Balancing sustainability with beautiful design

Giv­en our love of online retail, it is not sur­pris­ing the UK is one of the world’s largest pro­duc­ers of pack­ag­ing waste, at 2.4 mil­lion tonnes a year. The good news is 70 per cent of this is recy­cled.

While sin­gle-use plas­tics have dom­i­nat­ed head­lines, the industry’s car­bon foot­print results from many fac­tors, notably exces­sive use of card­board and non-eco­nom­i­cal pro­duc­tion process­es. Coro­n­avirus has exac­er­bat­ed the issue, caus­ing our con­sump­tion of dis­pos­ables to sky­rock­et and our recy­cling bins to fill up.

You have to analyse the brand you’re work­ing with and cre­ate a ‘design for life’ propo­si­tion

Brands have this to con­tend with, along­side cre­at­ing orig­i­nal pack­ag­ing designs that stand out in crowd­ed mar­kets. So which com­pa­nies are suc­cess­ful­ly bal­anc­ing impact and sus­tain­abil­i­ty?

Carlsberg: getting rid of single-use plastic

In 2018, glob­al beer brand Carls­berg launched its Snap Pack, which is a way to con­nect packs of four cans using adhe­sive glue, rather than plas­tic rings. Carls­berg test­ed 4,000 types of glue before choos­ing one that burns off in the recy­cling process.

Pete Statham, sus­tain­abil­i­ty man­ag­er at Carls­berg Group and UK, says remov­ing the rings improves user expe­ri­ence and allows the cans to show­case brand­ing.

“I don’t think it has to be a com­pro­mise,” he says. “The plas­tic rings detract from the con­sumer expe­ri­ence. Now, the packs are more sat­is­fy­ing to open as they snap apart and we’ve been able to do inter­est­ing things, like cre­ate a ban­ner effect across the cans.”

Statham says the biggest chal­lenge in rethink­ing the pack­ag­ing design has been lack of space for mes­sag­ing. “The more space you reduce, the hard­er it is to com­mu­ni­cate what you’ve done. We tack­led this through out-of-home mar­ket­ing,” he adds.

Carls­berg is also devel­op­ing its green fibre bot­tle, a recy­clable, biodegrad­able bot­tle made from wood fibre. It still con­tains a plas­tic inner lin­ing, which will be stripped out before launch. It retains Carlsberg’s dis­tinc­tive green, and the logo and slo­gan have been embossed.

“The end vision is for it to be com­plete­ly poly­mer free,” says Statham. “When it’s fin­ished, it will have a super low car­bon foot­print.”

Callaly: biodegradable and graphic design led

Fem­i­nine care brand Callaly hired agency Design Bridge to pro­duce “uplift­ing, desir­able pack­ag­ing”, and steer away from the “bor­ing, sani­tised” look nor­mal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with peri­od prod­ucts, says Jody Elph­ick, head of brand and con­tent at Callaly.

It uses a vibrant palette of yel­low, blue and pink, and its out­er pack­ag­ing is a dis­creet box that fits through a let­ter­box. All the pack­ag­ing is sus­tain­able; the card­board gets recy­cled and the wrap­pers are indus­tri­al­ly com­postable, mean­ing they go in the gen­er­al waste bin and break down nat­u­ral­ly but can also become com­post when heat­ed in indus­tri­al facil­i­ties.

The main chal­lenge was sourc­ing mate­ri­als. “It was tricky find­ing com­postable wrap­pers we could print on,” says Elph­ick. “We end­ed up cut­ting into large rolls of pat­terned mate­r­i­al, so every prod­uct looks slight­ly dif­fer­ent. But this vari­a­tion has actu­al­ly cre­at­ed a selec­tion box of love­ly shapes and colours.”

While brands like Callaly believe they are cre­at­ing solu­tions, waste dis­pos­al is not keep­ing up. “The UK’s recy­cling infra­struc­ture is not set up to deal with com­postable plas­tics. Hav­ing a clear sys­tem that’s easy for con­sumers to under­stand will be imper­a­tive,” says Elph­ick.

