Life cycle assessment of cured meat product packaging: integrating the potential food waste related to the shelf life

Common packaging for cured meat products relies on plastic multilayer, multi-material films with poor sustainability because of their non-renewable origin and non-applicable recycling. Therefore, an urgent demand is to identify alternative materials that ensure the same food quality as conventional packaging, with a circularity degree. This study aims to evaluate the environmental impact of two food packaging systems multilayer, multi-material (conventional solution), and mono-material (alternative solution) designed for cured meat products, considering the food waste (FW) deriving from shorter shelf life at retail, distribution, and household phases. A sensitive analysis was investigated considering the recycling rate in the packaging end-of-life since the baseline scenario only included landfills and incineration. The life cycle assessment method used a “cradle-to-grave” approach. The functional unit was defined as one unit of packaging containing 100 g of sliced cooked ham. Regarding the packaging life cycle, the mono-material packaging showed the worst environmental performance compared to the conventional solution, due to the higher amount of plastic (17.6 and 16.4 g respectively). Regarding the generation of FW, the shorter shelf life of the mono-material (21 days) compared to the one of the multilayer, multi-material (35 days) led to a higher amount of potential FW with a correlated higher environmental impact in all the impact categories. This work demonstrates that the use of this mono-material leads to a higher environmental burden through an increased packaging weight and shortened shelf-life. Future eco-design approaches for cured meat should consider how the shelf life of alternative materials influences the system’s sustainability.