Sustainable Innovations in Food Packaging

This brief concerns the interesting sector of sustainable food packaging. The ambitious goal to develop a sustainable production system involves the reduction of emissions, the efficient use of resources, and the transition to renewable energy. The bioeconomy theorizes a model that would like to reduce impacts and risks associated with the use of non-renewable resources considering the life cycle of products. The European Union furthers packaging from renewable sources focused on bio-based materials. Packaging is an important key to satisfy the increasingly pressing and urgent request of sustainable food production and consumption on the industrialized countries to reduce a minimum the environmental impact of packaged food. A new sustainable packaging should guarantee the reuse of whole waste material and the loss of food safety and quality during storage by preventing food-borne diseases and food chemical contamination. Also, it must consider the dramatic problem correlated with persistent plastic waste accumulation as well as the saving of oil and food material resources. This book presents the main innovations of food packaging that aim to win the pressing international challenges related to food and plastic waste reduction and end-of-life issues of persistent materials. Among potential solutions, the production of microbial biodegradable polymers and the use of by-products and waste of agricultural and food industries seem a promising route to create an innovative and productive waste-based food packaging economy, separating the food packaging industry from fossil stocks and allowing biopolymers to return to the soil. Moreover, to understand the economical reliability of these innovations, different analyses—life cycle assessment or LCA, life cycle costing or LCC, and externality assessment or ExA—are discussed to assess the impacts along the whole chain by means of an integrated approach.