What stops designers from designing sustainable packaging?—a review of eco-design tools with regard to packaging design

Abstract

Packaging has caused much waste and its sustainability has received much attention in the past decades. Designers have made efforts to mitigate environmental impacts of packaging. However, many packaging designs are still far from achieving their sustainability goals. The purpose of this study is to perform a literature review of the principal design methods and tools for sustainable packaging published over the last twenty years. The objective is to understand the main obstacles that limit their effective implementation in the packaging design process. This study develops a sustainable packaging design and development model and proposes criteria for accessing packaging tools and methods. This study has found that to achieve sustainable design, many tools have limitations in demonstrating usage and balancing trade-off situations. Most of the tools focus on defining problems rather than suggesting possible solutions.