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Well-chosen natural and renewable packagings may yield an environmental benefit

Placed by Natuurlijk Naturelle on 3 February 2011Well-chosen natural and renewable packagings may yield an environmental benefit

Organic products, in particular fruit and vegetables, are often packaged in new materials that are appropriate for such products, for example trays and films made from natural, renewable raw materials. Research carried out by the Dutch Food & Biobased Research department of Wageningen University has shown that such packaging materials are indeed more environmentally friendly, though there are differences between different types of materials.

Consumers have a love-hate attitude towards packagings. Packaging is hygienic and lengthens a product’s shelf life. But they are also responsible for the bulk of our domestic waste and cause a lot of annoyance, especially if they are considered unnecessary or excessive. Buyers of organic food are possibly extra critical regarding environmental aspects of packagings. If you intentionally choose to buy sound products you don’t want to end up with a pile of waste. This triggered intensive research into the new generation of renewable packagings that are currently often used for organic produce.

The researchers investigated a wide range of new materials such as trays made from sugar cane fibres and sugar cane pulp and trays and films made of PLA plastic. All the materials of this first category were found to be better than traditional plastic packagings in terms of environmental performance.
A second category comprising starch blend films as used in bin bags showed less environmental benefit. The researchers pointed out that other factors, such as the shelf life of the products contained in the packagings, are on balance at least as important as the employed packaging material as regards a product’s overall impact on the environment.

The conclusion of the study carried out by Food & Biobased Research is that the environmental benefit of renewable and natural packagings could be increased by reusing the packaging materials. The packagings would then have to be collected and processed via the existing system for collecting plastic packagings. That would be perfectly feasible; it would only necessitate some adjustments at the sorting companies.

Naturelle uses packagings made from renewable raw materials where possible, for example PLA trays and films.

Categorie: Well-chosen natural and renewable packagings may yield an environmental benefit

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