…In this engaging examination of greater green possibilities, Hosey–President and CEO of GreenBlue, a nonprofit dedicated to sustainability–makes a rational argument that design and sustainability can not only coexist, they can fuse to create vibrant, livable spaces. Publishers Weekly
Can green be beautiful? Logically, it would seem like green and beauty would go hand-in-hand, yet sustainable design is widely considered unattractive. Sustainable Brands 2012 emcee Lance Hosey, CEO of GreenBlue and author of The Shape of Green, argues that “if sustainable design is intended to act like nature, it should knock your socks off.” Triple Pundit
A contest to encourage environmentally friendly and energy efficient practices at area businesses concluded Thursday as the winners of the Better Business Challenge were announced. The nonprofit GreenBlue won two awards. They received one of two “kilowatt crackdown” awards for reducing energy consumption and another for reducing waste by 40 percent by introducing composting. Charlottesville Tomorrow
Lance Hosey is a former columnist with Architect magazine and the co-author, with Kira Gould, of Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design (Ecotone Publishing, 2007). His latest book, The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design (Island Press, 2012), outlines a clear set of principles for aesthetics and sustainable design, and studies how form and image can enhance conservation, comfort, and community at every scale of design, from products to cities. Building Magazine
This past April we hosted over 260 packaging and sustainability leaders in Toronto for a cutting-edge conversation on wide-ranging packaging sustainability topics at the Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s annual Spring Meeting. All are invited to join us in San Francisco next March for the packaging event of 2013! Registration will open in November, so stay tuned for more details over the coming months.
Categories
Recall Fatigue
Last week, USA Today reported that a rash of product recalls may be creating “fatigue” among consumers, who may be more likely now to overlook or ignore the recalls.
In 2011 alone, 2,363 consumer and food products, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices were recalled by manufacturers. IKEA, for example, took back 169,000 high chairs because the restraint buckle was unreliable. That’s 6.5 recalls per day, an increase of 14 percent from the previous year. The higher incidence is a good thing, say experts, since it results from greater oversight by regulators, better testing procedures, and the use of social media to communicate more quickly and widely.
It’s also a bad thing, of course. Faulty products create risks to health and safety, and, according to a 2009 Rutgers study mentioned by USA Today, only 60% of Americans actually respond to recalls, so the remaining 40%—possibly 125 million people—could be in jeopardy.
Furthermore, recalling products has potentially significant environmental hazards. An increasingly global market requires shipping goods across great distances, expending enormous amounts of fuel, which exacerbates global warming, and putting more pressure on transportation infrastructure. The environmental group Friends of the Earth estimates that just 10 miles of a new four-lane highway creates the equivalent lifetime emissions of nearly 47,000 Hummers. For a recalled product, the environmental impact of its transportation can double, since the good must be shipped back to the manufacturer.
In addition, the resources used to make the faulty products are wasted, since the products didn’t fulfill their intended uses. Some products, such as food, must be thrown out, and others go into storage indefinitely. In Indianapolis, Stericycle, the largest U.S. firm handing recalls, has five warehouses totaling 700,000 square feet—about 12 football fields—where it collects and stores everything from household appliances to sporting equipment to jewelry. “Recalled products come here to die,” Stericycle’s Mike Rozembajgier told USA Today. “If they come to Indianapolis they’re not getting back into the supply chain.”
The drive to make products less expensive increases the likelihood of mistakes that can harm consumers and the environment alike. Factoring in the true costs to public health and the environment, the savings of quicker, cheaper production could be nullified. The best solution is simply to make better products.
Last month I shared with our blog readers the winning idea for the Kids’ Science Challenge Zero Waste challenge: Joshua Yi’s innovative concept for toy packaging that becomes part of the fun. Joshua recently traveled to New York City to make his package design come to life with the help of SPC members Steve Mahler of Caraustar Industries Inc. and Laura Tufariello of Design and Source Productions. Joshua shared some insights from his experience building his package prototype in a recent blog post:
“Joshua, it is going to be a great, great day today,” I told myself on the way to NYC by train. Can you imagine working with scientists, making your ideas come to life, and having a great city tour in the Big Apple? That’s what I am going to do today and tomorrow!!!!
Away my dad and I went to our first stop at Caraustar at the Old Brooklyn Navy Yard…At Caraustar, Mr. Mahler and I designed my box design on the computer. It was amazing how you could “draw” on the computer! We revised and edited some glitches in the schematics. It was strange how the box would look when it was layout flat. After we drew the boxes we programmed the huge plotter to cutout the boxes. The plotter was a 2-yard by 1-yard square machine that looked like a small printer connected to 2 computers. There were 3 cylinders with tools that could cut, crease, and fold. There was also a small targeting laser. The plotter can do its job with great precision — it made everything exactly the right dimensions. It was also very efficient — it took less than five minutes to make my box, as complicated as it might be. It turned a regular 26” paper into a sophisticated box.
…After the plotter was done cutting, together we drove to Design and Source…I showed Mr. Metzner, Mrs. Sanders, Mrs. Tufariello, Mr. Mahler, and my dad my designs I made at Caraustar industries. Then we listed all the things either I needed or wanted to be on the box cover. Some of the things we listed were advertisements, race decals, and warnings (e.g. XX). Then we started to design the graphics. For the drawings I drew two of my monster trucks racing each other with an advertisement in the middle saying “This box can turn into a racetrack!” Then I put warnings in the corners and a checkerboard border against a neon green background. It was cool how the cars looked like they were racing each other and how everything stood out from the bright green.
