We need to design for human behaviour to get rid of single-use plastics
CategoriesSustainable News

We need to design for human behaviour to get rid of single-use plastics

Packaging designs aimed at boosting recycling rates and reducing the prevalence of single-use plastics are destined to fail unless they help to change people’s behaviour, writes Matt Millington.


No one is particularly happy when they find out there’s plastic waste on Mount Everest, or in the deep oceans, or in human blood. It’s not controversial to say that we need to stop churning the stuff out and throwing it away.

One way for businesses to tackle single-use plastics is to design their packaging to be reusable, but so far efforts have not succeeded at scale.

For example, reusable McDonald’s cups are only getting a 40 per cent return rate from customers in Germany, despite consumers paying a €2 deposit. When Starbucks trialled reusable cups in the closed environment of its Seattle HQ, where returning them is presumably straightforward, the return rate still didn’t exceed 80 per cent.

We weren’t exactly succumbing to dehydration on the streets before coffee shops designed takeaway cups

It’s not that we don’t care: research suggests consumer motivation towards environmentally positive behaviour is high. It’s that as a society we have developed an expectation of convenience: to have what we want, when we want it, without any consequences.

This is entirely unreasonable – we weren’t exactly succumbing to dehydration on the streets before coffee shops designed takeaway cups – but while it persists, consumers are very unlikely to switch to reusable alternatives if it puts them out. And without a high return-and-reuse rate, reusable packaging is usually worse for the environment, owing to the much higher quantities of plastic involved.

This is why we need to design for human behaviour if we’re ever to get rid of single-use plastics. You cannot control what people will do with packaging once it leaves your premises, but you can influence them by factoring behavioural psychology into the design of the packaging itself.

The first step is understanding how consumers interact with the pack, throughout its lifecycle. Where are they and what are they doing when they open it? What’s their headspace? How about when they’re finished with it? There’s a big difference between how someone interacts with a reusable plate after a meal in a cafeteria, and how they interact with the reusable salad bowl they’re gobbling from on the lunchtime rush back to the office.

Then it’s about understanding the levers you can pull to nudge people towards more planet-positive decisions. Behavioural psychology shows there are three factors that work together to drive behavioural change: increasing consumer motivation to recycle or reuse, raising their ability to do so, and providing a trigger to remind them.

Take plastic bags. While usage of single-use bags has dramatically decreased in the UK since legislation requiring retailers to charge for them came into force in 2015, reusable alternatives have had mixed success. According to a report by the Environmental Investigation Agency and Greenpeace, 57 “bags for life” were sold for each household in the country in 2019 – more than one a week.

It’s possible to go too far in signalling that a pack isn’t disposable

Online grocer Ocado uses recyclable bags instead, but it has had success in achieving returns because it pulls all three behavioural psychology levers. Consumers are happy to receive bonus reward points for each bag they give back (motivation).

The bags are straightforward to return and customers know not to throw them away because of their clear messaging and distinct off-grey colour, which follows from not using harmful bleaching agents (ability). And because the driver usually asks for old bags after delivery, they’re unlikely to forget (trigger).

Ability is the key consideration. If you wanted to return the packaging from a takeaway burger meal, it would mean washing and then carrying around a bulky burger box, fries box and cup, and either making a special trip to the restaurant or waiting until you happen upon another branch.

New Zealand start-up FOLDPROJECT has done some interesting work here, trying to make boxes more portable. It’s a simple idea: a machine-washable lunch kit that packs down to a flat sheet. The challenge is that because it is so minimal, its form and material make it look disposable.

One way to ensure a reusable design communicates its intended purpose is through material choice. For example, using explicitly post-consumer recycled plastic could be a visual shorthand to communicate a planet-positive intent, as could using longer-lasting materials like glass or stoneware.

Interestingly, it’s possible to go too far in signalling that a pack isn’t disposable. When McDonald’s introduced reusable packaging in its restaurants in France, it found the packaging kept disappearing, only to reappear on eBay. It looked reusable and on-brand, but was too novel for some, defeating the object.

So long as we have bins on every street that lead directly to landfill, we are going to struggle

Businesses cannot just switch to reusable packaging – even when intelligently designed – and expect results. So long as we have bins on every street that lead directly to landfill we are going to struggle.

We therefore need to think beyond just designing the packaging to be sustainable, and think about how we design systems to be sustainable. In a circular economy that means service and experience design, packaging, industrial design, marketing, data, artificial intelligence and logistics all working hand-in-hand to keep the pack “in the loop”. It will therefore need to be an ecosystem effort.

