The challenge wasn’t replacing a plastic — it was understanding which change could deliver a real environmental improvement.
Where this project comes from
This project stems from the commitment of Creacció — the Lluçanès and Osona Enterprise, Innovation and Knowledge Agency — to supporting poultry producers in the region on the path towards more sustainable production. A commitment that doesn’t stop at intentions, but takes shape in reviewing processes and the supply chain to make decisions grounded in real data.
The starting question seemed specific: could the stretch-film plastic used to pack organic chicken be replaced with a lower-impact alternative? But it quickly became clear that answering a simple question properly often means widening its frame. And that’s where the project gained its real significance.
What it changes, and why it matters
One of the most valuable lessons from this project is that wanting to move towards sustainability isn’t enough without the tools to do it with judgement. The producers had already taken a step: they’d replaced the original trays with EPS ones the supplier marketed as “biodegradable” — a decision made in good faith, but one that expert analysis would soon call into question.
Sustainability in food packaging, quite broadly, is a field full of poorly-defined concepts, confusing certifications, and solutions that look right on paper but don’t hold up to scrutiny. Biodegradable doesn’t necessarily mean lower overall environmental impact. And swapping one material for another without understanding the system it operates in rarely leads to real improvement.
The focus shifts, widens, and the project moves from looking for an alternative to one specific material, to analysing the product’s packaging as a complete system across its life cycle. That’s applied ecodesign: not substituting for the sake of substituting, but understanding first in order to decide better. The analysis shifted the focus from the film to the trays, where there was more room for improvement and more alternatives available.
How we do it
The methodology we apply combines a systemic view with design thinking techniques to precisely define the real challenge before exploring solutions. This distinction matters: in many projects, the challenge as initially framed isn’t the challenge that actually needs solving.
In this case, the analysis revealed that concentrating effort on the stretch film — the original question — wasn’t the most efficient option, nor the one with the greatest potential impact. The trays, by contrast, offered a much bigger margin for environmental improvement and a far more developed market of alternatives.
Knowing where to focus is, in itself, a result.
From there, the process combines direct fieldwork with the stakeholders involved, a review of the regulatory framework, and our own solution-weighting tools. For the trays, this meant putting every material available on the food-packaging market on the table and putting them through a structured evaluation: each alternative is scored against a set of sustainability criteria, each weighted differently according to its real potential environmental impact. The result is a comparable numerical score for each option, allowing the alternatives to be assessed against each other on a structured, transparent basis — independent of market trends, perceptions, or labels like “biodegradable” that can end up being confusing. Tools that make it possible to choose not by intuition, but on the basis of data and tested analysis. Economic viability is deliberately brought in at a later stage, to avoid biasing the initial environmental assessment, though it’s reintroduced afterwards to ensure overall viability.
The result is a well-founded selection of packaging alternatives, with suppliers identified and a piloting proposal to validate their performance under real conditions of use. The project ended with alternatives compared, suppliers identified, and a piloting proposal under real conditions.
Limits, lessons, and the future it sets in motion
Sustainability in food packaging doesn’t allow for shortcuts. It’s a field where concepts are easily confused, where regulatory and operational constraints are real, and where decisions made in good faith don’t always lead to the improvements expected. Accepting that complexity — working with rigour and always keeping the economic perspective in view — is what separates genuine progress towards viable circular models from the rest.
At Spora we’ve developed our own weighting system that doesn’t just work as a material-selection tool, but sets out a framework for making informed decisions in contexts where environmental, technical, regulatory and financial variables are constantly interacting.
But the future this project sets in motion goes beyond choosing a more sustainable tray. The systemic view taken throughout the project made it possible to spot improvement opportunities elsewhere in the chain that were initially out of focus — from the possibility of implementing deposit-refund systems (SDDR) for distribution packaging, to identifying regulatory weak points, such as compliance with the packaging declaration. Issues that, without a whole-system view, would have been unlikely to surface.
The result is a solid, tested body of work that guides the decisions that follow — because in ecodesign, understanding the system is just as valuable as finding the solutio. In ecodesign, understanding the whole system matters just as much as choosing the final material.