One of the “it” beverages at the 79th Academy Awards, and a sponsor for the Hollywood Premiere of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” Biota’s PLA-bottled water hit the market many years ago as the earth-friendly, compostable answer to PET bottles. The core selling point: They gave the consumer the impression the package would just “go away.” [...]

Perhaps you’ve heard (or maybe you haven’t) that Frito-Lay (part of Pepsico) has introduced a quieter version of their compostable SunChips bag. It’s now comparable, sound-wise, in user aural experience to any chip bag one might find on the shelf. However, the bag is still breaking ground as a serious effort at creating packaging that [...]

If you haven’t already, pop on by the Designers Accord Sustainability in 7 video series, delivering a daily dose of design inspiration by today’s leading sustainability experts. In my contribution to the series, “7 Handy Tips to Help You Change the World (Or at Least Your Bit of It),” in Tip #1 I ask the viewer to “Be [...]

Over a decade ago, Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson reported in their study of consumer attitudes that approximately a quarter of U.S. adults fit into a segment they tagged “ Cultural Creatives ” — a vocal group who use sustainability ethics to guide their shopping as well as voting behavior. More recently, a 2004 study by Price [...]

A few years ago, Spunk Design Machine was trying to help their client, the Seward Co-op in Minneapolis, to find a colorful window graphic that didn’t use traditional vinyl but still communicated the vibrant “fresh” look the co-op wanted. The dominant solution for direct application was, and still is, vinyl graphics. Not only is the vinyl not [...]

In a July 16, 2010 blog post entitled “ Hiring for Sustainability ,” on The Chronicle of Higher Education ’s website, writer David Evans voices the problem many schools and firms are having now: How do you hire the right eco-professionals? It would be easy to hire in one of the “traditional” sustainability-related areas (say, ecology or environmental ethics), but what [...]

As a market-based economy, over the past few years we’ve been marking many historic moments here in America. From the biggest debt load in the history of “ever” and accompanying corporate bailouts to keep the economy from collapsing, to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico underscoring the impact of our addiction to oil on top [...]

The old way of popping out this week’s brilliant idea, and then churning the resulting product out by the gazillion regardless of the consequences, still works great. Or does it? The store shelves are bulging with “brilliance,” each SKU fighting with its neighbor to be the lucky one to go home with the consumer. With all that [...]

Which side of the bottom line are you standing on? We’ve all heard manufacturers complain, “We’d like to be ‘eco,’ but are afraid our customers will reject the change,” or “Eco doesn’t sell.” That might have been so once, but not anymore. As sociologist Paul Ray reported in his study of consumer attitudes, approximately a quarter [...]

“Sustainability? That’s that greeny thing, right?” a packaging engineer of 20-plus years remarked to me in a meeting. “Green?” I replied. “If you mean green like money, yeah. If you mean green like all squishy, kumbaya — hardly. It’s about creating a solution that will let the customer feel good about their product choices — reinforcing brand [...]