Establishment of Sustainability Indicator for Cushioning Packaging

Abstract

An integrated approach to sustainability assessment for cushioning packaging based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been developed to meet challenges within the context of packaging. The approach measures the performance of the cushioning packaging with regard to social, economic and environmental aspects and produces quantitative results as a monetary unit, and integrates the results into a sustainability indicator (SI) for directly indicating the overall benefits of the cushioning packaging. Two types of cushioning packaging made from molded pulp and corrugated board respectively for packaging a gas appliance were assessed in this study as a case study demonstration. The results show that the main environmental impacts of the two cushioning packaging are global warming and acidification caused by the atmospheric emissions during production processes for the cushioning packaging materials and products. The molded pulp material with associated advanced component structure was found to be the scheme in the two cushioning packaging designs for achieving sustainability although it has somewhat higher physical costs than that of the corrugated board cushioning. The optimum for the two cases is indentified by calculating the newly developed SI.