Sustainable cardboard label production

Recently, all industrial sectors have shown significantly increasing attention in reaching the sustainability goals regarding economic, environmental, social, and also technological aspects not only at the regional level but also nationwide and even global scale. Aside from being an economically popular concept, sustainability is strictly related to effective resource use and efficient waste disposal. Thus, it functions as a complementary issue to be considered in various production activities. The sustainable production approach includes reducing or (if possible) eliminating the negative impacts on the human health and environment, reducing the waste generated, increasing the recycling rate, and developing energy and material saving processes. The printing industry is one of the most important industries in reaching sustainable production goals. The need for the printed products, which is the focus of this study, is increasing in parallel with the changing consumer expectations and technological developments. However, from the point of the printing industry view, a solid sustainability consensus is not settled among the practitioners, yet. This study aims to evaluate the sustainability of the cardboard label production considering several combinations of raw materials such as paper, ink, and surface coating additives via appropriate Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods. The most frequently used paper and ink types are considered with three alternatives for each. To indicate the sustainability scores economic, environmental, and social evaluation criteria are selected. By applying the Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT), the sustainability score of each label is calculated to determine the optimum alternative in terms of the production process and also the material used. This evaluation provides detailed information to the producer and also to the consumer about the alternative production routes to use less energy and raw material, and also to decrease the environmental impacts while sustaining the economic feasibility. Besides, alternative solutions are offered to reach sustainability goals by considering the economic and environmental life cycle impacts of these materials. Hence, an increase in awareness about the printing industry and service channels is expected. Moreover, this study is also important in presenting the applicability of sustainability assessments in the printing industry.