Sandra Domenek from AgroParisTech talks about tools for life cycle impact assessment as part of the FitNESS 2.0 training session on November 27-28.
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Food packaging is often necessary or essential for protecting food, keeping it safe, and thus preventing substantial food losses. It can help to enable the preservation, transportation, distribution, and preparation of food. However, food packaging today is strongly associated with environmental and health risks for consumers. To help packaging professionals address this challenge, the FitNESS platform was created to provide general and in-depth training courses on the design of responsible food packaging. This includes learning to optimize many sometimes contradictory criteria across all aspects of food packaging from its production and use to its reuse, recycling, and disposal.
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well thank you vred for this kind introduction uh thank you for all being here so um yesterday indeed there was already a lot of information we gathered so for I think that today we are more in a real training session where we speaking about tools and uh things to know uh about ecodesign of packaging so um I was um um dividing this class into three different points at first why Eco design introduction and definitions because there is a lot of of big words around and so I wanted to come back to some definitions then give you some an overview of over some general tools of ecodesign and a finish by a section about the specific needs of the packaging sector when it comes to Eco design uh so uh let’s start uh in the begin beginning with the first question why EOD design why do we want to uh do such a thing and uh I put in first and in in bould a very easy thing it is to protect the environment so um this is quite clear it is normal and straightforward but sometimes I think it is better that we all of us reminder us that this is the ultimate goal and all this uh discussion we might have should bring us one step step further to this ultimate goal which is the protection of the environment so after this uh are coming all the other uh good reasons one can have to do ecodesign so there will be the compliance and the anticipation of the legislation and we had yesterday a lot of updates on the on the legislation and on the policy push there is a growing Market oh sorry market demand for of environmental friendly products uh it helps you enter enhance Enterprises images to redesign industrial processes reduce manufacturing and Logistics costs detect New Opportunities of value creation um these things are uh true for all design processes just when you come back to your industrial processes to the design you’d have and you think it all over again often one discovers new possibilities for optimization so this can be also a very nice tool in fact to come back and to look on with a with a new uh with a fresh eye and on the on the different processes already running in a company uh and then uh Equity s can also set apart from competitors help you to develop new markets of higher added value and in general also stimulate the Innovation inside the the company um so yesterday there was a lot uh um already informations about the PO Pas uh so for detailed information please a look on the webinar of yesterday evening um I just put out the two main uh poy drivers we have for the moment for ecodesign of plastics packaging this is the single use Plastics directive of the European community and uh the um New regulation on packaging and packaging waste which uh is uh was voted in the European Parliament uh last week and we are now in an very active legislative uh process and so in all those two um regulations you will have uh uh the idea to reduce the use of single-use plastics to prevent the waste generation and to promote reuse and refill systems for uh food packaging um which calls indeed for ecodesign um and then there is also indeed the packaging and packaging waste regulations an idea to re to reduce excessive and unnecessary packaging in that case also might be interesting that you come back to your own processes um working to improve recyclability minimize the complexity of the packaging and increase the Recycled content um so these things were already said yesterday so didn’t want to go further into it so um one of the um main drivers of all these policy PES was that the EUR European economic economy wants to shift uh um from a linear concept towards a circular economy concept so a linear uh economy this is the one we living in for the moment and it basically says that uh you designer you designer material uh you for orow a product you manufacture the product you’re going to sell it somebody is going to use the product and then end of the life of this product but is going to uh become a waste and is thrown away in the waste bin and then somebody takes care of it um so this is linear where you have an extraction or excavation of raw materials and they uh over uh some uh over a short time uh end up in a treatment station somewhere uh what is important to know there is that only energy recovery does not count for a circular economy so energy recovery which me incineration of waste this is still a linear economy concept uh and also down cycling very very harsh down cycling I would say is not considered as a circular economy so when you have at the end of your incinerators uh the remainders of the incinerators and you use this under your your roads you cannot call this uh recycling process okay so with all this actions one is still in a linear economy concept uh the circular economy concept uh wants you to have uh already a a separation uh in the very beginning um of in the very end of the waste so there is it has a biosphere and it wants you to have all the waste or the end products which are organically degradable to going back to the biosphere and all the other uh objects and products you have are coming back to the technosphere so the idea here is from the uh fabrication of the project until is used and when it becomes a waste to try to close down the circle and to close it down in a in a most efficient way uh so you have the possibility to repair to re-employ to refurbish uh and to recycle the material you’re using and when you’re doing this then uh one is in a circular economic uh concept so this is for the technical parts and when you have organic waste which are the organic Wast for example from the food um you there are two possibility here you need to separate the the biowastes and this is also something which is regulations and then over anerobic digestion and biogas production you bring it back to the soil or over composting experiments you can also bring back the carbon to the soil so in that case one would uh speak about uh circular economy concept uh this has seven