🎛️Packaging systems

The comparison between single-use versus reusable food packaging options revolves around environmental concerns, cost, convenience, and specific use cases. When focusing on the environmental impacts of the packaging system, it becomes evident that the recoverability of packaging products is critical.

Recoverability is an integral part of the waste hierarchy, a conceptual framework ranking waste management options according to what is best to minimize resource use and waste. The waste hierarchy says that whenever possible, we should first rethink and redesign a foodware or packaging product (or the entire food delivery process) to actively prevent the generation of any waste or to reduce the amount of packaging needed.

An illustration of the waste hierarchy (adapted from Zero Waste International Alliance).

It then gives priority to closed-loop systems where, in a perfect system, 100% of the material originally used in a given packaging application is reutilized for the same application as many times as possible. In reality, no such thing as a fully closed loop exists (Cimpan et al., 2023). However, the waste hierarchy indicates that some approaches are generally better in terms of circularity and resource efficiency. In this context, reuse is prioritized over recycling, composting, landfilling, and lastly, incineration (Albrecht et al., 2022).

Let's more closely evaluate the impacts of the two standard packaging systems:

• Single-use packaging and associated recovery options
• Reusable packaging and associated logistics