Not that long ago, the food we bought wouldn't last very long. We'd buy it fresh, and we'd eat it fresh. It was grown locally, and thus, could travel fresh.

Now, the food we buy is often grown in a different country. Shipped to another country that still isn't ours, where it is processed, packed, and then finally shipped here. Weeks or months later we buy it and eventually, we eat it. Or don't.

Of course I'm being ungenerous. Some food is simply grown on the other side of the planet and shipped to us to buy. Occasionally still, the food we buy is fresh, having travelled fresh from where it was grown (fresh).

The off-shoring and outsourcing of our food, and indeed the high levels of processing of it, is all made possible by two things; refrigeration, and plastic.

The fridge, or freezer, slows the rot.

The plastic keeps the water in, or out.

A Place for Everything

The invention of refrigeration is one of the great achievements of humanity. Fridges and freezers have enabled technologies like vaccines, tissue transplants, and space flight. It keeps our food fresher for longer, and is a key reason we can store food for the winter months next Costco shop without learning how to pickle.

Likewise, plastic is also one of humanity's great achievements. The advent of plastic has enabled technologies like sterile single-use syringes, N95 masks, and space suits. Plastic is one of the greatest material categories ever discovered, and new and useful polymers make their way onto the market seemingly every other day.

If you stop and think for a moment, plastic is a wonder material. It is light, durable, and can be infinitely shaped, coloured, and textured. I often wonder if Andy Weir was thinking of plastic when he wrote of Xenonite.

It is also extraordinarily cheap.

The low cost of plastic lends itself very well to being exploited by companies looking to save a buck. To the point that just about everything we put something in has now been replaced with a plastic version. Yes, I'm old enough to remember when the inner bag inside cereal boxes was waxed paper, not plastic.

Decades later, we kinda have a problem. And we kinda need to do something about it.

By no means am I suggesting we go back to the old ways. The world is a vastly different place than it was two generations ago. While fortunately some regulations are starting to fall into place to limit the most egregious examples, whole product categories (like domestic liquid soap) have sprouted out of cheaply and easily shipping water in plastic containers.

I'm not proposing we simply delete entire market segments either. What I am saying is that if we want to reduce waste, or live and consume more sustainably, it means we can't just say we're being sustainable while continuing to do the same quick, convenient, and wasteful things we've done for the last few decades. Ignorantly, or otherwise.

We Should All Be Embarrassed

While some notes for this article have been sitting in my drafts for a very long time, what's triggered me into writing and publishing it this week is this article published on Abduzeedo this week.

Without going on too much of a witch hunt, this article praises this 'award winning' packaging for being a "fresh take on sustainable packaging design". The copy goes to great lengths to tell us it's "eco-friendly", that it's "good for the planet", and that Boiling Point is "made from earth-friendly materials".

Yet when I try and dig deeper into what this material is that makes it so sustainable, the sole mention of what makes it sustainable is that it's recyclable. Not recycled, even in part, recyclable.

What? Aren't we past this?

I would have accepted glass. Glass is recyclable. But if it was glass, the designer would have said it was glass. C'mon, we're not stupid. It's a plastic bottle.

I haven't even talked about the shape yet. A sphere, even a deformed one such as this, is the least economical shape to transport. In a perfect world, whenever you ship a sphere of something, almost half of your box is air. That's half of your usable volume, being shipped for nothing. Worse, the article claims that having the soup mix sold in a range of portion sizes will prevent waste. Never mind that the small and single servings also creates more packaging waste. Seriously, just put your leftover soup in the fridge. And on top of that, the package design dictates some of your soup mix will be trapped inside it. The package actually forces you to waste some of its contents because you can't completely empty it. I also haven't, and won't, get into how this packaging would be a nightmare to actually manufacture.

To add insult to injury insult, soup mixes are already dried and can theoretically last for years as a non-perishable. They don't need to go into plastic bottles at all. Most regular soup mixes live in small, foil-lined or wax-paper sachets that are space and material efficient.

I understand that this is a concept. Not a real product or a real company. And even if it was either, it wouldn't be for long. Still, Abduzeedo should be held responsible for publishing such claims, and the designer should be held responsible for making them. It's fine if you want to explore some wild packaging concept as a pure design indulgence, but don't pretend it's sustainable. Those with reach, like Abduzeedo, should be setting an example.

I'm not angry at Inna Efimova specifically, I'm angry at the prevalent attitude to sustainability in general. We're all for sustainable design, reducing waste, and saving the environment, as long as we can keep doing what we're doing and paying what we're paying.

Reducing plastic waste, and by extension consumer behaviour, is really really hard. Designers must fight to have real impact within the products they work on in the name of sustainability*. Sustainability is harder, and more expensive. Examples such as this undermine everything we're trying to do to affect real change.

We should all be embarrassed.

A Few Suggestions

First and most importantly, just because a material is recyclable DOES NOT make it sustainable. Even ignoring the carbon cost of sorting, reprocessing, shipping, and what you can even do with recycled plastic, plastic is literally not sustainable. Plastic is produced from dinosaur juice that will, one day, run out**.

Secondly, don't be ignorant. Learn the truth of what you say, before you say it. Call out others that don't know what they're talking about. Did you know only 12.4% of plastic waste is recycled nationally? I bet you didn't, and I would suggest most people don't either. Do you expect to make real environmental impact just because someone said it was now "good for the planet"? Know where your waste comes from, and know where it's going.

Naturally, the most sustainable packaging is no packaging at all. I get that eliminating or reducing the amount of packaging in this world might put a lot of Graphic and Industrial Designers out of work. The conflict of interest is not lost on me. Though lets be real. There will always be a need for packaging, and changes happen slowly. If designers truly want to develop sustainable packaging, there's plenty of work still be done in paper and pulp. As the single-use plastic regulations get tougher, which they should, those with demonstrated experience in actually sustainable materials will eat everyone else's lunch.

And if you're looking for opportunities to innovate in sustainability beyond packaging, just look wherever water is stored. Just as liquid soap (the product category) sprung forth from the ability to cheaply ship water, so too can new product categories spring forth from taking the water out. These aren't easy challenges of course. We as consumers are used to things being convenient, and needing to re-add or do without water in the end use adds certain usability challenges. But designers are problem solvers, right?

Lastly, If you want there to be less packaging, buy less packaging. Look in your garbage and see what packaging is in there that you could avoid next time. Buy fresh, local, produce and cook your own damn soup.

*I also recognise that I work in the medical device industry which, as part of the broader healthcare industry is an enormous contributor to landfill. I haven't reconciled the waste the healthcare industry generates with sustainability, but accept there are some environmental costs to modern healthcare. That doesn't give them a free pass, and I do what I can. Something I can go into in a separate post.

**It's funny to think that once all our fossil fuels are gone that there might actually be a market for plastic mining. To dig up the billions of tonnes of plastic we once tipped into landfill because it's financially viable to do so.

Update 2025-07-21: See this link for a better look at our insane food distribution in Australia.