sustainability

Designing packaging for sustainability

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Working towards sustainability means package designs that acknowledge and respond to the larger system that the product/package is a part of. A package is integral to that broader system, and part of the big system’s sustainability.

A design that merely does not worsen the system’s sustainability is not a breakthrough. And packaging pursuing only its own greenness is missing the chance to help the whole system.

The leading edge of packaging design often falls short. Designers recognize the centrality of sustainability. But they often work with a narrow perspective vis-a-vis the wider total lifecycle and contextual reality of the package. More often than not, the view is too narrow, focused on a simple substitution; “Do it with a renewable material”. 

Another narrow-view solution is finding a secondary use for the package. That is not enough. In most contexts, there will be too many waste packages for the secondary use opportunity. We cannot turn all PET soda bottles into jackets and pullovers.

How can designers and brands work together to come up with solutions?

Each side knows much the other does not. Joining brand owner experts with designers and innovators can move designs to the next level. This means joint explorations of possibility taking a whole systems view, understanding emerging change, learning together, and finding inspiration from parallel and distant situations. For example, drawing on nature, harking back to old approaches, and discovering things from other cultures all can inform and inspire design thinking.

Are consumers really demanding change? 

Designers and innovators should know what consumers want. But they also often have to lead and educate consumers for the need for change. On the old question of technology push versus market pull, the answer is, both.

More consumers live where there are tightening requirements for sustainability, limiting, recovering, and recycling waste. Brand owners’ choices in packaging may hand the consumer a waste problem. A consumer may not make a personal choice for more sustainable packaging. But if their community requires something, it’s part of their daily lives anyway.

How do you balance sustainable design with a better consumer experience?

Work to make sustainability itself par of the consumer experience and do it well.

What role does education play with consumers when designing for sustainability?

It is central. To be able to educate the consumer about sustainability while also handing them a solution that works in their lives is the pathway to success.

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We bring this kind of thinking to our triennial Future of Packaging program. It’s a multi-sponsor program for packaging executives and others with a strong interest in packaging. For more about the program, visit Future of Packaging: 2030. Our program launches at the beginning of 2019.

#Consumer4sight No 6: Greening it up by choice or by force

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More consumers are greening it up – Soon regulatory and social pressures will meet economic pressures to drive greener lifestyles. People are already subject to local recycling laws and often laws relating to their use of energy and water resources. But higher prices are an even surer way to wake up consumers to the need to conserve, reuse, etc. And shifts in consumer values are, at least for some, in the direction of less material consumption, but you don't have to care about the earth to be greening up your lifestyle. The bottom line for business. Though it’s not a majority of consumers who are acting on green values as they consume, plenty are. And sometimes the green option is the choice when two choices are otherwise about equal. It's also critical to get ahead of evolving regulation on matters of sustainability. Playing catch-up is expensive. At some point a company’s overall profile is a critical brand attribute, and if that profile looks anti-green in the marketplace, that company loses. Sustainable practices will be an integral part of corporate processes and a prominent brand matter. And the sustainability bar is regularly raised, as we gain knowledge and awareness of what matters. Image: photologue_np, via Flickr cc attribution license

Top 10 ways to “futureproof” your packaging

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Here's a special feature we've also published on Leading Futurists LLC's website under our Future of Packaging resources. The advice could easily be interpreted for other products and services that need "futureproofing":

To "future proof" your packaging, i.e. to make sure it's right for the immediate and longer-term future, now to 5 or 10 years from now, you should:

  1. Serve – Recognize that your package performs a service-to a retailer or to a consumer, for example. It's not just an afterthought, it's not just a wrapper, it is a technology that delivers the consumer and your business customer value. Anything that does not serve should be left out. That includes technical flourishes consumers don't notice or care about, built-in hassles such as hard-to-open seals, disposal hassles, and other time-wasters.

  2. Be humble – You should make sure your package is as sustainable as you can affordably make it. Avoid claims that the item is totally green if it is not. The science of sustainability will change, and since we'll continually learn new things, we need to show some eco-humility around our greenness claims.

