Life Cycle Eco-design of Biodegradable Packaging Material

Abstract

Biodegradable materials have gained a lot of attention for customers’ increasing social awareness of the power to reduce environmental degradation by selecting more environmentally-friendly products. However, biodegradable materials are in some cases less ‘ecological’ than conventional ones due to the high degree of optimization of conventional industries, while biopolymers obtained from renewable sources are still in an incipient state of development as compared to petroleum-derived plastics. Therefore, further research on their optimization towards the environmental impact is needed during the design and production process. Eco-design the “green product” will help limit the environmental burdens and enhance the economic profitability. For the packaging sector, this means designing for resource minimization (material, energy, and water), reduced hazards (such as heavy metals), reuse, recycling, waste reduction, and composting. This paper demonstrates the application of eco-design in the biodegradable packaging material design and production. Three impacting categories have been selected and evaluated on the target packaging material. Using the hotspot analysis will ultimately help figure out the key processes to reduce the products’ environmental burdens. The specific business benefits of eco-design for packaging materials are mainly to have the greater resource efficiency (materials, energy, labor), and to reduce environmental impact during production, use and disposal.