For a long time the packaging industry has been attacked for using what is thought as large amounts of packaging, choosing materials which are felt to have high impacts on the environment, and for being responsible for littering and overflowing land fills. In a study performed by WRAP, one of the first to study food waste in the UK in 2012, the most frequent responses when consumers were asked about packaging were "uses too much material" and "bad for the environment". The conclusions of these reports highlighted that the degree of the problem has been largely underestimated:at least 30% of food produced in the world is wasted. These figures are similar no matter if you are in the developed or developing world. However, two publications from cross--industry work groups were published recently, and have managed to reset the discussion to take into account the benefits of packaging for sustainability .The first publication, "The Global Protocol on Packaging Sustainability", describes an agreed common approach towards measuring packaging sustainability metrics , so that the industry is not competing based on the definition of a metric, but rather competing based on performance. The second was, "'Packaging in the Sustainability Agenda, A Guide for Corporate Decision Makers", which highlighted the contributions of packaging to the three aspects of sustainability: packaging protects products and prevents waste(environmental aspect); packaging enables efficient business conduct(economic aspect); and packaging provides consumers with the benefits of the products it contains(social aspect). Packaging performs indeed a wide variety of functions throughout the value chain and contributes to reducing food waste by protecting ingredients and products during transportation and by delivering family--sized packages. Food waste could be avoided for single households if they are provided with the choice of pack sizes meeting their consumption patterns and are not forced to buy larger packs that they may not be able to finish before the use--by date. Despite the fact that smaller sized packs use more packaging, the fact that food waste is reduced would nevertheless decrease overall environmental impacts of the packed product. It has long been thought that   _  .
larger quantities of food are wasted in developed countries WRAP is the first authority to study food waste in UK packaging does great harm to the environment packaging offers a powerful means to reduce food waste