCA is dependent on the goal and scope of any study and ranges from relatively cheap highlevel investigations (scoping studies), taking only a few hours or days to complete, to expensive fully ISO-compliant LCA reports for public release requiring several months of effort. There are also several dedicated LCA tools for packaging development, such as Piqet (Packaging Impact Quick Evaluation Tool; Sustainable Packaging Alliance 2005) and PackageSmart (EarthShift 2012). The LCA process begins by defining the goal and scope of a study, including defining the functional unit and where the boundary of the study is to be drawn. LCAs must be based on a defined unit of service, the functional unit that is delivered to a consumer by the value chain. A typical example of a functional unit in the food area will define aspects such as quantity, food type, location and delivery system, e.g. “The provision of 1 litre quantities of refrigerated fresh milk for consumer purchase from supermarkets in Belgium.” Different packaging systems that facilitate this functional unit could then be compared using LCA. The input and output data for all unit operations within the boundary are collected to create the LCI and these data are then assessed for their environmental impacts (LCA can also be used for social or financial studies although this is less common). Many parameters, such as total energy use, fossil energy use, fresh water requirement, global warming potential, ozone depletion, acidification, eutrophication and low level ozone must be assessed so that trade-offs amongst different impacts can be evaluated. Determining these multiple impacts is fundamental to the LCA process. In recent years it has become fashionable to focus on single indicators, such as carbon footprints and water footprints. Both are derivatives of LCA. Carbon footprints measure the global warming potential of product and service provision by accounting for atmospheric emissions of CO2 and more potent greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as methane and nitrous oxide over the whole life cycle. Measurements are in units of CO2 100-year equivalents, which describe the equivalent amount of CO2 that would need to be released to have the same impact over 100 years as any of the emitted gases. Water footprints have proved useful in the food area by highlighting the often huge and unexpected amounts of water required upstream in the food provision life cycle. This water is often referred to as virtual water. While focusing on one impact parameter can be helpful for goal setting, or directing innovation efforts, or highlighting areas of concern, footprints have the inherent danger of burden shifting and exacerbating other impacts that are not considered by a single parameter footprint. When it comes to reviewing the sustainability of the use of renewable resources there are further complexities
to those already mentioned that must be considered, namely scarcity and good management. The Newfoundland cod were renewable and plentiful but the fishery was badly managed and cod harvests became unsustainable before cod became scarce. Teak timber is a useful hardwood resource that is scarce in old growth forests where its harvesting is now unsustainable, but teak plantations based on sustainable forestry practices are ensuring that this useful resource remains available. To declare a product more sustainable it may not be sufficient to know which raw material is used for its manufacture, it may be necessary to understand where and how that raw material is produced. Then there are confusing terms such as bioplastic. This can mean either what is better described as ‘bio-based’ plastic produced from renewable raw material sources or it can mean ‘biodegradable’ plastic. The former refers only to the origin of the raw materials from which the plastics are manufactured, whereas the latter is all about their end of life. The key point is that bio-based plastics may not be biodegradable (e.g., bio-based polyethylene) and a biodegradable plastic may not be bio-based (e.g., fossil-based aliphatic–aromatic co-polyesters that are used to make biodegradable films). While biodegradability that supports compostability according to national standards, such as EN 13432, is a useful property for specific applications in localities where industrial composting facilities exist, it is neither a universal solution to sustainable packaging waste management nor a viable solution to problems such as littering, which is a social behaviour issue and should be addressed as such. Conclusions When developing more sustainable packaging it is important to make and assess comprehensive measurements that consider the full service delivery life cycle and take a holistic, anthropogenic view of sustainability, looking beyond generic environmental indicators also to include their ultimate social and economic effects. Clearly, the environmental, social and economic aspects of sustainability are interdependent and overlap. This Triple Bottom Line must be balanced by society, both increasing, and more equitably distributing, quality-of-life benefits while simultaneously minimising negative ecosystem consequences in both the short- and long-term over the whole life cycle of goods and services. This challenge is increased by dynamics, such as population growth, climate change, fresh water scarcity, technological development, human longevity and changing demographics. As Professor Michael Braungart, the German chemist who developed the Cradle-to-Cradle design concept with American architect William McDonough, has explained
Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A (McDonough & Braungart 2002), creating a sustainable society is a system problem that can be solved by the elimination of waste as it is currently defined. The solution will not be found in reducing the bad aspects of our industrial systems but in redesigning them to be inherently sustainable. More sustainable packaging will be a key component of such future systems.
