Switching
material from plastic to paperboard can reduce a packaging’s climate impact by
99 per cent. For people who influence the choice of packaging material, this
single choice can make the biggest climate impact during a product manager or
designer’s entire professional career. That’s the conclusion of a study done by
IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute for Iggesund Paperboard. The
starting point was to study some of the commonest packaging types and compare
the differences in climate impact depending on the choice of packaging
material.
“There
are tables giving carbon dioxide emissions per kilo of material, but when you
compare real examples of packaging, you realise the great importance of the
choice of material,” comments Johan Granås, Sustainability Director at Iggesund
Paperboard.
“Plastic
is a fantastic material for many applications and we use it ourselves when
producing paperboard for food packaging that needs a thin plastic barrier to
protect its contents,” he adds. “But we believe that decision makers in the
packaging industry must know about the effects of their choice of material.”
Packaging
light bulbs in plastic or paperboard respectively is the most extreme example
in the survey. By switching from plastic to paperboard, it is possible to
reduce the climate impact of the packaging by 99 per cent. In the example that
was most favourable for plastic, a paperboard carton containing 500 grams of
pasta was compared with the corresponding amount of pasta packed in a thin
plastic bag. The conclusion was that the plastic bag has a 3.25 times larger
climate impact than the paperboard carton. This is despite the fact that the
bag only weighs one-sixth as much as the carton and has significantly worse
protective and stacking properties.
“There
are masses of packagings that cannot be made in anything other than plastic
today,” Johan Granås emphasises. “But there are also packagings that are made
of plastic where it is easy to switch material without losing function at all –
and it is logical to start there if we want to reduce packaging’s climate
impact.”
For
the paperboard packagings used in the study, climate data for Iggesund’s
paperboard Invercote was used. For the plastic materials, IVL drew on data from
the databases used for doing lifecycle analyses. None of the paperboard
packagings used in the study is made of material from Iggesund Paperboard.
“This
is a study that shows the climate impact of different types of packaging. The
mandate to IVL was to be general. Neither they nor we know the climate data for
each individual packaging. However, based on the recognised environmental
databases, this definitely indicates the great importance of the choice of
material,” Granås concludes.
IVL
Swedish Environmental Research Institute was jointly founded in 1966 by the
Swedish government and industry to do research into industry’s air and water
management issues. Today IVL is an environmental institute that focuses on the
interplay between environmental, economic and social perspectives.
