Colloquia

Summary

One of the main challenges in today’s grocery industry is the lack of clear understanding of how each part of the supply chain affects a product’s environmental impact. Not only are supermarkets responsible for lowering the impact of a product, but all the different segments of the chain like the manufacturers, suppliers, consumers, and others play a role. To improve this understanding, more insight is needed into the total environmental impact of a product. By including more information about the environmental effects during production, use, and disposal during the product development process, some uncertainty about the product’s overall impact can be reduced.

The aim of this research is to construct a method to analyze the impact of packaging during product development, instead of checking the impacts afterwards with an assessment method. In most cases in industry, an assessment is only performed to use the impact percentage to support their ‘environmental claims’ instead of improving the product to reduce even more impact. Therefore, the aim is: ‘Assessing the environmental impact of packaging during product development to ensure well-considered decision-making’. The aim will offer the possibility to perform an impact assessment on a product during the development process and be critical to prevent decisions that lead to an unexpected environmental impact.

After researching different approaches of product development processes and explaining a way to assess environmental impact by using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a restructured product development model with an integration of LCA was made. The benefit of this integrated product development process is that the necessary steps of an LCA are performed simultaneously throughout the entire process. This approach provides valuable insight into the expected environmental impact of the new packaging throughout its life cycle. These insights will support the decision-making process to achieve better and well-founded decisions. All gathered information is then presented as a framework. It demonstrates how and when the LCA steps are used during the product development process. To evaluate the framework, a case study on the new packaging of HAK: HAK-in-PAK is performed, where the restructured product development model is used as a guidance to develop the product and the LCA steps to support well-thought-out decisions on the product itself.