  3. Tell a story – Your package should tell its story well, from "What is this? And "Who made it?" to "How do I use it for the most success?" and "What can this package do for me?" This is not limited to what is on the package label-since a package can connect the user, via the network, to a world of information-but the graphic and label design are essential to getting it right. And, of course, part of telling the story comes with advertising and other messages in the media.

  4. Be ready for change – Your package should be part of an adaptable system that does not overly depend on a particular sourcing for materials, a particular regulatory regime, or a single, or narrow range of sizing options, etc. This recognizes the risks in our complex world, with changing resource costs and availability, changing regulation, and economic turbulence. And make sure the fit works with the changes retailers and suppliers are making.

  5. Anticipate where the customers are going – Create packages that fit emerging realities in the business marketplace and changing values in the consumer market. For consumers, current examples that will continue to grow in importance include the desire for authenticity, and interest in products that "fit who I am" especially for affluent markets, and fits rising aspirations for success and quality, if focused on the emerging markets. For retailers, changes in how goods are merchandised and sold, including automating inventory and checkout, may drive new needs.

  6. Know the whole system – Consider how the package ultimately will be used, and misused, including improper disposal, littering, composting, burning, reuse in the home, etc. Consider the whole value chain. Consumers have no particular incentive to handle the package they way you want them to. Ultimately, at least some people, and some regulators, will consider the producer responsible, or at least target the package. This is already happening in more places with plastic bags, for example.

  7. Design for disposal and recycling – This means not needlessly combining non-recyclable materials, necessitating the consumer take something apart, and not being difficult to crush or crumple, for example. Consider what you would do, what packaging choices you would make if you, as producer, were going to get all of the packaging back.

  8. Create and use an identity – Your package can connect the product to an online identity. This becomes both powerful and essential, as more people explore what to buy and learn about products they buy online-seeing additional information, consumer reviews and comments, and so on. There are already proven technologies, e.g. using 2D barcodes, which make it possible for anyone to image the barcode on a package with their mobile phone, and get connected to information, contests, or a community of users. Scanbuy [www.scanbuy.com], a DuPont venture, has pioneered in this area.

  9. Enable local production – For many products, the "carbon footprint" and other factors are pressing for greater local production. In fact, a small movement of consumers is trying to consume locally to reduce the impact of their consumption on the environment. If we move to much more carbon footprint measurement, as well as focusing on other environmental aspects of consumption, e.g. energy used in agriculture and shipping food, there will be more pressure to produce goods locally. Whether or not you agree a local strategy makes sense for everything in the market, now is probably not the time to reduce the number of regional plants for producing packaging and products.

  10. Avoid "wrap rage" – Finally, keep a focus on what are you handing the consumer to deal with. They may understand why a paint can has to be hard to open, but should they have to struggle with a bag of chips or pack of batteries? In doing so, it should put the consumer first, not just optimize for the retail and distribution networks.

Thanks for the inspiration to Jeff Hilton, IMG Brandwire, for his post "Are You Guilty of the 10 Most Common Packaging Mistakes?" Link [http://campaign-archive.com/?u=468b6c268eb6609e5542d894a&id=bb6cf1a107]. His thoughts led me to think, what are the kinds of things you can do right or wrong in packaging with the future in mind.

Images: Orphan Jones, Valentina Powers, and Scrapthispack, via Flickr, creative commons license

Foresight illustrated: Making change — Beyond the low-hanging fruit

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For exploring and explaining sustainability, I developed the diagram at the right. It is a forecast. It focuses on change over time, showing rising degrees of transformation starting in the 1990s, and continuing to about 2025.

In the recent past and today, most green efforts involve things we can do easily, such as replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs, selling more gas-electric hybrid cars, and buying carbon offsets for some of our impacts on the planet. Those steps are valid efforts to be greener, but they are Low-Hanging Fruit—that is, they can be done at only slight expense or inconvenience.

