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Potential Routes to the Sustainability of the Food Packaging Industry
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This study investigates sustainability challenges in the food plastic packaging industry, examining how a Polish manufacturer navigates compliance with sustainability requirements and identifying practical barriers to reducing plastic use and improving end-of-life outcomes.
Plastic packaging of food products has a significant impact on the sustainability of the food industry and trade. The article presents selected problems surrounding the production of plastic packaging for food storage and distribution that might cause disruptions in the implementation of sustainable production. An important question regards the extent to which the industry that produces this packaging complies with the sustainability requirements. The present work consists in an investigation of the problems observed in a plastic packaging manufacturing company located in Poland, which is part of a global corporation. Plastic waste management was analyzed and compared with the requirements of a closed loop economy. The quantities of raw material processed and the quantities of waste in the defined period were analyzed. During the analyzed period, 0.05% of the monthly production was non-recyclable waste. The quality of raw material seems to be responsible for the majority of wastes. Therefore, the important role of SAP (Systems Applications and Products) in the use of lower quality batches of raw material is indicated. On the other hand, a possibility of converting the wastes into liquid or gaseous fuels is suggested. In addition, the paper investigates the efficiency of machine use in a film bag production line in a three-shift system. Process losses were analyzed and reliability indicators such as overall equipment efficiency (OEE) and its components, mean time between failures (MTBF), and mean failure repair time (MTTR) were determined. The monthly OEE values for each change individually exceeded 80%.
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