An Approach for the Responsible Design of the Packaging Employed in Household Appliances

The packaging is responsible for the production of a great amount of waste in the world. Every product comes with different levels of packaging to protect the product during shipping, store the content in the warehouse, and show the product to customers in retail shops. Therefore, the designer of packaging is more and more involved in a responsible analysis while defining the package configurations for a product. This paper proposes an approach to support the packaging configurations considering life cycle data, analytical structural analysis, and parametric cost modeling. Rules, formulas, and specific standards are formalized into a Knowledge Base. As a case study, the methodological approach has been applied to design the packaging of a household appliance. The results show the possibility to reduce the cost and environmental impacts of packaging by a responsible approach.