Assessment of the Life Cycle of the Food Packaging Industry in Dehek Industrial Area

The increase in the growth rate of the world population and the growth of the demand for the use of food resources has led to the development of food production and packaging. The food packaging industry is one of the most abundant industries, therefore it has significant polluting effects on the environment. Evaluating the harmful effects and identifying the origin of these effects in designing effective measures to reduce the harmful effects of this industry through reducing consumption, improving consumable raw materials and recycling is a way forward. With the aim of knowing the environmental effects of the packaging industry based on the life cycle approach, the environmental consequences of this industry have been applied to the vegetable packaging factory located in Dehak industrial town in the west of Tehran province. The destructive effects of this industry have been quantified based on the global ReCiPe method. The results of estimating the environmental effects of the process of food production and packaging (vegetables) in this study have shown the greatest environmental effect among the three groups of effects of resources, ecosystem and human health on human health. The origin of the greatest environmental load in this research has been shown as the source of damage through the investigation of effect groups, greenhouse vegetables and transportation. The results of the list of pollutant emissions obtained from the evaluation of environmental effects based on the life cycle in the studied factory indicate the emission of 2.2 kg due to fossil fuels and 74.7 grams of other activities in the air, the amount of carbon monoxide emission is 132 grams and also 7.96 grams in Air is also 874 milligrams and 2.83 grams in air per production of a package of vegetables (200 grams).