You can read more from Joshua on his exciting trip to New York on the Kids’ Science Challenge blog.
Anyone who tries to do the right thing and recycle has experienced it: the utter confusion that certain products induce with their packaging. But a new label tries to address the vague and oftentimes misleading recycling messages. Los Angeles Times
GreenBlue CEO Makes Case for Aesthetics in Sustainable Design with New Book
People often equate environmentally friendly cars, buildings, and products with being unsightly. Yet not only can sustainable design be beautiful, argues author Lance Hosey, its beauty can make it more sustainable.
“Conventional wisdom portrays green as not just occasionally but inevitably unattractive, as if beauty and sustainability were incompatible,” Hosey writes in his new book, The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology and Design (Island Press), out this month. Yet, “long-term value is impossible without sensory appeal, because if design doesn’t inspire, it’s destined to be discarded.”
In his book, Hosey outlines a manifesto for both designers and consumers interested in bridging appearances and doing right by the planet. He identifies three core principles of sustainable design–conservation, attraction and connection–to show how good design and green design can become one and the same. Hosey cites such examples as:
- Cars so aerodynamic they get 80 miles a gallon without new technology;
- Comfortable chairs built from a single piece of plywood;
- Packaging that uses less material while keeping food fresher;
- Electronics so appealing you can’t throw them away; and
- Buildings that adapt to their locations to use a fraction of typical energy needs.
The first book to outline principles for the aesthetics of sustainable design, The Shape of Green does not ask that consumers sacrifice comfort. Rather, it shows how designers can create products that are aesthetically pleasing, environmentally friendly, and enjoyable for years to come. “Can we be as smart about how things look as we are about how they work?” asks Hosey.
Hosey, a nationally recognized architect, designer, and author, is President & CEO of GreenBlue, a nonprofit working to make products more sustainable. Hosey has more than two decades of experience in sustainable design and strategy, and he has worked with some of the world’s leading companies to advance sustainable innovation. Previously he was Director with the renowned pioneer of sustainable design William McDonough + Partners.
“It’s time someone revealed that the oppositions of sustainability vs. style, ethics vs. aesthetics, are false starts. In this book, Lance Hosey helps retire that opposition and shows us what makes beauty and sustainability one and the same.”
—Susan Szenasy, Editor-in-Chief, Metropolis Magazine
Lance Hosey is “an inspirational guide to a future we can’t wait to embrace.”
—John Elkington, co-founder of SustainAbility and founding partner of Volans
This article by GreenBlue Senior Manager Minal Mistry appeared in this month’s issue of Packaging Digest, which features a monthly column by GreenBlue staff on packaging sustainability. Read the original article.
We often hear sustainability described as an iterative process, or a stepped journey to “mount sustainability” as industrialist and environmentalist Ray Anderson put it. At the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) spring meeting in Toronto, I reflected on the body of work the SPC has produced over its eight-year journey on the path towards sustainable packaging.
This catalog includes collaborative learning and teaching; research on materials production, end-of-life treatments, use of recycled content, measurements and reporting; and a package design assessment tool. Looking back shows us common threads that connect all these topics and demonstrates how change can be achieved through collaborative dialogue.
Since the creation of the SPC in 2004, coalition members have walked together on a series of paths towards sustainability. Everyone was given a map of the terrain in the form of the SPC’s Definition of Sustainable Packaging. The collective learning has allowed the group to take different paths yet stay together and exchange knowledge and best practices, which occurs primarily when members meet twice a year at the annual meetings.
The SPC’s collective learning also has been made accessible through the “Essentials of Sustainable Packaging” course, which provides a comprehensive overview of sustainability issues in packaging and has been on the road in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Hong Kong and, soon, China.
Over the past eight years, four main themes have emerged that have manifest themselves into resources developed by the SPC:
1. The sustainability road trip began with the notion of design as a leverage point for putting sustainability objectives into operation. This emphasis on design is still evident and has ushered in numerous changes in packaging, from initial lightweighting to completely rethinking material choices and product delivery. This design emphasis expresses itself through various SPC reports, including the “Design Guidelines for Sustainable Packaging” and COMPASS (Comparative Packaging Assessment), a life-cycle assessment (LCA) tool that provides design guidance along environmental parameters.
2. While design represents one path to sustainability, equally important are the measurement and data pathways that are key to design assessment, such as life-cycle data, indicators and metrics relevant to packaging materials and processes. The exploration of indicators and metrics resulted in the SPC’s release of the Sustainable Packaging Indicators and Metrics Framework. This report, in turn, served as the basis for a harmonized set of indicators known as the Global Protocol on Packaging Sustainability (GPPS 2.0).
3. As folks learned new ways to integrate sustainability measures into their packaging operations, there came a dramatic shift in thinking. Increasingly, the conversation has shifted from sustainability in packaging to broader sustainability at the corporate level. As a result of increased packaging knowledge, many companies have jump-started corporate-level goals on energy, materials and end-of-life and recovery.
4. End of life and recovery represents new frontiers for packaging, and the SPC has led the way in this area. Numerous SPC reports have focused on materials and materials flow. Many of these reports are freely available, particularly those that were part of the Closing the Loop project funded by the State of California. As emphasis on material recovery increases, and to help consumers do their part, the SPC soon will launch www.how2recycle.info to support the new on-package label for recovery.
