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140 | The “invisible” plastic in our seafood chain: how a simple box can
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Researchers applied a combined multicriteria analysis and life cycle assessment to evaluate six seafood packaging alternatives to expanded polystyrene fish crates, finding that recycled EPS options carry the lowest overall environmental burden while identifying design-for-robustness and closed-loop collection as the highest-leverage strategies for preventing plastic escape into marine environments.
What if one of the most common objects in the seafood cold chain - the expanded polystyrene (EPS) fish crate - were also one of its quietest pollution pathways? EPS boxes keep fish fresh efficiently, but when they break they can turn into persistent fragments that slip through collection systems and end up on coasts and in the sea. This talk takes that “box-to-beach” route and turns it into an actionable prevention story for experimental biologists: stop plastic escape upstream, without sacrificing food-chain function. I present an ecodesign workflow that couples multicriteria analysis (MCA) - capturing real-world constraints such as food-contact compliance, handling, insulation, durability, cost, and end-of-life options - with comparative life cycle assessment (LCA), quantifying environmental burdens using the Environmental Footprint method, version 3.0 (EF v3.0), under a cradle-to-grave perspective. The study compares practical packaging solutions for small-scale fisheries: conventional EPS (baseline), recycled EPS combined with polyethylene (PE) films for compliance, polypropylene (PP) crates with insulating components, wood crates with extruded/expanded polystyrene (XPS) trays, cardboard-based solutions with XPS trays, and a reusable washable PP crate. The functional unit is defined as the use of a 50×30×10 cm packaging system over 50 fish supplies. Under the modeled conditions, recycled EPS options show the lowest overall environmental burdens among the evaluated alternatives, while other solutions introduce trade-offs driven by material intensity, operational requirements, and end-of-life scenarios. The takeaway is not just a ranking, but a playbook: the combined MCA-LCA approach identifies where intuitive substitutions fail and where the highest leverage sits: designing for robustness, preventing fragmentation, controlling contamination, and enabling closed-loop collection and recycling. If we design the box for the whole journey - use, recovery, and reuse/recycling – the sea never has to see it.
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This life cycle assessment comparing disposable expanded polystyrene (EPS) boxes and reusable high-density polyethylene crates for seafood distribution found similar climate impacts for local and regional trade, but reusable crates showed a 12% higher carbon footprint for national distribution due to washing logistics and transport weight.
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