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Making the change happen Metsä Board’s third Better With Less Design Challenge highlights zero waste. Designers all over the world are participating in finding innovative and smarter packaging solutions supporting the circular economy.
BETTER WITH LESS Design Challenge 2022
betterwithless.org
Silja Eisto, interviews: Joseph Bayne & Marc Stevenson photos: Hasan & Partners
S tarting point: everything flows . The focus of this year’s Better With Less Design Challenge is creating easily recyclable and resource-efficient packaging solutions that generate less waste. “The Better with Less Design Chall- enge invites changemakers, packaging designers, and packaging developers to create packaging solutions that support the circular economy with zero waste mental- ity,” says Ilkka Harju , Packaging Services Director, EMEA & APAC, at Metsä Board. The need to create innovative packaging has never been this great before. Jury members share their thoughts about what the future holds. Brands of the future in the making “As David Attenborough declared, ‘What we do in the next 20 years will deter- mine the future for all life on Earth’. And arguably that’s too long to wait. I be- lieve we are at a huge crunch point,” says Ben Parker , Co-Founder of the creative design studio Made Thought. Businesses play a clear role in shaping both our consumption habits and the future.
“Right now, we’ve got 8 billion people on the planet, and we’re selling to them in one way,” Parker notes. “Humankind takes nearly two plan- ets’ worth of resources every single year and give back 6 billion tons of waste. This fundamental needs to change,” says Sian Sutherland , Co-Founder of A Plastic Planet, an organization tackling the plastic crisis. “There is an opportunity for business to be the tool of positive change. It’s really the only at scale, at speed tool we have – so let’s work with it.” Consumers are also actively changing their approach to purchasing. “Eighty-three percent of younger con- sumers are willing to pay more for sustain- able brands. It’s not a theoretical thing that will happen in the future. It is happening now,” says Andrew Gibbs , Founder and Editor in Chief of the Dieline. More design, more problem solving The key is to think and act big. “The change has to be about billions of units of change, or monumental shifts in consumer behav-
ior. If not, it’s greenwashing or marketing hype because it’s not really making a differ- ence,” says Parker. “We have the money, the technology, and the manpower to do everything to slow down the carbon emissions and to become less reliant on fossil fuels,” Sutherland adds. She underlines that the companies now actively reinventing themselves to reflect these societal changes will be the brands of the future. The change starts as an active decision, finds Brandi Parker , Head of Sustainabil- ity of the brand design agency Pearlfisher: “What we have to overcome as an industry is moving away from what’s easiest and cheapest, which is plastic, into something which does require more thought, more design, problem solving, and frankly, a change or shift in behavior across the population of the globe.” In her opinion, reaching zero waste means working like nature – a web of inter- connected organisms. Cross-disciplinary work is a must in this approach; design- ers, engineers, and everyone contributing to a value chain in consumer-packaged
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