pillars so when you’re doing when you’re working in a circular economy uh you should do uh you should have a sustainable sourcing of the raw materials one is using there should be then an Eco design of the products which are in which includes the whole life cycle of the product and this is OB obviously what I’m going to speak about now uh then uh also part of the circular economy is try to set up an industrial and then territorial ecology which helps to share FL flows on an industrial site for example and optimize resource use try to look on the economy of f functionality uh favor use over property this is typically what can be seen by for example car sharing um platforms things like this in that case um what you need is to to use a car to go from A to B but it is not in all moments necessary to be the owner of the car so this means that you favoring use over property uh responsible consumption so uh as a consumer favoring uh products and services often reduced environmental impact increase the lifetime of the products so repair repair reuse and refurbish this is what you have seen before this is closing the cycle in the most uh small or efficient way POS possible and when this is not possible at the very end of the life cycle try to have recycling of the materal materials and this could be recycling in the technosphere or even recycling in the biosphere um so circular economy uh so there are I wanted to make a point because uh people are speaking about circular economy sometimes about bioeconomy sometimes about Su sustainability and I wanted just to come back to all these words to give you some definitions when they exist and also make the difference between one of between all of them so when we start with the bioeconomy this is an economy that encompasses all the activities of production and transformation of biomass uh biomass is um resources coming from forestery agriculture aquaculture and uh for have as a purpose food production animal feed production biobased materials or energy production uh so this is not circular economy this is the definition of the bioeconomy concept uh when you are with the circular economy I have here um different three different uh types of um definition which are coming from different sources so the French Ministry of ecology uh defines circular economy as to produce goods and services by limiting the consumption of waste and raw materials water and energy sources so this is a very open uh definition the the ADM which is in fact the agency of waste treatment and environment in France is defining circular economy as an economic system of exchange and production which at all stages of the life of the products aims to increase the efficiency of the use of resources and reduce the impact on the environment while developing the well-being of individuals so uh you’ve been seen before that the pillars of the uh circular economy and the circular economy concept were uh pictures coming from the Adam so this is I think the one of the definitions France is going to head forward to and what is also very interesting in this definition is that there comes up this idea of the well-being of the individuals so that it’s not only there to consider the secularity of goods and resources but that this should be also something which is good for the society as a whole and then I got also one uh definition which is coming from the European commission so here they are writing that the circular economy is a model of production and consumption which involves sharing leasing reusing repairing refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible so here you little bit like with the French Ministry of ecology and you see this was the the different pillars I was presenting to you uh but in the EU definition this idea of being also a good thing for the society is absent so um for the moment there is no really official one uh but I think uh all these definitions give you some clues of what it is all about and just to set it up uh there is the problematic of sustainable development which is and development that needs the needs of the the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to mean their own needs so this is the very initial definition of sustainable development and you see this is not matching the ons of circular economy so uh circular economy is very much a concept which is centered on the economic activity and as the sustainability is something which is behind but it is a a driver but it should not be uh uh um used as synonyms okay because sustainable development is something which is much larger than circular economy and also much larger than bioeconomy okay so having um spoken about all these definitions uh now I’m going so one of the tools of the circular economy is obviously the ecodesign of products of services so ecodesign is an design approach which uh in the which considers from the very beginning of the design process the environmental impacts of the products during a pro during the whole life cycle of the product and this is what my what my picture here is all around so when you’re going to ecodesign you should very uh think about how my product is going to be used and how it is going to be disposed of and take into account all these different Assets in order to come up with uh a new design problem uh propose proposal um what is very important also is that uh uh the objective is to reduce ecological footprint of the product at an equal functionality or service delivered and this needs to be proven okay uh basically what the equation here says which is a very easy one is that um you need to um count or calculate in some point the ecological impact of the product you have and then uh you have a new design proposition and you calculate also the ecological impact of the new proposition and so when the uh whole um uh ecological impacts of the new ones are smaller than the ancient version uh but you can claim ecodesign which means that in conclusion it is sufficient to reduce at least one impact uh one ecological impact without increasing or creating another in order to have done an Eco design of products and services so this is very easy to be said it is often quite difficult to be done and it requires you having an holistic integrative point of view and doing a multicriteria and multi-step analysis of your uh product use in all its use phases so what is how can it done um well there are tools for doing this uh this is a very um simple sketch of the design process uh showing you that in the very early design um stages you have quite a high degrees of freedom and it is interesting to have the the thinking about the environmental impact already in this very early stages um because you have you can do whatever you like in some point and when you put it inside here then you are already on a truck which most probably is going to bring you to a an more environmental