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About us

Vision

Packaging Logistics is devoted to the advancement of knowledge, to motivate and co-create holistic solutions for sustainable development.

About Packaging Logistics

Packaging Logistics research and education integrate several theoretical fields of knowledge, to accomplish effective and sustainable utilisation of resources throughout supply chains.

Packaging logistics covers the design of a product and its packaging, throughout the whole supply chain from raw product, via various actors, to the end user, and on to recycling and recovery.

As both packaging and logistics form important parts of packaging logistics thinking, safe and sustainable delivery can be offered to customers and users at a low cost in an efficient way. Packaging logistics is gaining industrial and societal interest as it contributes to new insights due its unique emphasis of a holistic systems approach.

A national and international inventory of academic research directed specifically towards packaging logistics reveals only one source, namely Packaging Logistics at Lund University, Faculty of Engineering.

History

In the 1980s, Lund University realised that there was a need to invest in education and research in the area of packaging. This was because the packaging industry was important in Sweden, not least in the southern part of the country. An adjunct professorship was established (paid by the University) and the position was held by Yngve Dagel, former head of Packforsk (Swedish Packaging Research Institute) for six years in the 1980s.

With the aim of further strengthening the subject, the University contacted Bo Rydin, managing director of SCA at the end of the 1980s. The University wanted the company’s research director at SCA Packaging, Gunilla Jönson, to become the next adjunct professor. Bo Rydin and SCA were positive to this opportunity to develop cooperation between business and academia. They made it possible for Gunilla Jönson to spend one day a week in Lund instructing students in packaging logistics, carrying out research and supervising postgraduate students.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the recently established Bo Rydin Foundation decided to donate 10 MSEK to Lund University for a professorship in transport-packaging technology. Gunilla Jönson applied for and got the job in 1994. At about the same time, packaging logistics became an educational research subject with its own curriculum and in the following years, several doctoral students enrolled, both those with positions at the university and those who were supported by industry. Gunilla Jönson was their primary supervisor.

At the end of the 1990s, discussions ensued with the Division of Machine Design of the need to include packaging in research on product development. When the new Department of Design Sciences started to take shape in 1999, of which Machine Design was to be a part, Gunilla Jönson broadened the question to include development of new ideas on the integration of packaging, products and logistics, which was welcomed positively. Packaging Logistics became a part of the new department and moved, along with the other divisions, to the Ingvar Kamprad Design Center in 2002.

Page Manager: info@design.lth.se | 2022-01-24

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Affiliation

Packaging Logistics is a division at the Department of Design Sciences.

Address and directions

Packaging Logistics
Design Sciences
Box 118, 221 00 Lund, Sweden

Visitors: 
IKDC, Sölvegatan 26, Lund, Sweden

Directions to IKDC and Design Sciences (external page)

Contact

Daniel Hellström

Associate Professor, Head of division
daniel.hellstrom@plog.lth.se  

Erik Andersson

PhD, Research Coordinator
erik.andersson@design.lth.se 

Jessika Sellergren

Communications Manager
jessika.sellergren@design.lth.se