Tom Fisher: Consumer creativity is key to reusable future

We tend to assume that used consumer packaging is just waste. When it stops being a necessity, waste packaging becomes an inconvenience, a resource or both. Either way, it is certainly something that needs to be managed. Because dealing with it costs resources, these days both producers and consumers are exhorted and incentivised to minimise packaging and to dispose of it into the waste stream responsibly, recycling where possible.

Our relationship with packaging appears to have evolved to an advanced state in the 50 years since packaged goods became the norm in the developed world. However, some packaging has another destiny that contradicts the assumption that it simply flows from shop to waste via our homes – it is reused, and in a mind-boggling variety of ways.

Thrifty people have probably always looked out for useful things to do with used packs and some people now reuse because they feel bad about the environmental consequences of not doing so. Used packaging creations range from the inventive – a barometer made out of cans – to the obvious – using carrier bags as hanging planters or boxes for storage – to the odd, such as a dog toilet made out of a 50-gallon drum.

While this consumer creativity may be interesting in itself, it is awkward for those designers and manufacturers interested in promoting reuse to lessen the environmental impact of packaging because it is by definition out of their control.

However, there are some principles that may increase the likelihood of reuse, even if they can not guarantee it. For instance, there is a quality of ‘openness’ to packs that are reused – their design leaves a lot of openings and opportunities for people to find other functions for them. So while a simple carrier bag is perhaps the most reusable pack, it is easy to think of dedicated ‘one-shot’ designs that are almost certain never to be reused.

‘Openness’ sums up the necessary functional qualities of packs likely to be reused, but consumers also have to want to reuse them. Often this means that it has to be possible for someone to make a pack their own in a direct way by removing the graphics from it – some packs with removable card wraps or with peelable labels are more likely to become part of someone’s personal life-project.

While effective polymer sorting and recycling would more directly reduce packaging’s environmental impact, in its absence we can learn a lot from consumers’ creativity – each pack reused is in principle a purchase replaced.

Tom Fisher is a professor of art and design at Nottingham Trent University. Fisher and Chesapeake design director Janet Shipton are co-authors of Designing for Re-use: the Life of Consumer Packaging. Packaging News readers can get a 20% discount on the book by visiting earthscan.co.uk and typing packagingnews into the voucher code box in the shopping cart.

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