For a food product, packaging accounts for a minority of the total impact, with the contents sometimes dominating by a wide margin. That balance can shift in either direction: inadequate packaging lets the product deteriorate, and the lost product carries its entire production impact with it. ADEME therefore stresses that, for some products, a little more packaging may be the option with the lowest impact. Reducing packaging weight by 15% while breakage rises from 0.5% to 2% is enough to cancel out the gain once the product's impact exceeds roughly ten times that of its packaging. The ranking of impact sources varies with the product, and an initial assessment establishes it.
Read the source article: Packaging eco-design: costs and lead times for PPWR 2030