A strategy to reconcile environmental performances and economic performances in the process of greening packaging

Details

Supervisors

Frédéric Gaspart

Faculty

Faculté des bioingénieurs

Degree label

Master [120] : bioingénieur en sciences et technologies de l'environnement, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Packaging is considered to be an essential component of our daily life since it embraces all phases of activities involved in the transfer of goods and services right from manufacturers to consumers. However, once considered as waste, it can become a hazard for both humans and the environment. Therefore, in this context of international climate crises, and with the necessity to comply with European directives, there is an increasingly strong push for packaging to become more sustainable in its production, use, and disposal, as these are linked to direct environmental impacts. Hence, more and more packaging companies and packaging waste management firms are realizing that there is scope for growth if they can carefully orchestrate themselves towards capturing the innovation opportunities in sustainability even though, it has always been challenging to comply with environmental standards while making profits at the same time. For this study, the link between corporate environmental performance and corporate financial performance from 5 case studies was investigated. Both the qualitative and quantitative analysis method was chosen to gain a comprehensive and thorough understanding of environmental performances in the target companies while a variety of tools was used to measure corporate financial performance, corporate environmental performance, and the link between both performances. The conclusions were that most of the environmental effects of packaging and packaging waste are related to production, waste management, and distribution. It has also been shown that none of the developed tools works towards an agreement on a conceptual framework to assess the environmental and economic performance of packaging processing and packaging waste management system. Besides, practices such as resource and energy saving, recycled packages, reducing packaging materials, and technology investments help package processing and package waste management firms to improve their environmental performances which can be directly correlated to their financial performances.