Food packaging: identifying the socio-economic drivers and reduction opportunities through system dynamics modelling

Chakori et al. Globalization and Health (2026) 22:27 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-026-01191-2 Globalization and Health Open Access RESEARCH Food packaging: identifying the socioeconomic drivers and reduction opportunities through system dynamics modelling Sabrina Chakori1,2*, Ammar Abdul Aziz1 and Russell Richards3 Abstract Background Food packaging continues to create negative socio-ecological impacts. Current initiatives, including recycling and the use of sustainable packaging materials, address important aspects of sustainability, however, a more comprehensive approach is needed to tackle the underlying challenges of a growth-driven economy that significantly impacts food systems. There is currently limited research in identifying systemic policy changes aimed at reducing food packaging. Methods Using a system dynamics approach, this study models the determinants that shape contemporary food systems and contribute to the increase in packaged food production and consumption. The resulting stock and flow model developed helps to understand and evaluate how globalisation, urbanisation and households dynamics are driving growth in packaged food. Results Findings from this study highlight (1) the need to shift the conversation from food packaging to packaged food, the actual product traded; (2) that growth-driven globalisation is contributing to the dependence on packaging; and (3) policies, such as the introduction of a basic income, could foster a reorganisation of social reproduction to incentivise the consumption of fresh and unpackaged food. Conclusion This paper concludes with an invitation to explore degrowth policy proposals that could reduce dependence on packaged food and highlights the need for systemic policy changes to transform food systems. The findings of this study can be extrapolated to other countries exhibiting growth in production and consumption of packaged food. In this study, environmental and public health lenses converge. Keywords Packaging, Food systems, System dynamics, Degrowth, Sustainability *Correspondence: Sabrina Chakori 1 School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia 2 Leeder Centre for Health Policy, Economics and Data, Sydney School of Public Health, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia 3 School of Business, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia © The Author(s) 2026. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creati vecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Chakori et al. Globalization and Health (2026) 22:27 Introduction Since the 1960s, food systems have become increasingly dependent on packaged food [1]. Increased use of fossil fuels for petroleum-based packaging materials [2], air, water and land pollution are just some of the environmental impacts caused by food packaging production and consumption [3–5]. The environmental consequences of this growing reliance on packaging have been extensively researched [1, 6–9]. Despite efforts to mitigate the environmental impacts of food packaging [10], such as recycling schemes and the introduction of disposable “sustainable” packaging materials [11], broader systemic policy actions targeting the entire food system have remained largely neglected. The importance of comprehensive, systems-based approaches to effectively catalyse the necessary transformation in food systems has been emphasised in various studies [12–17]. This study adopts a systems approach as the foundational framework for the investigation of the socio-economic drivers of packaged food. Sterman’s [18] systems modelling framework was adopted to develop, test, and apply a simulation model using a stock and flow model (SFM). These types of simulation models are pivotal for understanding and interpreting the dynamics associated with systemic socio-environmental system changes [19, 20]. Thus, adopting a system-based approach, this study investigates the following research question: What are the systemic socio-economic drivers of food packaging? This systems-based approach aids in examining the determinants and dynamics driving the increasing global dependence on packaging. The novelty of this study is to explore food packaging challenges beyond the materiality of packaging and beyond supply chain analysis. This study offers a cross-scale analysis of the drivers of packaging use, pointing out policy frameworks influencing food systems. Moreover, in this study, environmental and public health lenses converge. This research started by focusing on the use and reduction of food packaging, however, the reiteration in the systems modelling process shifted the attention to packaged food. Packaged food is the ultimate product exchanged in the market; food packaging is a side effect of the purchase of (packaged) food. Packaging impacts the environment in several ways (e.g. as a pollutant), while the processed or ultraprocessed food contained within the packaging can lead to health issues (e.g. cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases) [21, 22]. Thus, this study links spheres that often remain disjointed in the literature. Food packaging studies, which primarily focus on material and technological innovation, remain disconnected from public health and nutritional research areas that analyse the health effects of consuming processed (packaged) food products. The geographical focus of the SFM in this paper is the United States (US), selected because it is a leading Page 2 of 16 contributor to global food packaging and because of the availability of data needed to parameterise and calibrate the SFM. However, this process-driven modelling methodology can be applied to analyse other countries or scaled up to model at a global level. This applicability (and scalability) is important given that packaged food production and consumption have increased at comparable rates across many other high-income countries [1, 23], and that the globalised food system is dominated by Western-style processed foods, which ha (...truncated)