Bridging Nature-Inspired Design Strategies and Consumer Behavior Evidence for Sustainable Circular Packaging: A Concurrent Systemic Framework and Validated Factor Catalog

Packaging waste represents a critical challenge for Sustainable Development Goal 12: the design stage accounts for approximately 80% of a packaging solution’s environmental impact, yet existing circular packaging frameworks evaluate finished solutions rather than guiding the upstream resolution of conflicts among functional performance, sustainability, and consumer interface needs. Nature-inspired design strategies, drawing on 3.8 billion years of biological optimization, offer an inherently circular approach to this challenge but remain methodologically fragmented and disconnected from empirical evidence of consumer behavior. This paper presents the Concurrent Systemic Framework for Sustainable Circular Packaging (CSF-SCP), developed through a six-stage sequential mixed-method process: a systematic literature review (68 publications); in-depth interviews with 11 international experts; a comparative consumer survey (n = 634, Chile/USA/Canada); a commercial packaging field study; and five biomimetic case study analyses. The primary contribution is a validated catalog of 197 nature-inspired design factors across seven operative dimensions, embedded within a concurrent architecture operating simultaneously across Functional, Ergonomic, and Formal subsystems. Consumer evidence reveals that the sustainable packaging attitude–behavior gap is structurally driven by infrastructure accessibility barriers and information deficits, not attitudinal deficiency, directly informing the model’s design requirements. Cross-case applicability assessment across five biomimetic design projects demonstrates dimensional coverage of the CSF-SCP’s seven-dimension structure. The CSF-SCP provides designers, researchers, and educators with a structured, empirically grounded methodology for sustainable circular packaging design.