The Impact of Recyclability on Environmental Performance of Coated Paper Packaging for Food Products

The strive towards circularity within the packaging sector has been an ever-growing challenge. Regular paper seems to be a good solution due to its natural and renewable origins and relative ease in its end-of-life processing. But food products often require barrier and seal functions or mechanical properties that cannot be provided by regular paper or cardboard. Possibly, the implementation of innovative, highly functional and recyclable coated paper/cardboard materials for food packaging applications would allow for the replacement of traditional multi-layered plastics. The objective of the paper is to verify the environmental performance of selected coated paper materials over their counterparts from multi-layered plastics with the use of LCA methodology. LCA screening is used to compare the environmental impacts of selected food products’ life cycles with the use of different packaging materials. Special focus is on the recyclability issue of the packaging materials and their contribution to overall environmental performance. The underlying objective of the paper is to indicate the best environmental practices and scenarios within the development of the innovative coated paper materials and to recommend possible updates to its recyclability scenarios.