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References Balch O. 2012 Aug 8. Feeding nine billion people in 2050 – discussion best bits [Internet]. Guardian Sustainable Business, Sustainable Living website; [cited 2013 Jan 15]. Available from: www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/ feeding-nine-billion-people-discussion-best-bits?intcmp=122& CMP= Bernanke BS. 2012 Aug 6. Economic measurement [Internet]. Pre-recorded video presented at: 32nd general Conference of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth; Cambridge, MA, USA; [cited 2013 Jan 15]. Available from: www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/ speech/bernanke20120806a.htm Consumer Goods Forum. 2011. A global language for packaging and sustainability [Internet]. Report of the Global Packaging Project; [cited 2013 Jan 15]. Available from: http://globalpackaging.mycgforum.com EarthShift. 2012. PackageSmart LCA Software [Internet]; [cited 2013 Jan 15]. Available from: http://www.earthshift.com/ solutions/integrated-solutions/smarter-packaging Elkington J. 1997. Cannibals with forks: the triple bottom line of 21st century business. Oxford: Capstone. FEFCO and CCB. 2012. European database for corrugated board life cycle studies [Internet]; [cited 2013 Jan 15]. Available from: http://www.fefco.org/technical-documents/lca-database Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2011. The state of the world’s land and water resources: managing systems at risk. London: Earthscan. Gustavsson J, Cederberg C, Sonesson U, van Otterdijk R, Meybeck A. 2011. Global food losses and food waste – extent, causes and prevention [Internet]. Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology (SIK), Gothenburg, Sweden and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. Rome: FAO. Available from: www.fao.org/docrep/ 014/mb060e/mb060e00.pdf Hamilton LC, Butler MJ. 2001. Outport adaptations: social indicators through Newfoundland’s Cod Crisis. Hum Ecol Rev. 8:1–11. Hunter S, Pereira B, Helling R. 2008 Sep. Life cycle assessment of sugarcane-based polyethylene [Internet]. Paper presented at: Life Cycle Assessment VIII Conference; Seattle; [cited
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Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tfac20
Sustainable (food) packaging – an overview David A.M. Russell
a
a
Sustainable Business Innovation, CH-8854 Siebnen, Switzerland Accepted author version posted online: 23 Oct 2013.Published online: 07 Jan 2014.
