Sustainable food packaging: a systematic review

Abstract

Packaging plays a vital role in the preservation and commercialization of food. However, its contributions have been left aside in many sustainability discussions. For a long time, they were regarded as having an undesirable environmental impact, and it was considered that their reduction or elimination were the best solutions. However, more recent research identifies them as essential tools for meeting the sustainable development goals of the 2030 Agenda, mainly objective 12, “ensure sustainable consumption and production patternsâ€. In this context, increasing the efficiency of food packaging systems is essential. However, the peculiarities of these systems are various and interact in different ways with the multiple actors and scenarios of the global food system, which makes it challenging to adopt concrete measures towards the fulfillment of the agenda. Therefore, a systematic review of this topic was carried out to understand better the concept of sustainable food packaging and its current state-of-the-art. Thereby, 40 papers from 18 journals, products of the collaboration of researchers from 61 institutions from 19 countries, who have investigated the role of packaging in food production and distribution chains with different methodologies, were analyzed. The most adopted methods in these publications were Review, Life Cycle Assessment, and Interviews, including combined in the same work, given the complexity of the theme. Thus, it was found that this is a multidisciplinary problem that has been addressed in the scientific environment for some time, but that still contains important gaps that require further studies. The available data are limited mainly to quantify and qualify food losses and waste associated with inadequate packaging. In addition, it is necessary to investigate the peculiarities of the multiple food packaging systems and the promotion of knowledge related to packaging among consumers to break outdated paradigms that focus on their individual impact. Thus, it was possible to gather an updated body of knowledge and, in addition, a set of recommendations that can guide future research.