We’re already seeing innovations that can help make reuse and return viable in the age of convenience. For example, when is a bin not a bin? When it’s a Bjarke Ingels Group-designed TURN system – a remote, digitally connected, RFID-enabled, packaging-asset reclaim and sorting network, which rejects unwanted trash.

Similarly, we’re seeing nudge messaging along the pack journey, and even packs that communicate their status themselves. Scottish start-up Insignia has designed colour-changing labels that reveal how long a pack has been exposed to the environment. Imagine taking this further, with reusable packaging telling you what to do with it, and offering prompts or rewards to encourage you.

Reusability hasn’t hit scale yet, but we should be optimistic that it can, not least because we’ve been there before. Milk deliveries were once the norm, with bottles returned, not discarded.

There’s no reason that we can’t get back to this more sustainable approach across the board, without having to endure too much inconvenience. All that’s required is a little ingenuity, and a lot of collaboration.

The photography is by Jas Min via Unsplash.

Matt Millington is a sustainable-design strategist at PA Consulting.

Dezeen In Depth
If you enjoy reading Dezeen’s interviews, opinions and features, subscribe to Dezeen In Depth. Sent on the last Friday of each month, this newsletter provides a single place to read about the design and architecture stories behind the headlines.

Reference

Pulpatronics tackles single-use electronics with paper RFID tags
CategoriesSustainable News

Pulpatronics tackles single-use electronics with paper RFID tags

A group of design graduates from London’s Royal College of Art have come up with a way to make RFID tags entirely from paper, with no metal or silicon components in a bid to cut down on waste from single-use electronics.

Under their start-up Pulpatronics, the team has devised a chipless, paper-only version of a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag – a type of electronic tracker that is attached to products and is most commonly found in clothing stores.

These types of tags have succeeded barcodes in many big retailers, where they allow self-checkout machines to “magically” identify items without scanning anything, while also facilitating inventory management and theft prevention.

Pulpatronics paper ID tags
Pulpatronics’ paper RFID tag contains no metal or silicon

However, these types of tags – 18 billion of which are produced every year – are “overengineered”, according to Pulpatronics.

The devices rely on a circuit with a microchip and antenna, usually embedded into a sticker adhered to the paper swing tag. Due to the mix of paper, metal and silicon, they are unrecyclable and tend to end up in landfills.

By contrast, Pulpatronics’ alternative RFID design requires no other material than paper. The company simply uses a laser to mark a circuit onto its surface, with the laser settings tuned so as not to cut or burn the paper but to change its chemical composition to make it conductive.

Life cycle diagram of a Pulpatronics RFID tag compared to a regular RFID tag, showing fewer steps and circularity for Pulpatronics
There are fewer steps involved in making Pulpatronics tags than standard RFIDs

This circuit is carbon-based and the tag can be recycled with household waste as easily as a piece of paper marked with a pencil scrawl.

“This approach streamlines the manufacturing process, eliminates the need for metal and silicon components and significantly reduces the environmental footprint of RFID tag production as a result,” Pulpatronics said.

Pulpatronics estimates its tags will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 70 per cent compared to standard RFID tags while halving the associated price for businesses.

Photo of Pulpatronics prototypes
The design is now being prototyped and tested

The company’s three co-founders came up with the idea for the RFID tags while working on a group project along with a fourth student as part of their Innovation Design Engineering masters course, jointly run by Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art.

Chloe So, Barna Soma Biro and Rui Ma have different backgrounds, ranging from engineering to biological sciences to fashion design, and wanted to consolidate their skills to come up with a design that would have a positive impact on the environment.

“Our approach was slightly different to the rest of the teams in our course,” said Biro, who is Pulpatronics’ tech lead. “We never really started with a problem and then tried to identify a solution to it as you would normally do in a conventional design process.”

“Rather, we investigated various types of interesting technologies that we thought were cutting-edge from a scientific perspective and then brainstormed around what we could create out of them by trying to stay aligned to our values of reducing waste and making technology more accessible,” he continued.

In addition to the paper circuitry, Pulpatronics also applied another of these experimental technologies to dispose of the RFID’s microchip, which is responsible for storing data about the item that is then communicated to the reader via an antenna.

Instead, the “chipless” Pulpatronics tag uses the geometric pattern of the circuit itself to convey the information. In the company’s concept designs, for instance, it’s a labyrinthine pattern of concentric circles.

“This mechanism is similar to barcodes and QR codes in the sense that the information is encoded geometrically, but it doesn’t need to be scanned visually,” said Biro. “It’s basically storing the information in the antenna.”

