Sustainable packaging: how to design better trash
Muchacha is a company run by craftswomen who create innovative design products using sheep’s wool as the main raw material. Their flagship product is the “Feeltie,” a bar of soap wrapped in felted sheep’s wool that makes regular soap into a “sponge-soap.”
At People that Care, we’ve just finished the latest redesign of the packaging for Feelties. At first glance, it might not seem like a great step forward, but take a look at this little detail in the lower-right-hand corner:
Feelties need to be visible. It’s not only about understanding the product, but for an elementary reason: each Feeltie is unique, and you have to see it to choose it. So, unfortunately, Feelties’ packaging has to be transparent.
In collaboration with our clients, we tried to find alternatives to plastic. In fact, the majority of our work consisted of looking for new materials, prototyping them, and testing them. For example, we made a promising test using PLA — a polymer made out of natural bases such as cornstarch or sugar cane — but it doesn’t withstand heat while being transported in a container.
We even thought about giving up on transparency: what kind of a product can be inside opaque packaging? That’s designing from the outside to the inside. As a result of that research process, we came up with some new product lines that we hope will be real very soon.
The thing is, we didn’t find an alternative for Feelties that was better than plastic[1]. So, given that, we focused on finding a supplier that, at least, would work with recycled plastic (rPET). Spoiler: it wasn’t easy at all. For a company of Muchacha’s size, the possibilities are pretty limited. Finally, we found a supplier that worked with 50% rPET and was working on reaching 70% at that time. Today, they’ve already reached 100%! — although they’re facing challenges around transparency.
What seems like a subtle redesign actually hides a total transformation under that tiny seal. And a research and solution-design process from which we extracted, among other things, this conclusion: packaging is nothing but scheduled trash.
We can’t avoid that the packaging we design ends up in the rubbish bin. But that has led us to another conclusion: maybe it’s time to keep trash in mind while designing and try to make the waste materials of the future more useful. To design useful trash, so to speak.
We need to be clear that trash is useful only if it will end up turning into a substrate. Continuing with the Feelties example, we could design the packaging so each piece of it could be used as a practical object, for example, a soap dish. But, what happens when the Feeltie is used up? You liked it, so you want to get another one. And then, another one. What are you going to do with 8 soap dishes!? In this case, we wouldn’t be designing more useful trash — in fact, quite the opposite: we would be designing trash that would be more complex to manage.
So, if everything that won’t turn into a substrate is irrevocably destined to become trash sooner or later, this is not about designing “more practical” trash. It’s about designing better trash. Trash that will comply with its destiny of trash better.
Because of its many possibilities, we’ve become dependent on plastic. We work with it because it can be rigid or flexible, transparent or opaque, lightweight, affordable, and the best — and the worst — durable. Paul Virilio[2] says: “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” Every technology carries negative consequences that demonstrate how progress affects the world. And it’s clear what we’ve generated in less than 70 years of plastic use.
Every 24 hours, the world generates a problem as huge as the Eiffel Tower. What can we do with 1.3 billion plastic bottles thrown away every day? How can we manage this situation?
The answer is circular design. Our planet is limited, but the amount of trash we generate is unlimited, an amount that increases day after day. Thus, reusing is the key to stopping waste generation: using the same trash again and again. If trash becomes something useful, it won’t be trash anymore.
So, how could we design a packaging that is valuable once it’s thrown away? How can we make the act of recycling it profitable? No unprofitable piece will work in the mechanism that makes things happen these days.
Let’s play following the rules. Let’s make recycled plastic into the business that regular plastic is today. Let’s keep looking for alternatives, exploring new materials, and proposing packaging made out of recycled materials to our clients. If the demand is massive, then the interest in picking up that Eiffel-Tower-sized trash mountain will be massive as well.
For the moment, the costs of using recycled plastic (rPET) are just slightly higher than regular plastic (PET). And at People that Care, we are absolutely convinced that, as designers, we can make decisions that will speed up the arrival of the change this world needs.
[1] If anyone knows alternative solutions that would work for this project, please let us know. We’re constantly looking for new materials to fight plastic.
[2] Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999, p. 89.
