Designing for Re-Use

The Life of Consumer Packaging

Tom Fisher, Janet Shipton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781844074884
• eBook ISBN: 9781136546075
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Packaging is ephemeral - its purpose is to be 'wasted' once we've removed the product it contains. Whilst we are encouraged to 'reduce, re-use and recycle', Designing for Re-Use proposes that domestic re-use is the 'Cinderella' of this trinity, because it is under researched and little understood.

The re-use of packaging could have a significant effect on the quantity of material that enters the waste stream and the energy and consequently carbon that is expended in its production - every re-used item is another item not purchased. The authors demonstrate that we do re-use - but usually despite, rather than because of, the actions of government and designers. The book shows that by understanding the ways in which actions of this sort fit with everyday life, opportunities may be identified to enhance the potential for re-use through packaging design.

The authors itemize the factors that affect the re-use of packaging, and analyse the home as a system in which objects are processed. Some of these factors relate to the specifics of the design, including the type of materials used and the symbolism of the branding. Other factors are more obviously social - for instance the effects on re-use of different consumer orientations. The book provides practical guidance from a design perspective, in the context of real-life examples, to provide professionals with vital design recommendations and evaluate how a practice orientated approach to understanding consumers' behaviour is significant for moving towards sustainability through design.

1

History, Habits and Principles: Objects, People and Places

Introduction

Once you become aware of it, you seem to see packaging re-use everywhere you look. Garden trees with yoghurt pots hung from their branches as bird feeders; a plastic carrier bag re-used as a hat; allotment gardeners using drinks bottles to protect plants; your workmate’s lunchbox that was a takeaway container. Although the subject may have a tinge of ‘waste not want not’ frugality and an anti-consumerist flavour, its sheer ubiquity in response to consumerism, and the fact that it is dependent on the modern scale of consumption for its raw material, suggests that what motivates it – how it fits with people’s lives and their relationships with the material world in general – is more complex than it might seem. This is not something that only radical environmentalists do. Packaging is raw material for any further use that human creativity can identify, and this includes the most technical uses – it may be that only a small number of people will want to re-use a tin can as part of a computer wireless network antenna, but it is possible to do so (Rehm, 2007).

Packaging is the visible excess of contemporary consumption. It is what is left over, surplus, discarded on the way to the objects that we desire. It provides manufacturers with a set of opportunities – conveniently long shelflife; engaging surfaces for branding; a way of making a product compete with others on a shelf. And these functions are usually themselves finished, used up, after goods enter the home. It is carefully designed, but designed to have no value, to be disposable, to be waste. Packaging is the ‘excess’ of consumption; it is ephemeral, but it gets in the way; we need it, but it offends us when it is out of place; we require it but simultaneously are disgusted by it. Attracted by it in the shop, our dislike of packaging seems to operate on two levels. It offends when it is ‘matter out of place’, when it is used but not hidden, when it is ‘dirt’ and therefore polluting, when it gets where it shouldn’t. It is also a focus for guilt at the scale of contemporary consumption. We buy into an ethic of ‘untouched by human hand’ (Tomes, 1999; Hooper, 1932) which requires packaging, at the same time as being disgusted by its consequences.

Pondering on things we consider of no value helps us to understand what we do value, and why. The transformation of objects from one state to the other, packaging re-valued, made to coincide with a configuration of usefulness that contradicts its conventional destiny, may help us to see something of our relationship with other classes of possessions. John Scanlan (2005) notes that the emphasis in recent social and cultural theory on the spectacular aspects of consumption as part of modern material culture means waste has not featured very strongly, though studies do exist of the history of waste (Strasser, 1999; Rogers, 2005) and of the ways in which we deal with unwanted things in our homes (Gregson et al, 2007a and b). This book points towards a shift in our relationship to packaging, made urgent perhaps by the frequent attention that packaging gets in the press as a contemporary evil. If we can put our hand in the bin and take something out that is coherent, that is clean or can be cleaned of the traces of its first use, and it can fill some need or other, we might, we just might, use it again. This is a radical step and people who are in the habit of taking it have to go against the grain of a system that is embedded in our built surroundings and ingrained in our habits and our psyches. Our homes are designed around the packaged products that we bring into them and which appear to flow through them. These products either soon shed their temporary clothing of plastic, cardboard and paper, or are used up and leave an exoskeleton of discarded packaging as an unwelcome trace of their short life. This material is channelled down the household cloaca¹ of waste bin and dustbin, to be dealt with by municipal services that we pay for out of our taxes. This system is similarly entrenched in our attitudes and assumptions. It is played out through our feelings about what is and is not acceptable in our physical surroundings, feelings which require the a-septic consumerism that packaging makes possible and make us ready to accept the assumption that the material excess of its leftovers has no value.

