Application of Additive Manufacturing for Innovative Design and Development of Reusable Packaging

Towards circular economy, companies are increasingly interested in exploring sustainable packaging design. The growth of e-commerce and home delivery has opened up new opportunities for package reuse. For this purpose, Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a technology with a high potential for designing and testing various packaging designs. This study utilizes AM to design and create a prototype of reusable packages in an Industry 4.0 Laboratory. After the design phase, these packages are produced using 3D printing and tested for their ability to accommodate various types of customer orders. A didactic modular production system is used to create these orders of various shapes and sizes. In this work a novel package prototype is proposed to meet two cornerstones for establishing circular economy, which are Design for Disassembly and Design for Adaptability. Disassembly has the potential to greatly increase the rate of component reuse, while adaptability significantly reduces oversized packaging. Furthermore, this work shown the capability of AM to implement innovative designs for reusable packages.