Packaging shelf-life and potential food waste can influence the environmental impact of food products: the case of red beef

Food packaging has been seen for a long time as an additional environmental cost within a packaged food life cycle. Packaging manufacturing and waste are widely believed to have a significant impact on the overall environmental performance of packaged food items. (Gallucci et al., 2021; Sazdovski et al., 2021). Recent scientific studies, on the other hand, have shown that food packaging has a favorable impact on the overall environmental profile of food packaging systems. This is attributable to the intrinsic qualities of packaging materials and solutions, such as those that might avoid and minimize food waste probability (Verghese et al., 2015; Wikström et al., 2018). For these reasons, packaging effective eco-design is a point of major concern in actual strategies towards environmental sustainability of food-packaging systems (Pauer et al., 2019). A well eco-designed system should balance waste reduction, both in terms of packaging and food, and preservative performance efficiency (Coffigniez et al., 2021; Verghese et al., 2015). Wohner et al. (2019) and Gutierrez et al. (2017) studied the role of shelf-life in reducing potential food waste and, consequently, the overall environmental impacts of the food-packaging system. Numerous food packaging materials, solutions, and systems are currently available on the market and characterized by different material compositions, properties, and characteristics that lead to different expected shelf-lives and eventually different potential food waste reductions (Gogliettino et al., 2020; Sumrin et al., 2021). In this scenario, the search for the best eco-designed solution is hard to achieve.