The packaging sector plays a fundamental role in the global economy, specifically in the protection, presentation, and distribution of products. It is also a sector facing the significant challenge of reducing its environmental impacts, driven by the context of the climate emergency, the need to transition towards a greener economy, and the demands of increasingly environmentally conscious consumers. With the aim of assisting manufacturers of packaging and containers on this journey, Packimpact (www.packimpact.net) has just been launched. It is an online software that allows companies to quantify the environmental impacts of their packaging in a simple, rigorous, sector-specific, and affordable manner. The tool has been developed by the Catalan Packaging Cluster, with the technical part executed by inèdit. The project also involved the design studio Lúcid and the companies Font Packaging Group, Alzamora Group, Rieusset, Enplater Group, Virospack, NGP Projects Packaging i Glovo.

Packimpact enables the calculation of carbon footprint, water footprint, and other environmental indicators for products, considering all stages of the life cycle: materials, manufacturing, transportation, use, and end-of-life. Until now, life cycle assessments of products were carried out using very generic environmental analysis tools that required specialized personnel and a significant investment of time and money, often leading to outsourcing this service. The new tool aims to make it easier for companies to take on this task themselves and is tailored to different types of packaging —flexible, rigid, cardboard, etc.—, providing specific information about the materials and processes required to manufacture and/or market each product type, as well as information on recovery and recycling.

The tool presents results and compares the environmental performance of different packaging solutions, the latter being highly valuable for eco-design decisions; it also allows for exporting this information in Excel and PDF formats and sharing it internally and with clients.

The project has been funded by ACCIÓ’s Initiatives to Enhance Competitiveness in Companies program, with the goal of transferring knowledge about environmental life cycle analysis and environmental footprints to the Catalan packaging industry, empowering it and saving it the cost of having to diagnose its packaging through one-off studies.