🥤What is sustainable food packaging?

Status quo

Currently, an authoritative definition of sustainable food packaging is missing, leading to a lot of confusion.

Ideally, sustainable foodware and food packaging enable circular and fair business models that deliver nutritious, safe, and culturally appropriate foodstuffs to people. They should also avoid adverse impacts that destabilize the planet's ecosystems in the long term across their entire life cycle.

In reality, many stakeholders in the food industry focus on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to evaluate sustainability (often communicated as CO2 emissions). Comparing such a metric only offers a one-dimensional view of sustainability and hinders capturing the known impacts of other crucial factors.

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The UP Scorecard's approach

To evaluate the sustainability of foodware and food packaging holistically, the UP Scorecard adopts a multi-indicator, metrics-based approach.

The UP Scorecard uses "traditional" life cycle assessment (LCA) metrics, including Plastic Pollution, Climate, and Water Use to evaluate impacts on the planet's ecosystems in the long term. Importantly, the UP Scorecard considers the entire life cycle of a product to paint a more realistic picture of true sustainability.

It uses the Recoverability and Sustainable Sourcing metrics to assess the principles of the circular economy.

Finally, the UP Scorecard uses the Chemicals of Concern metric to consider chemical safety in order to protect human and environmental health.

It is also important to understand that the sustainability of foodware and packaging is not solely related to the nature of the Food Contact Material used within a foodware or packaging product. It is equally important to evaluate different packaging systems and their impacts.