Print Email Facebook Twitter Eco-efficient Value Creation: An Alternative Perspective on Packaging and Sustainability Title Eco-efficient Value Creation: An Alternative Perspective on Packaging and Sustainability Author Wever, R. Vogtländer, J. Faculty Industrial Design Engineering Department Design Engineering Date 2012-06-20 Abstract The classical sustainability perspective on packaging is to reduce the environmental impact or eco burden of the packaging, using life cycle assessment to evaluate different design alternatives. Simultaneously, the classical marketing perspective on packaging is to generate value through differentiation, for instance, by providing additional convenience. These two perspectives often conflict. In business reality, there is currently no established method to deal with these conflicts. Life cycle assessment is methodologically incapable of incorporating the difference in convenience. This article uses the eco-costs/value ratio (EVR), as a method for dealing with the environmental assessment of packaging design alternatives with such unequal ‘soft’ functionality. The article reviews the current debate on packaging and sustainability, highlighting some of the shortcomings of the methods currently applied. Subsequently, the EVR model is introduced and applied to five examples. These examples consist of pairs of products, where the product, the amount, the brand and the retail outlet are identical and only the packaging design and the value differ. The examples illustrate how the EVR model fits better to design decision making in business reality than classical life cycle assessment. Subject designlife cycle assessmentdecision supportmarketinginnovationOA-Fund TU Delft To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:7b4c899b-ed68-4ae2-819b-c907d5f4fed4 DOI https://doi.org/10.1002/pts.1978 Publisher Wiley ISSN 0894-3214 Source Packaging Technology and Science, 26 (4), 2013 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2012 John Wiley & Sons Files PDF Wever_2012.pdf.pdf 1.08 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:7b4c899b-ed68-4ae2-819b-c907d5f4fed4/datastream/OBJ/view