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 really could one day “go away.”

When the first SunChips bags hit the market the ruckus about the “noise” the bag made drowned out the fact that Frito-Lay hadn’t created just another holder for chips, but a complete game-changer.

Chips and other snacks and beverages move across store shelves with lightening speed. There’s barely time to get comfortable before they’re off and into a customer’s hands. Super short product turnover cycles offer the opportunity for manufacturers to try new things and see what sticks and what flops, in a time frame hard-goods product makers can only catch as blur.

One of the main things one can take away from this recent example is that a willingness to do new things, and be okay with failing every once in a while, is well worth the effort, not just for the company positioning as a category leader, but in the bigger scheme of things as well. Being willing to investigate disruptive technologies and ideas is what has gotten us to where we are now, for both the good and the bad.

For example, plastic bottles have become the norm, affording breakage resistance and fuel efficiencies not possible with glass. This was a hugely disruptive technology, as glass had been the beverage transport of choice for hundreds of years. On the plus side, we’ve saved lots of fuel-oil by moving plastic rather than glass over the years. On the negative side, we’re stuck with oceans of bottles left unrecovered.

With only about 27% of the PET, and about 29% of the HDPE bottles finding their way back into the materials stream,[i] what will be the disruptive technology that will change what we use as their replacement? Or, rather than just getting hung up on a linear materials replacement approach, why not implement a system that makes recycling more attractive?

Recyclebank is now teaming-up with SC Johnson to help reduce the consumer products giant’s environmental footprint. Using SC Johnson’s Ziploc-brand bags as the vehicle for this project, the company plans to sponsor expansion of Recyclebank’s rewards-for-recycling platform into new U.S. communities equivalent to the amount of other waste the company generates — including glass, metals, paper and plastic — that would otherwise be destined for landfills. Without a cohesive resource recovery scheme that is uniform all over the U.S (some communities do no recycling at all), this scheme is a positive disruption of otherwise lack-luster resource recovery patterns.

If this plan is successful, getting people used to the idea of having their refuse be worth something could completely change the way people view their castoffs. It could help push for waste recovery reform in communities that otherwise had none, or were routinely performing poorly.

Chief sustainability officer of Recyclebank, Ian Yolles, notes in a news release: “We know there is not always a practical solution for brands to reduce their landfill contribution and environmental impact, and it is through partnerships like this that we are able to expand our recycling programs and work towards a goal of realizing a world where nothing is wasted.”

So what does all this mean? Options, options, options! Rather than simply trudge along the same depressing track of consuming resources in an ever-downward spiral of worsening impact, we suddenly see possibilities. What if packaging COULD “go away”? Or, maybe we don’t want it to. Maybe we want it to stick around in some form, over and over and over. And cooler yet, what if these materials just came back on their own (with enthusiastic help from the consumer), all ready for their next life?

Today, more than at any point in history, options are exploding exponentially. All you have to do is be willing to be a bit disruptive now and again. Being “bad,” in the service of us all, has never been so good.

[i]  EPA, Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2008

http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-02-24/business/28630522_1_frito-lay-big-marketing-effort-bag

Voyage of the Plastiki:
http://www.theplastiki.com/

SC Johnson working with Recyclebank:

http://plasticsnews.com/headlines2.html?id=21037&channel=260

“Disruption is Good” originally appeared ©April 2011 packagedesignmag.com.

Wendy Jedlicka, CPP— Jedlicka Design Ltd., o2 International Network for Sustainable Design, Minneapolis College of Art and Design’s groundbreaking Sustainable Design Certificate Program. Books: Packaging Sustainability and Sustainable Graphic Design.