Food-pack waste systemic management. Alternative ways to reuse materials and to develop new business, products and local markets

Abstract On the basis of latest data published by Eurostat (the statistical office of the EU) in 2008 Europe produced 80 million tons of packaging waste. Specifically, Italy produces about 12 million tons per year of waste from packaging, 2/3 of which derive from the food processing sector. This paper does not address the issue of proper disposal of waste by consumers; on the contrary, it studies the problem of the waste that occurs before the products distribution phase, since it has not been sufficiently addressed enough. The focus, therefore, pertains to pre-production phase in the food packaging industry. Currently, rejects generated by that sector represent a large amount of waste upstream of the primary production cycle. Through its more exhaustive and far-sighted analysis and the application of the methodology of Systemic Design, whose fundamental principle is that waste (output) of a process become the resource (input) to another one, pre-production waste can in fact be reused by other industries. This generates a virtuous network of exchanges between geographically close companies that achieve economic and environmental benefits from the sale of secondary raw material. The result ends in a less use of raw materials, an increased use of resources already on site and, consequently, in a greater traceability of the same resources used in industrial processes so as to ensure, by implication, a high quality finished product. The ultimate goal of the proposed research is to design a self-sustaining network of companies that can interface and confront each other by creating a virtuous cycle in order to exploit the resources available (output) and limit production of surplus packaging.