Advancing Sustainable Food Packaging: Life Cycle Assessment of PHBV Bioplastics in the ViSS Project Using the SSbD Framework

The progressive substitution of fossil-based consumer plastics products with bioplastics is crucial to decarbonise our society, while also biodegradability of the new bioproducts has to be ensured. The EU-funded Horizon-project ViSS aims to create a safe, sustainable, fully functional and highly replicable circular value chain of PHBV bioplastic specifically for high performance food packaging, utilizing food industrial residues as carbon and nutrient sources for PHBV production. The technology development of ViSS follows Safe and Sustainable by Design framework (SSbD) established by EU. This presentation will detail the methodology, results, and findings of the first life cycle assessment (LCA) iteration.
SSbD framework facilitates a (re-)design approach to create products, that are genuinely safe and sustainable, rather than merely relatively safer and more sustainable than alternative products. It involves three iterative assessment phases, evaluating safety and environmental sustainability, and optionally also socio-economic sustainability. Based on the results of the assessments, the product is re-designed and improved. In ViSS, safety, environmental sustainability by LCA, life cycle costing and social readiness level are assessed in each iteration.
The first LCA iteration of the ViSS assesses all impact categories recommended by the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) guidelines with cradle to gate system boundary with the focus on materials. The study identifies environmental impact hotspots in early stage of the production design and compares these environmental impacts with those of benchmark state-of-the-art plastics, thereby validating the progressive sustainability of the plastics in the market.