Factsheets

Reductions in the amount of packaging used – "lightweighting” – didn’t start when environmental awareness emerged. Manufacturers have always sought to use less packaging [...]

Introduction Lifecycle assessment (LCA) quantifies the environmental burdens associated with a product, process or activity over its entire lifecycle, from production of the raw [...]

The main purpose of Lifecycle Thinking is to ensure that changes to one part of a system do not increase environmental impact in other [...]

Recovering energy from unrecycled waste is preferable to landfilling it, according to the government’s waste hierarchy. There are a number of ways of recovering [...]

Why do we need packaging? Without it, many of the goods manufactured or grown would be damaged or spoiled before they reached the shops. [...]

When manufacturers want to introduce a new product or service, or improve the performance of an existing one, they need to examine its environmental [...]

Many assumptions have to be made in carrying out a lifecycle assessment (LCA). The results are never precise or consistent enough to enable comparisons [...]

The environmental impact of packaging in the UK is controlled by two different pieces of packaging legislation. One covers industry’s role in ensuring that [...]

Producer responsibility is a policy concept designed to extend a manufacturer’s responsibility beyond the sale and use of its their products to include disposal [...]

Many types of packaging – glass, metal, paper, cardboard, plastics – are widely recycled. There is also a long tradition of making packaging from [...]

Recycling is a way to turn unwanted materials into new ones. It helps to reduce the need for virgin raw materials in manufacture, as [...]