In some places, we can say we are Getting Serious, with initiatives to install alternative energy, increasing regulation, and more economic incentives. Cap and trade systems for emissions are a “getting serious” initiative. For some people, Getting Serious also includes changing their lifestyles and consciously trying to reduce their carbon footprints, for example, by eating more locally-produced foods. Voluntarily home-installed solar panels are another example.

A further stage we can anticipate is Big Systems. Mostly aspirational, that is when we will or could substantially replace carbon-based energy, require people to change their lifestyles, radically cap emissions, or force reductions through regulation, and so on.

You can argue with the years spanned by each period. You can also challenge the forecast: Will we really get serious, and ultimately make big systems change? But the years are approximate–I only mean for them to help people think about the changes we are seeing and can expect to see over the next 15 or 20 years. The chart has proven useful to our clients, and I thought it worth sharing here, as well.

You can also look at this chart a different way. Considering only the vertical axis, it differentiates our degrees of willingness to change. Then, the bottom is easiest, the top, hard to imagine. That is why most people expect that the big systems change will happen gradually over the next generation. That is a reasonable expectation, but our situation with energy and other systems may force Big Systems change sooner than we want, and sooner than this chart suggests.

I’ve already found this basic breakdown, Low-Hanging Fruit, Getting Serious, and Big Systems, to be useful in looking at other kinds of change, too. Examples include primary education, where teachers have begun to introduce some experiential moments in their classrooms—e.g. showing video clips, role-playing, but our classrooms are still typically four walls, one adult, and kids in chairs. Big systems change might mean immersive learning using virtual reality, or sending older students out to teach themselves using a city as their classroom.

Another example is corporate change. Companies routinely innovate on the margins, e.g. by introducing a new product at relatively low risk, before truly getting serious and challenging their broader strategies. Low-hanging fruit means brand extensions, or adding related and complementary products, for example. Big systems change means entering a new market, radically changing the mission and product mix of the company, and so on.

If you know you want to get beyond Low-Hanging Fruit, and want or expect to have to make Big Systems change, you need to begin the process of comprehensive change now. In that sense the bars on my chart are deceptive. You can’t wait until 2012 to launch big systems change for sustainability. The work, the discussion, the plans, the research have to start now.

The power of words

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Thinking about roles

We may often get a breakthrough in thinking by changing the words we use. Linguists and psychologists have long debated how much language shapes how we think, but there’s little debate that it does. A powerful way to break down barriers to new thinking is to reconsider what words we use.I’ve learned a lot about this from a futurist colleague of mine, Mimi Stokes Katzenbach, who is also an actor and playwright. Mimi has taught my colleagues and me new things about how the work we do in exploring the future is about people, roles, and stories at least as much as it’s about data, trendlines, and technologies.

Mimi and I had a conversation this week about roles. In a World Futures Society session on the social future, I had supposed that some people might, because of strong and rising concern for environment, recast themselves from “consumer” to “sustainer”. Mimi seized on that word, sustainer, as a great example of how we can break through to new thinking by changing the words we use.

“Sustainer” is a role word. Having it can move our thinking off of the broad, theoretical noun: “sustainability,” to a role or function we can define and play. If you say “I am a sustainer, not a consumer” you redefine your role, and can have a much clearer idea what you need to do.

We live in roles we play; parent, executive, student, friend, cyclist, artist, and so on. Otherwise, we would not know what we are all about. By creating a “role” word for a situation, we can open up our thinking about what we will or should do.

Mimi’s other observation is the power of a verb over a noun. By transforming a noun into a verb, you move to action. So instead of saying that sustainablity is important to us, we might say that we are going to “lower our carbon footprint” which implies and can define specific action.

The lesson here is to move our thinking from the abstract to the specific and to put people into the change we want to understand and make happen. That’s a critical part of the bigger issue we face in foresight, which is to make the future clear, relevant, and real to people. There are no great changes in the world, good or bad, without people driving them.

Image: gemsling, via Flickr, cc license

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