Características bio psicosociales de los niños.

This study presents an original framework and a significant application of the economic and environmental assessment of the adoption of a RPC packaging system, in lieu of single-use packaging in the food catering supply chain. This framework integrates environmental and economic analyses through performing an LCA and a LCC evaluation. The use of RPCs has been tested and applied to organic produce handled by the DC studied herein. The related operative and capital costs for each node of the supply chain, i.e. vendors, DC and customers, are estimated as well as the CF associated with each packaging life cycle stage.

The LCA demonstrates that the environmental impact associated to the single-use network is mainly caused within the manufacturing phase, due to the great volume of the packages required over the year. However, transportation significantly affects the sustainability of the RPC system. The environmental impact associated with a package’s end-of-life is highly dependent on the disposal policy, requiring the evaluation of different disposal scenarios for completeness. The unpredictability and influence of several parameters such as RPC lifespan, disposal treatments and network distribution can profoundly affect both the environmental and economic analysis, potentially leading to different conclusions.

In summary, the analysis shows that for the case study in question, adoption of an RPC system will lead to a reduced environmental impact in terms of CO2eq emissions. However, the overall economic return is projected to be negative, resulting in a cost increase of about 0.06€ per kilogram of handled food product. The DC is the chain partner that would bear most of the cost of adoption, due to increased management overhead. Farmers would be likely to achieve economic benefits from the adoption of RPC packages.

As discouraging as these results may be, it appears that RPC usage within the FCC may have potential, especially if a system can be implemented such that more favourable values for the key factors prevail. To this end, further research is warranted, and future studies might investigate:

 the evaluation of further packaging solutions and distribution system configuration (e.g. materials, shape and dimensions in primary and secondary packages, facility location issues, vehicle routing, delivery frequency, etc.);

 the adoption of different impact assessment methods for packaging life cycle analysis in order to consider more impact categories (e.g. human health, resource preservation, ecosystem quality);

 the identification of unique economic KPIs through the conversion of environmental impacts into economic drivers (e.g. carbon taxes, environmental externalities, eco-costs) for a coherent single-objective analysis, and finally;

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