Click for updates To cite this article: David A.M. Russell (2014) Sustainable (food) packaging – an overview, Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A, 31:3, 396-401, DOI: 10.1080/19440049.2013.856521 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19440049.2013.856521
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Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A, 2014 Vol. 31, No. 3, 396–401, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19440049.2013.856521
Sustainable (food) packaging – an overview David A.M. Russell* Sustainable Business Innovation, CH-8854 Siebnen, Switzerland
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(Received 27 January 2013; accepted 9 October 2013) Packaging has an increasingly essential role to play in preserving the value invested in products by ensuring that they can deliver their designed service with minimum wastage. Food contact materials that deliver more units of service with increasingly fewer inputs of energy and materials, and increasingly fewer negative social, economic and environmental impacts, e.g., from emission of wastes, will be more sustainable both in the food processing machines of the industrial system and as packaging for food. Buzz words, whether bio-, nano-, degradable, or whatever comes next, must be critically examined per unit of service delivered to determine if, over the whole life cycle of the products to which they are applied, energy and resource use are minimised, pollution is reduced (not relocated), ecological benefits are created, and social and economic well-being are increased. Only when this caution is applied can a new solution be described as more sustainable. Keywords: sustainable; sustainability; packaging; food waste; triple bottom line
Introduction Today’s standard of living is based on the services delivered by our industrial system (the technosphere), which includes agriculture. It relies on raw material and energy inputs to produce the products that deliver the services from which we benefit. Unfortunately, the processes of manufacturing products, delivering services and dealing with products at the end of their useful life causes emissions that go beyond the technosphere boundary into the broader environment (ecosphere). Earth’s geological, hydrological and atmospheric processes and the ecological systems that developed over millennia are limited in their ability to accept these emissions without change. Nevertheless, human quality of life depends on both our technosphere and the ecosphere. Environmental impacts already affect the ecosystem services that provide quality-of-life benefits to people today and these impacts are predicted to increasingly limit ecosystem services in the future. Also, amongst the human population, inequality of opportunity and living standards, such as lack of access to education or exploitive labour practices, mean that, for the foreseeable future, groups will strive to change the status quo. Society prioritises quality-of-life benefits through financial values that reflect both our willingness to pay for a service and the effort (human, material, energy) needed to run the industrial system that delivers it. Occasionally, and possibly increasingly, cost estimates of social and environmental impacts external to the technosphere are added. We make sustainability decisions every day, for the most part unknowingly, relying on government, the media, *Email: [email protected] © 2014 Taylor & Francis
brand owners, retailers, International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) scientists, and other groups, believed to be better informed to direct our choices. To quote from a speech by Dr Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the United States Federal Reserve System (Bernanke 2012): In many spheres of human endeavour, from science to business to education to economic policy, good decisions depend on good measurement. More subtly, what we decide to measure, or are able to measure, has important effects on the choices we make, since it is natural to focus on those objectives for which we can best estimate and document the effects of our decisions.
This is just as true for sustainability as it is for income and wealth. For sound sustainability decisions, whole life cycle measurements and holistic thinking that considers both the services society requests today and what is likely to be required in the future are needed. This theme of good decisions depending on good measurement is fundamental to sustainability. Sustainable innovation By 2050, the world’s population will have reached 9 billion; barring an unforeseen catastrophe, that number is more or less a certainty. If all these people are going to have enough to eat, many innovations will be needed; not only increases in food production but also changes in consumer behaviour, attitudes to fresh water and successful adaption to climate change. Increasingly sustainable approaches are not necessarily intuitive. The following
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examples from a discussion among sustainability experts reported on The Guardian newspaper’s ‘Sustainable Business’ website (Balch 2012) illustrate this point. ● The adage ‘Think global, act local’ is often interpreted to mean that food miles (how far food has to be transported from farm to grocery store) must always be minimised if we are to feed the world. Yet analysis by Unilever (2013) has found that only 2–3% of the global carbon footprint of the average food product comes from transport, in contrast to previous studies such as Madival et al. (2009) or Roy et al. (2009), albeit with different boundaries and assumptions, which suggested that transport was a major source of emissions. Richard Perkins, a senior commodities adviser for the environmental charity World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), made the point that the case for going local is not as simple as it sounds and he suggested that it made sense to “Grow things where they grow best … and trade them.” (WWF-UK has published a discussion on this point (Williamson 2012).) ● While feeding 