Potential environmental gains from reducing food losses through development of new packaging – a life‐cycle model

Abstract

Abstract Food losses are seldom included in life cycle analyses of the food packaging system, nor are they included in the debate on sustainable packaging. The development of packaging that decreases food losses does, however, provide an opportunity to reduce the overall environmental impact. In this paper, we present a model that calculates the environmental impact of the food packaging system as a function of food losses. The model can be used to analyse the potential environmental gains from developing packaging that reduce food losses. The model includes food production and processing, transports, packaging, retailer and consumer issues and waste handling. The results show that it can be environmentally motivated to increase the environmental impact of packaging, if necessary, when new packaging design helps to reduce food losses. However, the waste handling systems of food and packaging are important to consider if packaging are developed in order to reduce the environmental impact of the food‐packaging system. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.