Wagamama: reusable, recyclable takeaway packaging

Agency Pearl­fish­er helped Waga­ma­ma improve the recy­cla­bil­i­ty of its take­away pack­ag­ing. Its take­out offer­ing aims to repli­cate the restau­rant expe­ri­ence, pro­vid­ing con­sumers with plas­tic bowls that can be washed and reused up to 100 times at home, says Jen Newell, head of real­i­sa­tion at Pearl­fish­er. Once exhaust­ed, they can be recy­cled. The design team test­ed sev­er­al dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als for food qual­i­ty preser­va­tion and tem­per­a­ture reten­tion.

Orig­i­nal­ly black, the bowls were changed to grey in 2019, mak­ing them eas­i­er to recy­cle, as black plas­tic often goes unde­tect­ed by scan­ners at recy­cling plants. Out­er card­board sleeves have been replaced with small­er inserts that slot into the lid.

Newell says there is no gener­ic approach to pack­ag­ing design, with solu­tions assessed on a brand-by-brand basis and con­stant­ly reviewed. “You have to analyse the brand you’re work­ing with and cre­ate a ‘design for life’ propo­si­tion,” she says. “The infra­struc­ture isn’t there yet for com­posta­bles; only a small num­ber of local author­i­ties recy­cle them and they can take ages to break down. The envi­ron­men­tal impact can be worse than using recy­clable plas­tic.”

Petit-Pli: packaging design with a new purpose

Children’s cloth­ing brand Petit-Pli takes aim at the waste­ful nature of fash­ion. The clothes are made from recy­cled, pleat­ed fab­ric that expands as a child grows, mean­ing one item can last up to four years. Agency NB Stu­dio designed the brand iden­ti­ty and pack­ag­ing, con­tin­u­ing the pleat and fold con­cept through­out.

The clothes are wrapped in tis­sue paper, which are a left­over prod­uct of the fab­ric pleat­ing process, and arrive in a card­board box that can be refold­ed to cre­ate a child’s jet­pack toy.

“The last thing you want is for a sus­tain­able prod­uct to arrive in some­thing that you instant­ly throw away,” says Sam Pittman, Design­er at NB Stu­dio. “Hav­ing a reusable box goes hand-in-hand with the clothes’ longevi­ty.”

One of the biggest chal­lenges was sourc­ing a print­er: “We had to bal­ance an origa­mi design with card­board that was thick and robust enough to go through the post — most designs like this are done on very thin paper. Chang­ing per­cep­tions of what sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing should look like was tricky.”

He tack­led this by pro­to­typ­ing and test­ing. “I approached the print­er with hand­made mock­ups, to show them proof of con­cept. I also post­ed box­es to friends, to check they wouldn’t get destroyed and the clothes would stay intact.”

Loop: a circular system of reusable packaging

Loop, owned by Ter­ra­Cy­cle, pro­vides a sus­tain­able alter­na­tive to sin­gle-use pack­ag­ing. Con­sumers “rent” pack­ag­ing; they buy their favourite brands from the Loop web­site with an addi­tion­al deposit and receive prod­ucts in con­tain­ers made from steel, alu­mini­um, glass and durable plas­tic. Loop then picks up the emp­ty reusables, cleans and redis­trib­utes them back to man­u­fac­tur­ers to refill, while con­sumers get their deposit back.

Tom Sza­ky, founder and chief exec­u­tive at Ter­ra­Cy­cle, says this shift from dis­pos­able to “bor­rowed” could enable more invest­ment and inno­va­tion in pack­ag­ing design. “This allows brands to think about high­er-qual­i­ty mate­ri­als and unique design improve­ments,” he says. “Many of our part­ners, like Coca-Cola and evian, say their food and drink taste bet­ter in glass.”

Häa­gen-Dazs, dis­trib­uted by Loop, has used this the­o­ry to improve its pack­ag­ing, mar­ry­ing “reusabil­i­ty, beau­ty and func­tion­al­i­ty”, says Sza­ky. The new stain­less steel car­ton is more durable, has a stronger seal, enables the ice cream to stay frozen longer and has a con­cave bot­tom, designed for use with a spoon. Japan­ese food brand Aji­nomo­to is inves­ti­gat­ing tem­per­a­ture and humid­i­ty sen­sors to tell con­sumers how fresh their food is.

“This is absurd with dis­pos­able pack­ag­ing, but afford­able when bor­rowed,” says Sza­ky. “If pack­ag­ing shifts in this way, the pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less.”

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