OUGD601 | Packaging Research - 'The Handbook of Design for Sustainability. Bloomsbury Academic' by Stuart Walker, Jacques Giard and Helen L. Walker.

Walker, Stuart & Giard, Jacques & Walker, Helen L. (2013) The Handbook of Design for Sustainability. Bloomsbury Academic.

Packaging waste - p. 108 - 109

• Designers can take advantage of the standards developed to enable their designs to consider best practice, e.g. in the use of certain materials, packaging and recyclability levels.
• Energy recovery of used packaging - relates to packaging recoverable through composing and biodegradation, which is oriented to packaging reuse.
• These types of standards give framework that when combined with design for sustainability can help designers not only to comply with legislation but also produce innovative designs with greater environmental and social values.
• In other cases electrical and electronic products, one of the main pieces of legislation introduced in Europe. Which requires producers to take responsibility for their products at the end of their products' life.
• The final objective of this directive is to reduce the amount of e-waste by encouraging producers to take actions that lead to the reuse, recycling and recovery of their products.
• Final approach of the incremental changes through improvement, designers should aim to gain an understanding of what design for sustainability means and reflect this through concrete actions in the design process.
• Some of these actions can be related. e.g. selecting low-impact materials by taking account of recycling rates, avoiding toxic substances according to the legislations or replacing non-renewable materials.
• In terms of energy efficiency, this can be achieved by identifying whereabouts in the life cycle the products, service or systems consumer energy and encouraging low consumption.
• This can be accomplished, also, by considering waste and what the possible options are to dispose of the product and components the system at the end of their life.
• The available option are shown as a waste hierarchy in Figure 7.2 (Euro Parliament Council, 2008).

Consciousness and an Emerging New Reality - p. 304 - 305

• A few designers observed the changing landscape and began to share their observations with the world.
• Designers such as R. Buckminster and Victor Papnek began to public challenge the complicity of the design in the consumerism and suggested a new path forward for the profession. 
• Fuller wrote Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1969. 
• Papnek's Design for the Real World published in 1971. 
• These authors were beginning to see that if the flawed world of being shaped by design continued on its trajectory, it would lead us down an untenable path. They were talking about challenges of sustainability before sustainability become a word in common usage. 
• They were talking about social equity, a flawed economic model, and the consequences of the resources depletion and environmental damage associated with population growth.