Approaching the re-design of reusable packaging from an environmental perspective: a case study in the railway sector

The production of railway vehicles determines the handling of a large amount of materials which are transferred from suppliers to production site using industrial packaging. The activity here described is part of the MORIMB project, which dealt with the reduction of waste related to railway sector; wood, plastic, cardboard and metal fasteners are the typical materials which are adopted for such packaging. The study is motivated from the evidence that, due to the peculiarities of the transported components, most of the packaging units were different from standardized formats therefore they were frequently used for a single transport and subsequently scrapped. An applicative methodology for the analysis, redesign, and evaluation of environmental and economic impacts was defined, with particular attention to packaging reusability. An adaptation of the DMAIC approach was used to analyze the various components and find solutions reusability and performance improvement, especially in terms of volume efficiency and component protection. Depending on the item to be transported, specific crates have been designed and structurally verified according to existing technical regulation, and their sustainability has been analyzed considering environmental and economic impact during production, transport and storage phase; appropriate scenarios regarding distance travelled and volume occupancy were defined. The case study presented in detail in this work concerns the concept of special crates for the transport of passenger seats – a key component for train production - for which an increase in packaging density and a reduction of transportation costs was achieved. Other case studies were also considered.