Given the strength of these feelings, and the degree to which assumptions about the progress of packaging from shopping bag to bin are entrenched both in our system of provisioning and the arrangement of our homes, it requires some strength of will to disrupt it. People do interrupt the apparently natural flow of packaging by re-using it, however, and the idea behind this book is that by understanding the circumstances in which they do so, it may be possible for design to work with this spontaneous consumer creativity and thereby promote packaging re-use. This implies a particular approach to designing – one that relates to recently developed conventions in design practice and also to the strongly market-orientated tradition of packaging design itself. The ‘user-centred’ ethic in design has offered a powerful way of developing new technologies that are easy for people to integrate into their lives (Norman, 1990 and 1999). This approach to designing has proved effective with the information and communication technologies that can strongly influence the ways that people work, interact and fill their leisure time.

Developing this type of product brings together a range of disciplines and approaches. Non-designers are prominent in such product-development teams. Social scientists – psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists – may work closely with designers and engineers to originate the product’s form and function. The types of research that these teams undertake is also diverse and concentrates on the experiences people will have with the resulting products, going a long way beyond the emphasis on market groups which may be familiar from earlier forms of product-development process (Laurel, 2003). This emphasis on human experience, including feelings both positive and negative that people can have about and with objects (Hirschman and Holbrook, 1982; Holbrook, 1996; Jordan, 1997; Blythe et al, 2003; Fisher, 2004; Desmet and Hekkert, 2002), has led to a reassessment of the concept of ‘user-centred’ design, criticized as an over-simple and mechanistic approach to people’s experience with objects. So Richard Buchanan’s emphasis on ‘the central place of human beings’ in design (2001, p37) has gone along with the emergence of a ‘human-centred’ ethic which honours the diversity of ways we live with and experience material things and the influence of politics, economics and shared culture on those experiences.

Attempts to integrate the functionalist flavour of user-centred design with the more recent orientation to people’s experiences of the designed world – their feelings and emotions – has seen attention turn to the concept of social practice as a basis for designing (Fisher 2008a, Fisher 2008b). This ‘practice orientated’ approach seeks to pay attention simultaneously to the physicality of our material environment, what is built into it, and to the ways people negotiate, adapt, value and form relationships with it (Shove et al, 2007). This view of how designed objects end up ‘behaving’ with people acknowledges that the physicality of objects influences how people interact with them as well as what they might symbolize. Some writers have emphasized this active role that objects play in our interactions with them – they ‘push back’ at us (Dant, 1999) – and while the properties they have are put there by us, they also influence us in what we do. In this respect they have a degree of what sociologists call ‘agency’ (Callon, 1987; Latour, 1992 and 2000) – and this has a role in determining the way we integrate them into our lives, what we think they say about us, how they influence our self-identity, the roles they have in our social relationships and therefore what we can do with them.

Designing that responds to this view of our relationship with objects must work with the patterns of everyday life rather than trying to impose fixed solutions to problems, and this is the spirit that motivates this book. The following chapters set out some of the ways that people re-use packaging to show how it ‘behaves’ in our lives as a result of the combination of what is built into it – its physical properties, the systems of production and consumption into which it is fixed, and the things people do with it. It is the relationship between these three elements – materiality, system and use – that makes packaging what it is, and only by engaging with all three is it possible to understand and influence packaging re-use. It is only possible to design for the ways that people re-use packaging by acknowledging that they do this in very diverse ways, taking advantage of the openings that packaging provides for re-use, which by definition goes against its intended function but in some way or other fits with the pattern of their lives. Designing for re-use therefore requires building openness into packaging, as well as being aware of the ways in which people may take advantage of this openness.

People and Objects: Homes as Waste Processors and Generators

Contemporary homes are like factories processing the products that we buy, preparing them for use and physical consumption by stripping them of their layers of packaging and then contributing to that ubiquitous product of everyday life, waste. Awareness of the waste packaging we throw out stimulates a good deal of anxiety and guilty hand-wringing, which results in headline-grabbing demands to ban carrier bags or to leave packaging at the supermarket. However, relatively little is known about the positive contribution to sustainability that we can make when packaging enters the home but does not leave because we re-use it as a substitute for another purchase. This book describes how, where and when packaging is re-used. It shows that this re-use depends to some extent on physical factors that can be designed into packaging, as well as factors that can be used to make packaging desirable in itself. To oversimplify, there are three aspects to the re-use of packaging: the packaging object itself, where it is and the type of person who is re-using it.

Although packaging appears ephemeral – it is often deliberately designed to be light and insubstantial – the quantity of waste packaging in our collective household ‘product’ is prodigious. The UK produces ten million tonnes of waste packaging a year, which equates to the weight of a medium sized family car for every three households.² Our consumption of packaging becomes starkly obvious at the seasonal peak in our buying as we struggle to close the wheelie bin on the discarded portion of our Christmas binge, or if the system of disposal breaks down when there is a refuse collection strike. This domestic system of ‘goods in’ and ‘waste out’ is modified, however, when packaging is re-used in the household. This has consequences for the output side of our domestic factory. The amount of waste produced is reduced, as is the amount of goods entering, if re-used packaging is substituted for a new item.