9 billion people by 2050 may require a revolution in agricultural productivity, simply stopping waste in the food chain will make a significant contribution. During The Guardian debate, Argentinean agronomist and farmer Santiago del Solar pointed out how many farmers in Argentina do not own grain silos so instead use huge plastic storage bags to prevent loss and spoilage of their stored grain: a “cheap and clean” local solution to missing silos. In fact, it is a packaging solution that preserves value for farmers by preventing waste, albeit packaging on a larger scale than might normally be considered (the bags are typically 2.7 m diameter by 60 m long and can hold over 200 tonnes of grain). ● As a follow up comment, Jan Kees Vis, Global Director for Sustainable Sourcing Development at Unilever, explained that reducing waste at the consumer end of the value chain is equally important and that means food should be affordable, but not cheap. “Cheap food leads to waste,” he cautioned in the debate (Balch 2012). Improving sustainability requires knowledge of whole value chains; a focus on only one section is insufficient since solving a problem in one place can result in the creation of a different problem somewhere else. For example, switching from fossil-based to agriculture-based raw materials for the manufacture of, say, polyethylene used in packaging may seem like a good way to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions when waste management by incineration is practised. The idea is that the CO2 emitted during combustion of a bio-based polymer package will be
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balanced by the CO2 uptake that occurred when the plants that provided the raw material for the polyethylene were growing. The challenge for bio-based raw materials is that the molecules typically obtained from plants are further removed from the molecules that are needed to manufacture many commodity chemicals and plastics than are fossil fuel derivatives. When that is the case, more chemical conversions are required to turn the bio-raw materials into useful molecules. Typically, that requires more energy (about twice more energy for polyethylene from sugarcane; Hunter et al. 2008), and if that energy is supplied by fossil fuels, then CO2 emissions can be increased by switching to bio-raw materials, not decreased. To ensure the best decisions are made about packaging raw material changes intended to make packaging more sustainable, good measurements over the whole life cycle are required.
The Triple Bottom Line of sustainability Sustainability is about much more than our impact on the environment. It is as much about the associated social and economic aspects as it is about environmental considerations. Today, 2740 km3 of fresh water are used for agricultural irrigation annually. In fact, 70% of all fresh water withdrawn by humanity (from lakes, rivers, aquifers, etc.) is used in agriculture (Food and Agriculture Organization 2011). At the 2012 World Water Week in Stockholm, Torgny Holmgren, Executive Director of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI; 2012), told the assembled global leaders: More than one-fourth of all the water we use worldwide is taken to grow over one billion tons of food that nobody eats. That water, together with the billions of dollars spent to grow, ship, package and purchase the food, is sent down the drain. … Reducing the waste of food is the smartest and most direct route to relieve pressure on water and land resources. It’s an opportunity we cannot afford to overlook.
The expert advisors to the United Nations estimate that, worldwide today, about 30% of the food grown is lost due to spoilage (Gustavsson 2011). Packaging can help to reduce this. Although avoidable food waste tends to be higher in high-income countries (UK consumers throw away 7.2 million tonnes of food and drink from their homes every year, more than half of which could have been eaten; Waste & Resources Action Programme 2012) there are opportunities for appropriate packaging to help reduce waste in all regions. Sustainability is about humanity obtaining a balance between human social and economic needs, and all the services provided to us by our ecosystems. In 1994, the sustainability expert John Elkington named this balance the Triple Bottom Line to contrast it with an organisation’s (traditional) financial bottom line. Elkington describes the
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Triple Bottom Line in detail in his book Cannibals with Forks (Elkington 1997) in terms of an organisation’s relationship with:
● humans are not harmed; and ● the economics of value chain service provision to end users is improved.
● People: fair, ethical and beneficial business practices. ● The planet: environmentally sound products from sustainable manufacturing. ● Profits, which includes the economic benefits not only for a company but also for its employees, shareholders and value chain.
Economic incentives and market drivers are at least as important for the success of more sustainable products as they are for the products against which these compete. All these points need to be addressed from a holistic perspective, considering the complete life cycles of all the components and services that come together in a value chain to provide a specific product or service to a consumer. For example, bio-based raw materials are currently mostly made from agricultural products that could also be foodstuffs (e.g., maize) because the chemical conversions from such products are generally easier and the economics are reasonable. These are referred to as Generation 1 bio-based materials. By contrast, the processing of agricultural wastes (e.g., sugar cane bagasse) into useful (Generation 2) materials, a potentially more sustainable concept, is currently challenging. The sustainability prize will be won when the molecular precursors of useful materials can be economically grown in areas, such as previously degraded land or sand deserts, that are neither needed for food production nor deliver important ecosystem services (Generation 3).
