As designers, we need to facilitate environmentally conscious design practices for each step of a products life-cycle to ensure a zero waste result. It is possible though, to merge existing packaging systems and guidlines with new requirements to display brand transparency and a products environmental impact, creating awareness and giving customers the option to make more informed choices.
More often than not though, we choose accessibility and ease over being a conscious consumer. Being conscious about what you buy means purchasing items that do not deteriorate human life, animal life or the environment. Just as we use nutritional labels on the outside of products to reveal the ingredients inside, consumers should have easy access to information about the environmental impact a product has on the outside. Clear, prominent information that a shopper is able to see and understand at first glance could help cut down on waste, influence more sustainable packaging standards and generate eco-conscious awareness about the impact of the brief choices we make everyday.
There are over 200+ eco-labels currently in use in the United States, this can get confusing and overwhelming very quickly for a brand or consumer. By generating this system it made it possible to narrow down the various ecolabels and certifactions into a group that only applied to grocery store consumers. It is consisted of labels and certifications such as fair trade practices, recyleability, organic products, carbon neutral practices, anti-animal testing, energy efficient production, rainforest alliance certified, non-gmo and so on. This group is composed of the most valuable packaging labels related to market consumers but could be applied in any facet of product production or anything that uses a barcode. By breaking them down I was able to assign each label and certification a value out of 100% based on their importance. Condensing these labels creates a multi-attribute label, one that places standards for a range of environmental impacts and emphasizes what actually defines these “green” products. The meter will take into account all eco-labels a brand has verified and ranks them by importance of each of each label based on the product. A sustainability score is calculated and then displayed to consumers in a much more digestible way a meter. The implementation of such a system would be a large task, requiring the participation from a variety of different not-for-profit and government organizations and then condensing those groups through data and certifications based on various job sectors. Creating a meter to be considered a Environmental Product Declaration (EPD’s) is a much larger structure than any traditional label and provides data on a products environmental impact across multiple categories and creates life-cycle assessments of products to produce more relevant consumer data. Life-cycle assessments of a product are important tools for brands and designers must take this data into account beforehand to create a waste-free packaging system.
