Eco-packaging innovations in paper and cardboard. Preliminary insights from cognitive mapping on international projects

The presence of packaging along the supply chains is pervasive, both as product itself and as product-packaging combination. Due to its pervasiveness along supply chains, packaging carries great importance in achieving sustainable goals and targets, over the entire packaging life cycle – from production, through to distribution and transport, to use and disposal. In particular, the environmentally sustainable impact of packaging has been in the last years an increasingly important issue for businesses. The European Commission places packaging among the “key product value chains” for circularity. Despite its cruciality, the academic literature presents gaps in the study of eco-packaging innovations undertaken by firms to concretely improve environmental sustainability. Then our work contributes to filling the research gaps, with a wide perspective investigating which are the environmentally sustainable practices that firms adopt in innovating packaging – in particular in paper and cardboard materials – and what are the implications of these practices on packaging logistics aspects. To accomplish the objectives of this study, a qualitative content analysis was conducted using cognitive mapping on multiple cases of eco-packaging innovations at international level.