Intertek, a leading provider of quality and safety services to a wide range of industries around the world, collaborated through its Brussels-based European center of expertise for environmental solutions with Fost Plus, a Belgian non-profit organization responsible for the sorting, collecting and recycling of household packaging, to develop and implement pack4ecodesign, a life cycle analysis (LCA) tool to evaluate the environmental performance of and optimize packaging.

Fost Plus approached Intertek to create pack4ecodesign as a packaging optimization solution for packaging industry professionals, as well as to address packaging end-of-life management. Intertek and Fost Plus collaborated to create this reliable solution to evaluate the environmental performance of packaging in a simplified way, meeting the expectations of industry professionals by integrating the LCA process.

Pack4ecodesign is a user-friendly tool that enables experts, non-experts, directors, production managers and packaging designers to better understand the full life cycle of packaging products. Offering guidelines for eco-design, the tool provides users with the environmental impacts of their packaging designs, suggests various methods for improvement and instantly calculates the environmental gain from proposed changes. This solution is already available with a Belgian scenario on www.pack4ecodesign.org.

According to Bernard De Caevel (Intertek) and Sylvie Meekers (Fost Plus), the pack4ecodesign solution provides the ability to study more than 40 kinds of packaging and sub-packaging that can contain a wide variety of materials including: polyethylene terephthalate (PET), paper, cardboard, glass or multilayer packaging. Users can choose design aspects they wish to improve to reduce the environmental impacts of their packaging. This LCA solution provides users with specific tips to improve design aspects, which may include reduction of packaging weight, transportation optimization or methods to improve recyclability at the end-of-life. The environmental impacts included in the model are energy consumption, contribution to the greenhouse gas effect and water consumption.

Intertek has been supporting companies for several years in eco-design and LCA approaches, by providing clients with simplified solutions to calculate the environmental impacts of their products, packaging and organization. Dedicated solutions by industry are also available that integrate more parameters and functionalities in the analysis.

About Intertek

Intertek (www.intertek.com) is a leading provider of quality and safety solutions serving a wide range of industries around the world. From auditing and inspection, to testing, quality assurance and certification, Intertek people are dedicated to adding value to customers' products and processes, supporting their success in the global marketplace. Intertek has the expertise, resources and global reach to support its customers through its network of more than 1,000 laboratories and offices and over 30,000 people in more than 100 countries around the world.

About Fost Plus:

Fost Plus is a private, accredited organization responsible for the providing of information and households' packaging waste take back services. Fost plus takes all necessary measures to promote, coordinate and finance the sorting, collection and recycling to reach public authorities targets of recycling (80%) and recovery (80%) of packaging waste.

Fost Plus also raises awareness with its members to optimize product and packaging to lower the amount of unnecessary packaging used.

General website: www.fostplus.be

Websites dedicated to packaging waste prevention, recyclability or eco-design: www.preventpack.be, www.pack4recycling.be, www.pack4ecodesign.org

Intertek
Laurent Lebarq
Telephone: +32 (0) 2 420.28.23
laurent.lebarq@intertek.com
or
Bernard De Caevel
Telephone: +32 (0) 2 420.28.23
bernard.decaevel@intertek.com