A Sustainable Packaging Logistics Framework for Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Food Supply Chains

Packaging is a fundamental component of food supply chains, enabling product protection, handling, and distribution from production to final consumption. In this context, the selection of secondary and tertiary packaging dimensions plays a critical role in improving logistics efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with material use and transportation. This study proposes a sustainable packaging logistics (SPL) framework that systematically evaluates and optimizes packaging carton dimensions to enhance pallet utilization, transport efficiency, and packaging material efficiency. The framework is applied to a real-world case study from a meat processing company, demonstrating how alternative carton dimension configurations, while maintaining a constant product weight and functional equivalence, can significantly influence pallet-loading efficiency, transported payload, and associated CO₂-equivalent emissions. Rather than constituting a full life cycle assessment (LCA), the proposed approach adopts LCA-informed indicators to quantify material and transport related emission implications of packaging design choices. By integrating packaging design, palletization constraints, and logistics performance, the SPL framework provides a structured analytical basis for identifying packaging configurations that reduce material intensity and transport-related emissions. The results highlight the importance of packaging dimension optimization as a practical and scalable strategy for emission reduction in food supply chains. The proposed framework is intended to support decision-making in packaging design and to serve as a robust preparatory tool for future, more comprehensive LCA studies.