Packaging sustainability assessment

Packaging is an essential part of the majority of products in the actual market. Therefore, packaging design must draw attention to improve its sustainable character in order to satisfy consumers, enhance its environmental performance and keep economic costs to a minimum. Measuring packaging’s sustainability would provide consumers information so as to raise awareness and, moreover, a tool that would help companies to find product weaknesses to be improved. For that purpose, this project has defined a Sustainability Index that measures with a 100-point scale the sustainable character of seven food and beverage packaging. The index contains the three pillars of sustainability which are environment, economy and society. These sustainable indicators are represented by the following variables: carbon footprint, product price, value for money, product preservation and openability. The seven containers will be compared in sustainable terms and finally one of them will be selected to be redesigned. The new design will try to improve the worst scoring variables and its overall sustainable character.Ingeniería en Tecnologías Industriale