Environmental impact of plastic packaging on fresh produce in the Dutch diet: A comprehensive study on food packaging to quantify the food waste and GHG impacts in the Dutch diet

From a food packaging perspective, plastic food packaging is considered an optimal solution to extend the shelf life in food industry and as well effectively reduce food waste. On the other side, plastic waste mismanagement generates negative impacts on ecosystem and biodiversity, as well as to human health. Consequences derived from plastic pollution results in more contingent challenges that still need to be solved. Overall, it is difficult to examine the correlation between food packaging and food waste due to the high complexity in the entire food supply chain and consumer behavior. With a narrower approach, this research aims to understand the trade-off impact between food packaging and retail food waste for the fresh produce in the Dutch diet.We quantified the overall food waste percentage for the fresh produce in the Dutch retail sector by combining food consumption patterns, food life cycle inventory (LCI) data, and food loss fractions. We estimated that the averaged retail produce waste rate of the Dutch diet is 3.3% in daily consumption basis. With the absence of primary food packaging, we observed that the retail food waste for the food groups will increase in respect to the ratio of packaging emission, which is particularly true for the perishable produce (mushroom). This study indicates a need to further examine the packaging material and design, then assess more environmental indicators (i.e., energy use and material intensity) for the perishable products in future research.