What Stops Designers from Designing Sustainable Packaging?—A Review of Eco-design Tools with Regard to Packaging Design

Abstract

Packaging has caused much waste and its sustainability has received much attention in the past decades. Designers have made efforts to mitigate environmental impacts of packaging. However, many packaging designs are still far from achieving their sustainability goals. The purpose of this study is to perform a literature review of the principal design methods and tools for sustainable packaging published over the last twenty years. The objective is to understand the main obstacles that limit their effective implementation in the packaging design process. This study develops a sustainable packaging design and development model and proposes criteria for accessing packaging tools and methods. This study has found that to achieve sustainable design, many tools have limitations in demonstrating usage and balancing trade-off situations. Most of the tools focus on defining problems rather than suggesting possible solutions.

A multi user‐centred design approach framework to develop aesthetically pleasing and sustainable OTCP packaging

“…A literature review shows that even with a high number of design support systems available, 41 designers may not know which design support system is most adequate for their design practices 42 . Furthermore, designers lack support when understanding stakeholder requirements 13,43–47 .…”

“…A literature review shows that even with a high number of design support systems available, 41 designers may not know which design support system is most adequate for their design practices. 42 Furthermore, designers lack support when understanding stakeholder requirements. 13,[43][44][45][46][47] The critical review provides a degree of evidence that there is a research gap in the development of a framework aimed to be used during task clarification and which supports OTCP designers when considering sustainability and aesthetics.…”

“…However, the high number of design support systems creates incongruity in sustainable packaging design. Ma and Moultrie 42 suggest that designers may not know which tool is best suited for the design stages or what results to expect from each design support system. Studies show that stakeholders should be better represented in early stages 43 of the OTCP packaging design process 13,44–47 …”

8 Circular design in practice: eight levers for change

“…Environmental trade-offs -Managing environmental trade-offs is a topic widely discussed in both design (Ma & Moultrie, 2017;Prendeville et al, 2014;Salari & Bhuiyan, 2018;Vanegas et al, 2018) andCE contexts (Bracquene et al, 2020;Glogic et al, 2021;Millward-Hopkins et al, 2018). Similarly, within industry, Organisation B remarked that "if you've worked in sustainable design, you are always trying to understand these trade-offs [.…”

Sustainable packaging as a tool for global sustainable development

“…For this reason, they are used to improve the market position of enterprises and create the image of ethically operating companies and with respect for the natural environment and its users. This is the reason for the adaptation of production to the implementation of the principles of the above concepts and recognizing them as an integral part of the enterprise management strategy by companies from the packaging industry, which belongs to the dynamically developing economic sectors and packaging design, which throughout their life cycle will be in line with the assumptions of sustainable development [8,9], and meet the expectations and needs of users.…”