friendly product because as then as your design PR process goes its way here um the degrees of freedoms are diminishing and the cost of change and the environmental locked in is increasing so change something at the end of the impact is more at the end of the design process can be more costly than changing it in the beginning so for uh acop you with this you have the possibility to use tools and there are different tools there are tools for the very early development stages which are called generative tools and there are tools for the late development changes uh stages which are more evaluative tools and models which can be applied um so this brings me to my second part here which is the general tools of the design um so for the Gen I’m going to speak about the generative tools at first which is which are the one you can apply in the very beginning so basically those are principles checklists and guidelines uh they are very um useful for the Frontline integration of sustainability consideration in your design and ideation pH phase uh can be helpful for idea generation but uh be aware that they need High expertise it is very rare that uh people who do not know much about the subject come up with the sound equid designed proposal and uh because those are checklists there is also attention to be paid on cherry picking so ideally you should check all all the points on your checklist and not just one whenever it is possible so what could be such checklists there is a easy to SU easy to apply rules the first one is whenever you can do an ecological Improvement but do it even if it’s small it should not prevent you for doing the big movement also but uh well then it is quite uh easy and well done to do um even a small step then do also the small step use life cycle thinking and multicriteria Analysis to PR prevent the shifting ecological burdens from Once step to the other and Define the functions of the product with regards to the service for the user and not with regards of what you already have this can then bring a bring you to a more Innovative ecodesign and quantify in the end ecological uh impacts so um qualitative rules are for example such rules of the T as I’m showing to you here uh which is the 6rs the think products and its functions repair so design for easy repairing replace harmful substances reuse so EAS disassembly return and use again systems reduce energy and materials you need to do the product and recycle so use recycled materials designed for recycling so this is just one of the generative rules you could use in your idea generation process in order to bring you already on a track for better uh Environmental Quality of the product so I had another one which is also a little bit the main style this is just to tell you that there are quite a bunch of uh different rules and guidelines you want to use so whatever you use will be possible and useful I think for the design process it’s always a little bit the same type um of tool in the in the uh later stages of the design process so when you already know something about your product and something about your um uh processing and use phases uh you need to evaluate the um ecological impacts of the product and its services and uh the best tool we have for this is the life cycle assessment uh so this is uh a tool you can apply in the in the end because it needs quite a precise specifications so therefore it is useful in the later stages and there’s a comparison tool uh for specific design decisions but it is quite hard to use it as a standalone frontend design tool because in the very beginning you do not know much about how the thing is going to be made and how is it is going to be used um this but it is a very very important tool and that’s why Fatima poas is going to speak about this just in the speak after me um then uh the um circular circular economy has also its own uh new indicators which are the circularity indicators so here um I show you some examples of indicator types uh there can be examples found by The Ellen Maat uh found Foundation uh and also other toolkits which are already out for the circular economy and uh most of those also indicators are something like material circularity indicators so I was choosing here uh for you one of the projects of our University which is um having you circularity indicators online and so you can go to this website and then um uh you need to furnish uh to provide some informations about your product and then uh those types of can you calculate um a circularity indicator um of of your pro product and of your process uh sorry just to say what is behind the machine is uh most of those uh circularity indicators have the structure of mass flow indicators so in some point they are going to calculate how much material is going to put into the system how much material is going to flow out out from the system and how much material is going to be circulated inside the system and then you do uh you sum up all those different uh mass flow flows and you can come up with those mass flow indicators which are then often translated in circularity indicators okay so this is another uh mechanism and it is something which is starting also to be much more and more used so okay seven minutes left um so my last part was now on this when I speaking having spoken about the tools to speak about the specific needs of the packaging sector and how you can apply those tools so uh I was telling you several times that there needs to be an holistic analysis um of the impact of the service offer because uh um in fact PL packaging is always used together with its content packaging is not a project in itself when there is no content the packaging just doesn’t exist so one can uh look at it as a service and as a service it has direct environmental impacts which are linked to the packaging material its fabrication and its disposal but there are also indirect environmental impacts which are caused by this service food and packaging and those indirect impacts can be for example food loss because of not efficient enough packaging um or loss of Transport efficiency so that’s why I think you have seen this curve already several times when you have an environmental impact of your whole service offer which means the food plus the packaging H and you do it versus here it is the environmental impact of the packaging material or the weight of the packaging materials you can see that uh when you you can come to an Optimum design where the packaging helps the food to be protected and not to be lost and so in that case uh you are decreasing the environmental impact of the whole service offer but whenever there is too much packaging then the environmental impact is increasing again and that’s why we need to seek for this Optimum packaging design um one uh here also rule of the Thum would be uh to using the packaging relative