Measuring each of these aspects is challenging. Many sustainability metrics are cross-cutting, contributing to two or sometimes all three dimensions of this Triple Bottom Line. The environmental dimension in particular is often given a broad definition where ecologically focused metrics fail to measure the social and economic sustainability consequences of an environmental impact. The story of Gadus morhua is a case in point. G. morhua, better known as the Atlantic codfish, sustained the people of Newfoundland on the eastern seaboard of Canada since at least the sixteenth century. The Northern Cod population inhabiting the continental shelf off Newfoundland’s east and northeast coasts used to be one of the world’s richest fishery resources. But during the 1970s and 1980s the fishery was decimated by overfishing, first by foreign trawlers and then by local boats, so that by 1992 the Northern Cod biomass had fallen to just 1% of its earlier level (Hamilton & Butler 2001). Clearly, this was an environmental disaster. As a result of the fishery’s rapid decline, 22 000 fishermen and plant workers from over 400 coastal communities in Newfoundland became unemployed; the environmental disaster became a social disaster. This cost the Canadian government over C$3 billion in community aid throughout the 1990s (Hamilton & Butler 2001) and so the environmental and social disaster also became an economic disaster. Today, other marine species have colonised the area and provide a livelihood for the Newfoundlanders, but the cod fishery has not yet recovered (Swain 2012). Clearly, when we evaluate sustainability we need to consider all three dimensions of the Triple Bottom Line and consequences for the future as well as today. Sustainable products and services A narrower sustainability focus on value chains and their products and services makes it possible to conclude that the long-term commercial success of a product or service is likely to increase if, from a holistic, life cycle perspective: ● the biosphere is conserved; ● resources remain available; ● society is enhanced;
Sustainable food packaging There are many attributes that can potentially contribute to more sustainable food packaging, such as being made from a material that has been recycled, or which minimises water usage, generates zero landfill waste, has the potential to be reused, is made using renewable energy, results in no air pollution, creates no greenhouse gas emissions, protects human health, etc. In fact, all such attributes can be valid and valuable; however, no one solution meets every criterion for sustainability, and the single most important sustainability attribute that packaging needs to have, the one almost never talked about in the popular press, is missing from this list. Namely, that any packaging (and especially food packaging) must succeed in doing its job of protecting the packed goods and delivering them in good condition (which for food packaging means without posing a sanitary risk to human health), together with relevant information, cheaply and conveniently to consumers. Packaging is an essential component of the supply chain and to be sustainable it must deliver, above all else, its contents to the consumer in good condition because packaging, in fact, has a minor environmental impact compared with that of its contents – contrast, for example, the life cycle inventory (LCI) of food products (Nielsen et al. 2003) with that of typical packaging materials (PlasticsEurope c1996–2013). This is not to say that reducing the impact of packaging itself is not a worthy exercise but rather that this should be
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Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A done in the context of making whole supply chains more sustainable. With food packaging, the package is there to preserve the food. The amount of energy that goes into growing food, manufacturing the fertilisers used to grow that food and to the transport of the food from the field far outweighs the energy and the CO2 footprint associated with food packaging (Madival et al. 2009; Roy et al. 2009). Today’s lighter weight packages need less energy to manufacture and transport so are cheaper and result in lower emissions. It comes down to a balance of performance and value against resource use and environmental footprint considered holistically over the whole life cycle. When the shelf life of a cucumber can be extended from 3 days to over 2 weeks by shrink-wrapping it in 1.5 g of packaging, this makes the cucumber food supply chain much more sustainable and means that the tiny amount of hightechnology polyethylene packaging used is a good candidate to be called ‘sustainable packaging’. Today, food packaging technology advancements can control, for example, ripening or spoilage rate, enabling more food to move through the supply chain to the grocery store, and onwards onto peoples’ plates. Future packaging innovations, for example, in (so-called) intelligent packaging that monitors the state of the food contents and alerts the consumer when the food is starting to spoil or is no longer fit for consumption has the potential to eliminate the wastage that is caused by today’s necessarily conservative ‘use by’ dates. While that packaging may be more