How to Assess the Environmental Footprint of Food Packaging?
We often get asked about food packaging and its overall impact on the total footprint of a food product. One of the challenges though is that this question is usually posed by the last player in the supply chain, for example retailers or wholesalers. Our own data from customers tells us that food packaging emissions overall stay below 5% of the total footprint.
Why Packaging is also confusing
At Niatsu we get to analyze hundreds of thousands of food products every year. And each partner we work with has put a lot of care and thought into why they are using a certain type of packaging. One of our customers famously told me that he changed the packaging of his soy sauce from a glass bottle to plastic (yes, to plastic, but more on this later), and this in return caused fewer people to buy his product because it was perceived as too expensive for a soy sauce in a plastic bottle. Long story short, packaging and food has always had a lot to do with consumer perception.
Another company decided to reduce packaging based on our analysis and save packaging cost (up to 1 cent per SKU), meanwhile I personally really disliked their new packaging. It is a common belief that packaging matters a lot in the overall footprint of a food product, but at the end of the day the packaging we buy our products in and take home is negligible in the overall picture. The famous public argument here is the cucumber in plastic foil versus the fresh cucumber: critics say the foil is wasteful, retailers say the wrapped cucumber stays fresh longer and therefore reduces waste. Our data sides with the retailer on this one. A cucumber thrown away costs far more CO2 than the few grams of foil around it ever will.
The bigger truth though is that a lot of packaging and wrapping material is forgotten in the whole process. Farms use plenty of plastic, from planting foil to the bags fertilizer is delivered in, and during transport of wholesale goods a significant amount is used to assure a safe journey from the place an ingredient has grown to its destination. So if you only count the wrapper the consumer sees, you are underestimating the total packaging in the chain. But even with all of it included, the share stays small compared to what happens on the field.
How to get a footprint and what matters?
My blunt and straightforward answer is to use an emissions database such as Niatsu and figure out how much packaging was used for each product. Easy, right? Well, there is another answer, which is that packaging can be neglected in the bigger picture. Agricultural emissions are a lot more relevant, and packaging makes up on average less than 5% of the total footprint. There are two distinct exceptions to this rule: beverages and small SKU items.
The impact of packaging in the beverage industry is twofold. First, if you sell something that is mostly water (which has a very low footprint), the packaging ends up making a significant portion of the total. Second, the weight of the packaging drives transport emissions. A 500ml glass beer bottle can weigh almost as much as the beer inside it, which is why a local beer can perform significantly better than one shipped over long distances. The same is true for wine and other spirits.
For small SKU items, say a 15g nut package or a single slice of cheese in a PE box, the story also changes, simply because there is not enough product to justify the amount of packaging around it.
Which packaging type should you choose for your food product?
This is the question customers ask us once they accept that packaging is a small lever, because small lever or not, you still have to pick something. If climate impact is your deciding factor, the emission factors point in a clear direction.
Fibre-based materials sit at the bottom of the range, with brown paper at around 0.33 kg CO2e per kg and corrugated board not far above. For dry products like pasta, cereals, flour or baked goods, a paper bag or carton is almost always the lowest-impact choice you have.
For products that need moisture or grease resistance, mono-material plastics like PP and HDPE are the next best option at roughly 1.7 kg CO2e per kg. A PP tray or HDPE bottle usually beats glass, because even fully recycled glass carries about 0.91 kg CO2e per kg and a bottle weighs five to ten times more than its plastic equivalent. If your brand requires glass (remember the soy sauce), ask your supplier for the recycled share. Fully recycled glass cuts the footprint by a third compared to virgin.
The materials to watch are the ones that look harmless on the shelf. Multilayer barrier films that combine PET or PP with polyamide reach 4.2 to 7.5 kg CO2e per kg, and they are common in coffee, cheese and fresh meat packaging. If your product does not strictly need an oxygen barrier, a mono PP or PE film does the job at a third of the emissions and is easier to recycle. The same logic applies to aluminium: virgin material tops the list at close to 16 kg CO2e per kg, roughly six times the recycled version, so recycled content should be a hard requirement in your specification.
Bioplastics deserve a sober look before you pay the premium. Our data on PLA at 3.5 kg CO2e per kg emits more in production than conventional PP, so "compostable" on the label does not mean lower footprint.
The practical rule: choose the lightest mono-material that still protects your product, prefer paper and fibre where shelf life allows it, and only accept multilayer films when the barrier is truly needed. And keep the bigger picture in mind. The food inside typically causes far more emissions than the packaging around it, so packaging that fails and lets your product spoil is the most expensive option of all.
What about Recycling?
One last point on recycling. The numbers above describe production, but your material choice also decides what happens after use. Mono-materials like PP, HDPE, paper and glass flow through existing recycling streams, while multilayer films and mixed plastics almost always end up incinerated because the layers cannot be separated. So a recyclable design pays off twice: your packaging can be made from recycled content at a fraction of the virgin footprint, and it stays in the loop instead of leaving it.