The Ocean Package UG is a young and sustainable company from Munich with the goal to make e-commerce more environmentally friendly and sustainable. For this purpose, they have designed reusable packaging made of recycled polypropylene, which contains a proportion of collected plastic from the North Sea. Their product can be used 20 times more often than conventional cardboard packaging.
CIMPA, an EU-funded H2020 project, aimed to develop a recycling chain for post-industrial and post-consumer multilayer films from food and agricultural applications. This complex approach combines innovative compositional sorting, mechanical and physical recycling and an advanced decontamination process.
The consortium CIRCULAR FoodPack worked on solutions to enable the circular use of plastic packaging, focusing on the most sensitive product category: food. The project aimed to develop recyclable packaging with at least 50% post-consumer recyclates incorporated behind a functional barrier.
The Osservatorio Innovazione Packaging is run by the Advanced Design Unit in the University of Bologna's Architecture department.Itaims to trigger innovation in the area of packaging. It collects, prepares and provides case studies, knowledge and experience in order to promote circular, collaborative and responsible innovation projects along the packaging chain.
One of the observatory's goals is to create a regional and national "network of networks" within the packaging sector so as to foster connections between stakeholders.
The platform provides planning services, bridging research, students and businesses through talent labs and competitive projects.
There are levels of access depending on the type of membership.
The BioSupPack project aimed to deliver novel, cost-competitive and versatile bio-based packaging solutions - based on PHA - that demonstrate high-performance for the packaging of food, cosmetics, homecare and beverage products as well as no environmental damage during and after use.
Many political, business and civil society stakeholders are disappointed with the German Packaging Act. They feel it makes a comparatively small contribution to the circular economy. This study explains why they are disappointed:
Policy-making became entangled in disputes between proponents of a private and a public system for waste collection. Stakeholder fears of potential radical changes led to a stalemate
Fears allowed only incremental changes in the Packaging Act
The incremental changes could not resolve existing conflicts.
Based on its findings, the paper proposes possible courses of action. To create a shift to a circular economy, dialogue is needed using methods which explicitly address fears and overcome the current stalemate.
This literature review identified and categorised circular economy (CE) practices within all stages of the food and feed production chain in Europe to provide an overview of current and envisaged practices. There are four macro areas:
reducing food and feed waste in wholesale, food retail, catering and households and
reducing food and feed packaging waste.
It is recommended that future primary research in novel food and feed in the CE focuses on areas other than insect farming, and that there are further investigations into the potential risks associated with importation into the EU of livestock/goods that may have been subject to different restrictions/legislation.