resource intensive to produce, the food supply system that it will support will be much more sustainable. While packaging cannot be separated from the product chain in which it participates to supply a service to consumers, consumers and politicians are generally only exposed to two links in the chain: retailing and waste collecting. As a result of this limited view, consumers understandably question the amount of packaging with which they have to deal, seeing it as a drain on resources and wondering why it is not all recycled. The danger of this perception is that it encourages a focus on design for recycling to the exclusion of design for sustainability. This can shift environmental burdens to new points in the value chain rather than reducing overall life cycle impacts. The whole value chain has a responsibility to explain that sustainability is not synonymous with recycling, recyclability, recycled content, biodegradability and other popular buzz words, but that it is the overall resource efficiency of the supply chain that should be the main priority. More sustainable product supply chains are those that optimise material, water and energy use over the life cycle while minimising waste from products and used packaging. They ensure that the maximum value is recovered from waste in the form of material, feedstocks and compost as well as energy, irrespective of whether the packaging is made from paper, glass, metals, plastics or a mixture of materials. No material
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has a monopoly of environmental virtues – all can have pros and cons. For any packaging system there will be a specific amount of a particular packaging material that represents the optimum use of that material in that system; use too little and the under-packaging will result in negative environmental impacts (e.g., from spoilt food) while overpackaging will also increase the environmental impact by using unnecessary packaging material (Consumer Goods Forum 2011). Optimum amounts of different materials will have different environmental footprints such as greenhouse gas emissions, air, land or water pollution, minerals depletion, water abstraction, etc., and these impacts can occur at different stages of the life cycle. There is a similar optimum in terms of the mechanical recycling of packaging materials. Collecting and recycling used packaging helps to preserve the financial and energy inputs that went into creating the material and to reduce environmental burdens by not requiring new packaging material to be created, but only up to the point where collection, sorting, cleaning and reprocessing is cheaper, requires less energy and causes fewer unwanted emissions than the production of the virgin packaging. The more dispersed or contaminated packaging material becomes, the less sustainable its mechanical recycling will be (Pilz et al. 2010). Assessing sustainability In order to understand if one packaging innovation is more sustainable than an alternative we need the good measurement alluded to by Ben Bernanke. Not only must we assess the life cycles of the packaging materials concerned but also the whole supply chain that utilises the packaging to deliver equivalent amounts and quality of packed product to the consumer. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an internationally standardised technique (ISO14040) to manage such an analysis. Although it is necessary to account for all inputs of energy and materials and all outputs of products, co-products and wastes at every life cycle stage from materials out of the ground, through refining, manufacturing, delivery and use, to end-of-life waste management, there are excellent computing tools to facilitate this process. LCA computer programs such as SimaPro (developed by PRé Consultants), GaBi (PE International) and Umberto (ifu Hamburg GmbH), are available as well as LCI databases such as those from EcoInvent or the European Union’s European Life Cycle Database (ELCD). Also, many industry associations provide thirdparty reviewed eco-profile (cradle-to-gate) datasets of their materials free of charge, e.g., PlasticsEurope (PlasticsEurope c1996–2013), The European Federation of Corrugated Board Manufacturers and Cepi Containerboard (FEFCO & CCB 2012), and WorldSteel (WorldSteel Association 2011). For data on food
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production the Danish LCA Food database, Nielsen et al. (2003), is a useful resource. The cost and effort of LCA is dependent on the goal and scope of any study and ranges from relatively cheap highlevel investigations (scoping studies), taking only a few hours or days to complete, to expensive fully ISO-compliant LCA reports for public release requiring several months of effort. There are also several dedicated LCA tools for packaging development, such as Piqet (Packaging Impact Quick Evaluation Tool; Sustainable Packaging Alliance 2005) and PackageSmart (EarthShift 2012). The LCA process begins by defining the goal and scope of a study, including defining the functional unit and where the boundary of the study is to be drawn. LCAs must be based on a defined unit of service, the functional unit that is delivered to a consumer by the value chain. A typical example of a functional unit in the