Publications

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 at end of its life as well. As far as packaging and producer responsibility is concerned, there are two aspects: designing packaging with its eventual [...]

Many types of packaging – glass, metal, paper, cardboard, plastics – are widely recycled. There is also a long tradition of making packaging from recycled materials. Packaging from recycled materials makes sense when this provides an overall environmental benefit. Often this is the case, but sometimes it isn’t. This [...]

Introduction Litter is any waste in the wrong place. Individuals create litter through thoughtless or anti-social behaviour. Only individuals can therefore prevent it. Many people think that litter and packaging are synonymous but statistically packaging is not the largest component.  However by its nature packaging catches the eye and [...]

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 the UK meets recovery and recycling targets, and the other requires producers to ensure that their packaging meets eco-design standards. These two laws implement the [...]

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 energy from waste. The most basic one is collection of the landfill gas which is given off as wastes degrade in landfills. After hydro power, [...]

Reductions in the amount of packaging used – "lightweighting” – didn’t start when environmental awareness emerged. Manufacturers have always sought to use less packaging in order to keep costs down, and as technology has developed, packaging has become lighter and lighter. As our topic sheet on Too Much 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 materials to disposal at end of life. It generates a series of lists of materials and energy, and environmental impacts. These cannot be added together [...]

When manufacturers want to introduce a new product or service, or improve the performance of an existing one, they need to examine its environmental impact. This means understanding how it relates to the environment throughout its life. One way to do this is to apply Lifecycle Thinking LCT. Lifecycle [...]

Many assumptions have to be made in carrying out a lifecycle assessment (LCA). The results are never precise or consistent enough to enable comparisons to be made between alternative products. Carbon footprinting is a subset of a full LCA and has the same limitations. In addition, it measures only [...]

The main purpose of Lifecycle Thinking is to ensure that changes to one part of a system do not increase environmental impact in other parts. This was one of the drivers for the development of The Responsible Packaging Code of Practice in the UK in 1998 (updated in 2003) [...]

Why do we need packaging? Without it, many of the goods manufactured or grown would be damaged or spoiled before they reached the shops. In less developed countries without the sophisticated distribution and packaging systems that we have in the UK, as much as 50% of food never reaches [...]