Packaging — what a load of rubbish
By Ian Brown
This article was published on behalf of Ian Brown, who is a Melbourne based graphic design practitioner and educator. You can find out more about him at: ianbrowndesign.com.au
I’ve spent many years working as a packaging designer and teaching packaging design. When I ask new students what packaging means to them. The most popular answers are either something to do with wasteful packaging or I hate it because I can’t get in it. That used to dishearten me because I wanted a positive response. I had hoped they would name some product that came in a beautiful piece of packaging they’d seen or talk about packaging that works seamlessly. However, I found that it wasn’t bad news that they only associated packaging with negative environmental and usability issues. The good news is that the students have an opinion about packaging design and a desire to do something about it.
When asked to bring examples of what they see as bad design, the same kind of packaging appears each semester. It is usually blister packs and other in-accessible packaging, and each semester, the solutions to the issues in each particular type of packaging offer different and interesting solutions. So if second-year graphic design students can create easy-to-open sustainable packaging that still fulfils criteria such as tamper evidence and being as theft-proof as possible, why can’t manufacturers?
The only answer I can think of to that question is will. Manufacturers don’t have the will to create what the planet and their customers need because there is no pressure on them to do so. You could bet your life that we would have it if there were a massive uprising of dissatisfied consumers demanding more sustainable and functional packaging. But we don’t complain. Most consumers don’t want to pay any more for their products. So, we just accept packaging that we can’t open and don’t know won’t be recycled. We don’t know if it will only be downcycled into a lower-grade product because, in actual fact, despite the recycling code on the bottle, it actually contains mixed plastics and won’t be recycled. Consumers believe the recycling codes. However, most don’t know that if a bottle and its cap are different materials this will affect its recyclability.
In my opinion, current recycling codes don’t accurately reflect the recyclability of a packaging material. They only state that the material is recyclable, not whether it will be or not. Only the bottle carries a recycling code if the bottle is HDPE and the cap is PP. Consumers won’t know that in recycling terms, it is actually mixed materials, and its recyclability is affected. Plastics can be separated after use, but will they be? With current recycling codes, I don’t care if it is polyethylene. I want to know if it will be recycled, not if, in theory, it is possible, but not on this bottle because the cap is a different material, and we can’t be bothered separating them, so we’ll just make a park bench out of it. Yes, I know they can be separated post-collection, but it just adds energy consumption to the process. What I want is a more accurate system informing me what will actually happen to my packaging when I’m finished with it. If we have a system where sustainability and usability are measured and a rating given to a piece of packaging, we, the consumer, would have a better idea of how green the products we buy actually are. Why can’t we have a 1–10 rating system? We could see a number five on a pack and know that the pack will be made into another product but will only end up a lower-grade product. Or see a 10 and know that this packaging is 100% sustainable and can come back as the same product. Thinking about it, 10 would the packaging can it be washed out and reused? Remember, avoid, reuse, recycle. What if you had a zero because your packaging was impossible to reuse or recycle and was bound for landfill? High grades would be difficult to achieve, as we would consider things like energy consumption as well. This would encourage manufacturers to use energy more efficiently and to offset emissions or use sustainable energy.
From a functional point of view. We could also have Ikea-style information on the packaging about the required tools. This would be perfect for blister packaging. Imagine seeing ‘Warning: this packaging requires a medium level swordsmanship to get into’ on your shiny new earphones. In the USA alone, around 6,000 people end up in hospital after coming off second in a battle with a piece of packaging.
This should create healthy competition between the manufacturers of the major formats of packaging materials. If you could claim a 10, you have a selling point for your material. As an industry, you could advertise the benefits of your material. As a designer, I would hopefully start to get the choice of material. I rarely get the chance to choose the material for FMCG products. Material, manufacturer and cost per unit is usually known before I put pencil to paper. That doesn’t give me much scope to influence a product’s environmental credentials. For materials that are harder to be sustainable, manufacturers could look at making their product more substantial and reusing their packaging a number of times rather than down cycle after one use. When I was a kid, a milkman would bring milk to our doorstep in glass bottles, take away our empties in an electric vehicle, wash them out and reuse them the next day. It wouldn’t make it 100% sustainable, but certainly increases its environmental credentials. Reusing would also massively reduce the amount of energy needed to produce new packaging and further improve a bottle’s credentials. In my packaging class, we do an exercise where we visualise the life cycle of a plastic bottle and the start of its afterlife. In the infographic, there are an awful lot of diesel trucks moving products around from the manufacturer to the warehouse, to the bottler, to the warehouse, to the supermarket, then from you to the council etc.
We might need government help to change some policies, but it happens in other countries. In Denmark they return plastic bottles to the manufacturer, who clean and reuse them. They even offer cash back to encourage consumers to return the bottles. Across most of the world, there is more supply than demand for used plastic packaging, so it becomes waste rather than recyclable material. Reusing bottles would readdress this balance.
Walking around my local organic store, I’m amazed at how much unsustainable packaging there is. As someone who tries to buy green products, being able to assess the packaging as well as the contents would help me make an informed choice. A zero on the packaging would make it a pariah in a store that sells only green products.
A more accurate coding system would also prevent the greenwash associated with much packaging. I once saw an ad for a washing product that was sold on the fact that the film pack version used 40% less plastic. That may be so, but at least the bottle would be down-cycled. The composite film pack is going straight to the landfill. How is that better for the environment? People will buy that based on the ad, thinking it is better for the planet. Maybe that’s one for the advertising standards board.
So I think we need a progressive system that would encourage materials manufacturers, designers and clients to attain the highest possible grade. It would eliminate companies making false claims about their packaging and reward those who strive to do right by the environment. It could also be done gradually, which would minimise the cost impact that sudden and drastic legislation further down the line would have.
