With our non-renewable resources getting limited increasingly and environment becoming deteriorated gradually, there is a growing need to design and manufacture product-associated packaging in a more sustainable way, e.g. the Circular Economy approach with a clear and strong intention to support a new generation of businesses towards a more efficient and sustainable industrial ecosystem. However, the current practice for packaging industry is still primarily linear. Regulators and advisory parties have urged to substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse. World leading companies in consumer goods industry e.g. Unilever and Danone have thus set stretching targets for 2025 to realise every piece of packaging to be reusable, recyclable or compostable. ‘Circular’ starts from product design through to consumer use, reuse and/or recycled which requires to fundamentally rethink the way when design packaging, by taking into consideration the systems in which the products flow. The key to achieve this is to reinvent a new eco-design mind-set and principles for packaging towards the concept of circular economy, especially considering the symbiotic relationship between design and material selection.

Collaborated with the University of Sheffield (Co-I) and University of Cambridge, this research project therefore aims to investigate the state-of-the-art packaging design for a circular economy, focusing on plastics and exploring the current practice in designing packaging that uses less plastics and environmentally sustainable plastics. The research outcome would be expected to drive the development of packaging design knowledge and accelerate the transition from a linear to a circular economy of packaging, as well as enable appropriate design and use of plastics to achieve a more positive environmental impact, towards creating a packaging system that is truly circular by design.