Informing Packaging Design Decisions at Toyota Motor Sales Using Life Cycle Assessment

The environmental impacts of packaging manifest themselves at all life-cycle stages. From raw material acquisition, to package manufacture, distribution, recycling and landfilling, packaging systems deplete natural resources, consume energy, produce hazardous waste and emit pollutants. Additionally, each of these stages carries a financial cost. Driven by a desire to minimize financial costs and environmental burdens associated with the packaging of accessory and service parts, Toyota Motor Sales commissioned the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management to build a life-cycle-assessment-based decision support tool to assist the packaging decision-making process. The Environmental Packaging Impact Calculator (EPIC) provides full Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) results that allow packaging designers to compare options in daily decision-making and choose environmentally preferable packaging systems. EPIC’s heavy parameterization allows users to run a virtually limitless number of LCAs and LCCs using a single model. This parameterization also allows results to be calculated from minimal user inputs in a matter of minutes, requiring no pre-existing knowledge of LCA theory or methodology. Finally, EPIC distills LCA results into management actionable metrics, and provides the information early in the design process, when managers can affect downstream impacts by designing smarter packaging systems.