Render of a Pulpatronics paper RFID tag next to a regular RFID tag, showing the metal circuitry inside the partially torn sticker
The tags can easily recycled together with household waste

So far, Pulpatronics paper RFID tag has passed its first round of testing, where the technology was found to match the performance of a copper-based control RFID tag.

The company – which is longlisted for this year’s Dezeen Award in the sustainable design category – will now stress test the product, looking at its shelf life, durability and whether it is affected by environmental factors.

Pulpatronics is targeting the retail industry first, particularly smaller companies that have not yet made the switch to RFID due to cost. And a preliminary trial with a retail partner in the redeveloped Battersea Power Station is already on the horizon.

Pulpatronics is also pushing for the introduction of a new symbol to designate recyclable RFID tags and raise awareness about the environmental issue of e-waste generated from hidden electronics.

Other single-use electronics in circulation today include disposable vapes and digital pregnancy tests, which show the results of a paper strip test on a tiny screen.

Last year, Australian company Hoopsy launched a paper-based pregnancy test to tackle both the electronic and plastic waste created by these devices.

Reference

Recycling single-use plastic waste from labs
CategoriesSustainable News

Recycling single-use plastic waste from labs

Spotted: Disposable plastics have become a crucial part of research and healthcare, especially for consumables like syringes and test tubes that need sterilisation. A lot of this laboratory and clinical plastic waste is sent to landfill or incinerated without a specialised recycling service.

This linear economy takes its toll on the environment. According to one study, lab-derived plastic waste could amount to 5.5 million tonnes a year around the globe. To address the problem, LabCycle has opened the UK’s first pilot plant that can recycle up to 60 per cent of plastic lab waste to make new lab equipment.  

Members of the LabCycle team have experience working in laboratories and were shocked by the amount of single-use plastic consumables that people had to go through in their daily work lives. In response, the company developed technology that enables contaminated plastic waste to be recycled from the laboratory to manufacture lab- and medical-grade consumables, promoting a circular economy approach within the research and healthcare sectors.  

After it is decontaminated, the plastic is turned into high-grade pellets the size of rice grains, which are then sent to LabCycle’s manufacturing partner to be transformed into new lab equipment like test tubes and Petri dishes. Waste doesn’t need to be sterilised beforehand, meaning less heat energy is required, and the company also specifies that water for the process can be reused, further reducing the environmental impact. 

LabCycle has recently set up its pilot recycling plant in a converted greenhouse on the University of Bath campus, and will be using the plant to recycle waste from the university’s engineering and science labs. The company is also working closely with the local NHS Blood and Transplant to repurpose their plastic waste. 

Single-use plastics pose a serious danger to the environment, but promoting a more circular economy can give these plastics a chance to be used again, instead of quickly being thrown into landfill. In the database, Springwise has spotted many innovations looking to boost circular practices, like trainers made from recycled waste materials or on-demand data that makes recycling easier.

Written By: Anam Alam

Reference

A compostable clay cup replaces single-use plastic
CategoriesSustainable News

A compostable clay cup replaces single-use plastic

Spotted: Every hour, people across Germany buy 320,000 hot drinks in single-use disposable cups. And although many manufacturers have been working to make their cups recyclable, the reality is that – in Germany and beyond – little single-use packaging actually gets recycled. German startup GaeaStar has come up with a novel approach to reducing the waste, having developed disposable cups made from clay.

GaeaStar has proposed to make its cups on a special 3D printer that can create a cup in 30 seconds or less. The company plans to use a micro-factory model, establishing cup-printing centres near customers and sourcing clay locally. GaeaStar even foresees restaurants and takeaway spots having their own tabletop printers, and the cups be easily etched with a corporate logo as part of the printing process.

The cups can be washed and reused as many times as customers want and when it’s time for disposal, the cup can simply be smashed or used as a plant pot. While many clay pots can take thousands of years to decompose, the GaeaStar cup is thin and made of unglazed and unfired clay, which means it will decompose fairly rapidly.

GaeaStar recently completed a $6.5 million (around €5.9 million) seed round from investors including Morningside and Dart Labs. This is on top of an earlier $1.7 million (around €1.6 million) pre-seed round. The funds will go, in part, towards introducing the clay cups into the US in a trial with the Verve coffee chain in California, and conducting a complete life-cycle analysis of the environmental cost of the clay cups.

3D printing is rapidly becoming an important tool in developing more sustainable products. In addition to printed reusable cups, Springwise has also spotted the technology used for the manufacture of biodegradable glass and to produce fully-recyclable, custom footwear.

Written By: Lisa Magloff

Reference