Sustainable Packaging Innovation via GAN-Enabled Inverse Design

Abstract

The urgent need for sustainable packaging solutions has intensified research efforts toward computational design methodologies that can accelerate the development of environmentally responsible materials and structures. This paper presents a novel framework for sustainable packaging innovation through the integration of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with inverse design principles, enabling the automated generation of packaging solutions that meet stringent environmental performance criteria while maintaining functional requirements. Our approach leverages machine learning methodologies to explore vast design spaces efficiently, moving beyond traditional structure-property optimization approaches to implement intelligent search strategies that can identify optimal material compositions and structural configurations. Through the implementation of a comprehensive machine learning-enabled inverse design system, we demonstrate the capability to generate packaging designs that achieve up to 35% material reduction compared to conventional approaches while maintaining equivalent protective performance. The methodology incorporates sustainability metrics directly into the optimization process, ensuring that environmental considerations guide the search for promising design regions rather than being applied as post-hoc constraints. Validation studies using Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) demonstrate that machine learning approaches exhibit superior performance consistency across different training data sizes, with GPR showing particularly robust performance for sustainable packaging design applications. The findings establish machine learning-enabled inverse design as a transformative approach for sustainable packaging innovation, offering unprecedented capabilities for systematic exploration of environmentally optimized design solutions that can significantly accelerate the transition toward circular packaging economies.