While there is plenty of information available on the amount of waste we produce, much less is known about the times when people spontaneously re-use packaging that would otherwise go in the bin. As well as trying to work out what motivates people to do this and what types of people are likely to have this motivation, one of the fundamental purposes of this book is to simply show the different ways that consumers re-use packaging. It also shows how this re-use fits with other everyday habits and explains how it fits into the spatial ordering of the home, the ‘where and when’ of packaging re-use. So it looks into those hidden areas of houses – the cupboards under the sink, the shed, the cellar – to find examples of packaging being re-used and draws on the first-hand testimony of consumers to explain what sort of influences have led them to take this action. Finally, it suggests ways that design can work with what consumers are already doing spontaneously without any guidance and little concrete incentive.

Re-use should be of interest to designers concerned with sustainability, because sustainable consumption does not automatically mean consuming less. As Charter et al (2002) explain, it can mean consuming in a different and ‘smarter’ way. However, the ways that consumers interact with goods involve many factors, some of them beyond the scope of designers to influence alone. The packaging industry and government’s emphasis on recycling or biodegradable materials as solutions to waste management may actually be counter-productive as a long-term approach to waste minimization in that it distances people from direct contact with the problem, lessening their sense of ownership and responsibility for it.

In contrast to the trend for ‘instructive’ approaches to waste minimization that focus on ways to enforce environmental legislation and pro-environmental consumer behaviour at a macro-level, this book puts the creativity of individual consumers at the centre of the subject in an effort to work with the variety of ways people behave with the detritus of consumption that is packaging. For this reason, even though this book is intended to help designers and manufacturers to encourage packaging re-use through design, it contains as much about the various contexts for re-use as about actual designs or pieces of re-used packaging. It stresses the network of connections – the social mores, the consumer orientations, the domestic arrangements – that influence a decision to re-use a piece of packaging as much as the materials, brand identity and form of the packaging itself.

The life of packaging in the household is relatively invisible, and even though many consumers do re-use packaging, the emphasis on recycling has perhaps contributed to this lack of visibility. The lack of attention to what consumers do with packaging in their homes means consumers and designers often do not understand what packaging re-use is and how it differs from recycling. As a consequence of this lack of understanding, ‘recycling’ is often used to identify all pro-environmental actions to reduce packaging waste, and for this reason, it is important to define what we mean by ‘domestic packaging re-use’.

For our purpose here, ‘domestic packaging re-use’ is taken to mean the ways consumers re-use the types of ‘primary’ packaging that survives its designed-in function to promote, protect and help transport goods. While transit packaging such as stretch wrap and film makes up a significant proportion of packaging waste, it does not fall within the scope of this book. It is not generally appropriate for re-use as it usually has no immediately useful form once the product is unwrapped. If it is to be put to another function in the home without being recycled, in other words without being melted down and re-made as a lower grade of plastic, it will need to be processed and re-manufactured to some extent before it can function as a new object. We are not talking about the artful use of packaging materials for what is sometimes known as ‘thrift-craft’, where something new is made from old materials using low-tech processes. While the results of this sort of activity are engaging, and constitute the re-use of packaging materials, the sort of re-use described in this book is more varied, and does not necessarily emphasize the appearance of the resulting useful object, since it is usually carried out relatively privately and not to produce items for sale. Although he was not writing about packaging but about manufactured goods, Victor Corral-Verdugo’s definition of re-use is helpful to distinguish it from recycling:

Re-use is the use of an object in a different, additional way from that originally intended when the object was purchased. In re-use, objects are neither discarded nor reprocessed, but keep their original form. The only thing that changes is their use or the person using them. (1996, p 666)

What we are talking about here is the re-use of packaging that remains ‘coherent’ after it has done the job it was designed for and which can be re-used more or less as it is, or with some modification.³ Later chapters show that re-use of this sort of packaging is common and is carried out by many types of people for sometimes quite individual reasons. This is re-use activity that is spontaneous, sometimes inventive, sometimes artful but not necessarily systematic or planned. At its extremes, people may re-use a piece of packaging simply for its physical function, such as the use in Figure 1.1, where a carrier bag is used to protect some tools, or simply for its appearance, as in Figure 1.2, where some bottles are displayed on a windowsill.

In most cases there is a mixture of influences on the decision to re-use something. Out of the various different types of packaging that are involved in what the British Standards Institution defines as ‘the containment, protection, handling, delivery and presentation of products’ (BS EN 13429:2000), it is what is known as ‘primary’ packaging that is most likely to be re-used in the home. This is the arrangement of materials designed to display, promote and contain the product the consumer takes home. ‘Secondary’ packaging is the pack that contains and transports primary packs and does not usually make it into people’s homes. Another pair of terms is used to describe packaging re-use: ‘closed-loop’ and ‘open-loop’. In closed-loop re-use, an item is used again for the same purpose as originally intended within a recognized distribution system – the classic exam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Introduction
• 1 History, Habits and Principles: Objects, People and Places
• 2 Material Factors
• 3 Ideas and Values
• 4 Spaces, Habits and Routines
• 5 Re-use Practices and Design
• 6 Conclusion
• References
• Index