Enhancing supply chain sustainability through packaging design: Espressoh case study

Over the last years, the topic of sustainability has spread into many aspects of daily life. CO2 emissions and waste are significant societal problems due to their profound impact on global climate change. Recent data underlines that CO2 emissions reached a record high of over 40 billion tons in 2023, of which almost 37 billion tons came from fossil fuels. This represents an increase of 1.1% compared to 2022. Hence, it is fundamental for companies to become more sustainable. Enforcing sustainable supply chain management practices is key to achieve organizational sustainability , due to the significant proportion of ‘Scope 3 emissions’, which include indirect emissions from activities such as procurement, transportation and product use that contribute significantly to a company's total emissions. Aiming to contribute towards sustainable supply chain management, this thesis treats about the importance of assessing the environmental impact of alternative packaging solutions. This assessment led to the definition of a more sustainable packaging design, that considers both its primary role in the supply chain as a tool that contains, preserves and enables transport of a product, but also its environmental impact, in terms of waste generation and CO2 emissions. A case study is presented, in which different repackaging solutions for 3 products of Espressoh cosmetics company were evaluated to identify improved alternatives with respect to two KPIs, namely CO2e emissions and waste generated, through a methodology that includes both qualitative and quantitative analysis and by means of a dedicated software, Bluebird Climate. For 2 out of 3 of the analyzed products, with respect to the AS-IS scenario, the repackaging solutions shows an improvement both on CO2e (-10% and -36%) and waste impact (-80% and -13%), while the third product shows a worsening on CO2e indicator (+4%), due to greater emissions in the supply chain design, which is counterbalanced by an improvement on waste impact (-27%). This study illustrates the efficacy of advanced sustainability assessments in repackaging evaluation, highlighting several tangible possibilities of improvements, but also underscores the need for businesses to carefully evaluate trade-offs between carbon footprint and waste reduction in their approach towards sustainability.