ITERG presents the PACK-AGB project at the MCV 2024 congress

For consumers, aware of the need to reduce their household waste, packaging is one of the primary criteria for comparing food products in the same category. It is also a clearly identified eco-design lever within companies. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the most advanced method for quantitative, multi-criteria evaluation of the environmental impact of a product/packaging combination. In LCA, packaging modeling requires a certain number of methodological choices (end-of-life scenario, consideration of recycled material, etc.). To date, there is no public database of packaging solutions representative of products on the French market. The construction of robust data for the environmental assessment of packaging is therefore a real challenge.

AGRIBALYSE®, the public database on the environmental impact of agricultural and food products in France, managed and published by ADEME, serves as a reference base for the environmental labelling system currently being finalized by the public authorities [1]. Agricultural and agri-food technical institutes are actively involved in developing the AGRIBALYSE® database alongside ADEME and INRAE, within the GIS REVALIM [2].
In version 3.1 of this database, packaging is modeled using a simplified approach: a single packaging element is considered, itself composed of a single material. In addition, potential end-of-life benefits (recycling, energy recovery) are not taken into account. Thus, in autumn 2022, the PACK AGB project was launched with the aim of building more robust packaging Life Cycle Inventories (LCIs), aligned with French [3] and European [4] recommendations, covering a wide range of product categories in the AGRIBALYSE® database, with a view to its next update scheduled for 2024.
7 players from the LCA ecosystem are collaborating on this project: 5 agri-food technical institutes, covering a wide range of products (meat, fish, cereal products, fresh and sterilized ready-made meals, sterilized fruit and vegetables, vegetable oils and fats, dairy products and wine), the technical institute for plastic materials and processes, and a consultancy specializing in LCA.

Method

The aim of the PACK AGB project was to cover the main types of packaging for the above-mentioned products. The first step was to identify all the packaging solutions (sales, grouping and transport packaging) to be modeled according to their representativeness on the French market. In the second stage, these packaging solutions were characterized, defining the materials used for each component of the packaging solution, the shaping and finishing processes employed, and their end-of-life treatment.
Characterization was achieved mainly through the analysis of commercial references by packaging experts; in particular, analyses of multilayer plastic packaging were carried out by a specialized laboratory of one of the partners. For some products, industrial players were also approached. In parallel, a methodological framework aligned with French and European recommendations on LCA of packaging and products was developed [3], [4]. Finally, a global and harmonized architecture was put in place to make the approach easily reproducible, with a view to integrating new packaging solutions in future versions of the database.