food area will define aspects such as quantity, food type, location and delivery system, e.g. “The provision of 1 litre quantities of refrigerated fresh milk for consumer purchase from supermarkets in Belgium.” Different packaging systems that facilitate this functional unit could then be compared using LCA. The input and output data for all unit operations within the boundary are collected to create the LCI and these data are then assessed for their environmental impacts (LCA can also be used for social or financial studies although this is less common). Many parameters, such as total energy use, fossil energy use, fresh water requirement, global warming potential, ozone depletion, acidification, eutrophication and low level ozone must be assessed so that trade-offs amongst different impacts can be evaluated. Determining these multiple impacts is fundamental to the LCA process. In recent years it has become fashionable to focus on single indicators, such as carbon footprints and water footprints. Both are derivatives of LCA. Carbon footprints measure the global warming potential of product and service provision by accounting for atmospheric emissions of CO2 and more potent greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as methane and nitrous oxide over the whole life cycle. Measurements are in units of CO2 100-year equivalents, which describe the equivalent amount of CO2 that would need to be released to have the same impact over 100 years as any of the emitted gases. Water footprints have proved useful in the food area by highlighting the often huge and unexpected amounts of water required upstream in the food provision life cycle. This water is often referred to as virtual water. While focusing on one impact parameter can be helpful for goal setting, or directing innovation efforts, or highlighting areas of concern, footprints have the inherent danger of burden shifting and exacerbating other impacts that are not considered by a single parameter footprint. When it comes to reviewing the sustainability of the use of renewable resources there are further complexities
to those already mentioned that must be considered, namely scarcity and good management. The Newfoundland cod were renewable and plentiful but the fishery was badly managed and cod harvests became unsustainable before cod became scarce. Teak timber is a useful hardwood resource that is scarce in old growth forests where its harvesting is now unsustainable, but teak plantations based on sustainable forestry practices are ensuring that this useful resource remains available. To declare a product more sustainable it may not be sufficient to know which raw material is used for its manufacture, it may be necessary to understand where and how that raw material is produced. Then there are confusing terms such as bioplastic. This can mean either what is better described as ‘bio-based’ plastic produced from renewable raw material sources or it can mean ‘biodegradable’ plastic. The former refers only to the origin of the raw materials from which the plastics are manufactured, whereas the latter is all about their end of life. The key point is that bio-based plastics may not be biodegradable (e.g., bio-based polyethylene) and a biodegradable plastic may not be bio-based (e.g., fossil-based aliphatic–aromatic co-polyesters that are used to make biodegradable films). While biodegradability that supports compostability according to national standards, such as EN 13432, is a useful property for specific applications in localities where industrial composting facilities exist, it is neither a universal solution to sustainable packaging waste management nor a viable solution to problems such as littering, which is a social behaviour issue and should be addressed as such. Conclusions When developing more sustainable packaging it is important to make and assess comprehensive measurements that consider the full service delivery life cycle and take a holistic, anthropogenic view of sustainability, looking beyond generic environmental indicators also to include their ultimate social and economic effects. Clearly, the environmental, social and economic aspects of sustainability are interdependent and overlap. This Triple Bottom Line must be balanced by society, both increasing, and more equitably distributing, quality-of-life benefits while simultaneously minimising negative ecosystem consequences in both the short- and long-term over the whole life cycle of goods and services. This challenge is increased by dynamics, such as population growth, climate change, fresh water scarcity, technological development, human longevity and changing demographics. As Professor Michael Braungart, the German chemist who developed the Cradle-to-Cradle design concept with American architect William McDonough, has explained
Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A (McDonough & Braungart 2002), creating a sustainable society is a system problem that can be solved by the elimination of waste as it is currently defined. The solution will not be found in reducing the bad aspects of our industrial systems but in redesigning them to be inherently sustainable. More sustainable packaging will be a key component of such future systems.
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