environmental impact um indicator um this means that uh you can calculate what is the uh environmental impact of the packaging versus the environmental impact of the food which is packed inside and then you see something which may be quite obvious when you have a products which are environmentally very very um uh costly to produce like animal products like meat for example milk or butter um then the relative environmental impact of the packaging is not very high so in those cases uh it would be uh uh interesting it can be interesting to have a um a packaging with high technicity which may have in itself a high environmental impact but when it helps to protect very efficiently this uh food then the overall environmental impact of the system can be lower than when you doing an underpacking and the other uh uh side of this graph is uh uh soft drinks and uh I think the very much opposite of meat is water bottles for example in that case the production of the food which is the water is not very costly from an environment m al point of view however the uh environmental impact of the package is packaging is and so for water bottles the environmental impact of the total service offer is much more uh linked to the water uh to the bottle than to the water and that’s where all those uh refill bottles uh make make sense make a lot of sense um here the Eco design methodology um needs then take into account the packaging level level so primary uh and the interactions between the primary packaging and the uh and the food the secondary packaging and the tertiary P packaging so the transport packaging uh it needs also to take into account the system level so what is uh important for Logistics consumer Behavior and the waste treatment uh when you head for the methodology uh ecodesign needs always Senior Management involvement in order to be successful uccessful and uh in order to take into account all those different design levels there are some tricks and hints which can be applied for example you can uh change the definition of the functional unit and so when you define it as a packaging and distribution of one ton of product from a manufacturing company to the final consumer M it is going to um include from the very beginning all the problematics you could have with the logistics and the transport packaging inside your um ecodesign and uh one other trick could be that for the design process you could consider packaging as a waste stream at the end and so this is something which will need to be minimized and it will also bring you on a track where you’re going to uh be more likely to have a more optimized environmental design at the end um so I’m going to skip over the design processes I think this is clear for you you need to clarify your problem ideate have some ideas develop uh a project realiz the project and then evaluate if your new TR design proposal has a uh less environmental impact than the uh initial one okay so um in your very first beginning of this uh design steps you need to define the objective of the EOD design process so objectives need to be relevant attainable and measurable so which means communicable uh in that case you need to do an functional analysis of the package from the of the packaging and of the service the packaging is going to um give to the consumer check the critical points uh of the packaging from the technological side from the Practical side check the flexibility of your critical points because sometimes stimes uh decreasing quality can help you to decrease the um uh environmental impact and uh then uh when you have clarified your objectives you can then think about a several number of Design Elements so optimize resource use sustainable resourcing responsible use recycling or uh designed for recycling organic waste treatment and each design uh element has its own checklists which is one of the major tools I was presenting you before uh for example when we are on responsible user uh you can uh think about the ReUse Solutions so resealing systems easy to wash systems designed to avoid littering avoid small loose Parts attach closures to your packaging uh designed for easy portioning and emptying in order not to lose the food which is contained inside the packaging so for all of those elements you can have some checklists and um you have a a website which is providing you some of those checklists uh in the bottom um then so when you define your environment to tagnet you have your different design uh elements then you uh need to develop the strategy apply your strategy elements and check achievments this is always iterative steps and in the end you need to measure uh and Implement a transparent and responsible uh communication uh conflicting targets can be must be handled so this here is a also an example how to handle the conflicting targets it is very important to be transparent in the uh presentation of conflicting results it can help you to Define minimum requirements uh for some of those targets and uh uh resolve then those Al transparently um presented conflicted targets by decision making and referring to the designed priorities of the project um one uh alert here is uh this is a spider diagram can be very useful for doing this however you should never ever rely on the integral of the spider diagram because it is biased so it is not informative always only R to where the the points are never to the integral um some feedback uh coming from a successful oh sorry I’m overtime from successful project um what is interesting in order to um have um impact is that you need to Foster internal coordination so the more cross functional the teams as you’re working with the more you have uh uh a chance to come up with a new and uh very efficient proposals you should also try to get you on board your suppliers and customers incl including the logistics in order to avoid the shifting burdens and uh a high Innovation culture in a company is uh in favor of ecodesign uh and then you need also to think about what the customer is going to perceive from the ecodesign attributes so customer has in his head some types of Eco environmentally friendly materials so when you use them you have a chance to be understood uh he understands also labels and colors so it is very labeling is something which is of high importance because this is helping you to communicate the outcomes of your of your design strategy and uh well uh some one main recommendation to brain own uh to Brand owners in any case you should avoid green washing and always be transparent with your design targets and also will be transparent when you have conflicting results uh in that case you’re going to be um believed and uh you need to uh and uh you have a chance to be successful in the Eco design so sorry for being over time so very much thank you for your attention and uh well I give back the floor to my colleagues