Colloquia

Summary

Increasing awareness of consumers and legislative encouragement pushes companies to improve the sustainability of their portfolios. Packaging, which is a field where those sustainability improvements become directly visible to the customers, has been targeted by the new proposed packaging and packaging waste regulation of the European Union.

Reusable packaging in the form of reusable plastic containers (RPCs) is a means to reduce the environmental impact of product-packaging systems by distributing the ecological costs of secondary packaging over their multiple use cycles. Foldable RPCs can potentially increase the ecological benefit even more by streamlining the system's efficiency during transport and storage through reduced volume. A packaging format of such crates that fit and transport 1l beverage cartons without compromising efficiency in a reusable packaging system's value chain did not exist before this research.

Because of the complexity of a reusable product-packaging combination and its logistical system, it is not immediately clear if introducing a reuse concept would be economically and ecologically beneficial for a company. Lifecycle analyses (LCAs) are the golden standard for evaluating the environmental impact of products. Because LCA studies are executed at the end of a product development process as they require an in-depth inventory of the materials and processes involved in all stages of a product's lifecycle, companies are developing MS Excel and Power Bi-based tools to be able to estimate the potential environmental impact of products without having to conduct full-scale LCA studies.

The research presented at the colloquium deals with the fundamental question of how to design sustainably. It aims to show how designers can usefully utilise tools that assess the environmental impact of products preliminary during a design process by providing a framework based on the dynamics of divergence and convergence during the iterative design approach.

A case study on the design of reusable plastic crates for beverage cartons explains the framework synthesised during this research. During that case study, a preliminary impact assessment tool based on LCA methodology, suitable for analysing a transition to reusable packaging systems, is developed and used.

Next to the framework and the tool, the design process also furnished two RPC designs that could potentially set a new standard for reusable transit packaging of beverage cartons.