Andrea Dombrowski’s Carbon Foot Print #2: Biomimicry Research
Personal Consumption of Food Packaging over the course of 1 month:
Plastics (water bottles, soda bottles, milk, clamshells, bags)= 30 units
Cans (coke, soup, beans)= 13
Paper-based (paperboard boxes, cookie bags, cartons)= 32
Glass (bottles, jars)= 4
“The simple truth is that all of our major environmental concerns are caused by, or contribute to, the ever-increasing consumption of goods and services.”
-Cradle to Cradle
1. How can we limit the use of and even prolong the life of a product’s packaging so it does not automatically become waste?
2. How does nature achieve successful packaging? How can we translate elements of nature into design?
Our new design assignment is to create “products that when their useful life is over, do not become useless waste but can be tossed onto the ground to decompose and become food for plants and animals and nutrients for the soil; or alternately, that can return to industrial cycles to supply high-quality raw materials for new products.”
FURTHER RESEARCH: BIOMIMICRY:
Biomimicry= the process of looking to life for sustainable design advice
Nature’s packaging performs the same functions (contain, protect, communicate) as our modern day packaging without causing harm to themselves, the contents, or the environment.
DESIGN IDEAS:
A water bottle that could easily fit in your pocket when dry, but holds several liters of water when full (like the pouch of a pelican)
Build matrices inside packaging to avoid leaks and to save on material (like the internal structure of lettuce)
“Trigger” packaging that opens or changes shape and adjusts itself for the product it contains (like the opening of a seed of the spreading of a virus)
Packaging that disappears as its being shipped (similar to how horses slough off layers of their hooves)
Ketchup bottles that clean themselves with very little water (similar to how leaves clean themselves)
CONCLUSION:
Biomimicry provides us with the opportunity to compare how life works with how our designs should work. Life has been creating packaging on earth for 3.85 billion years, leaving behind no landfills, no wasted materials, and no toxic sludge. Life is responsive—why can’t our packaging be too? Could our packaging be made from local materials to fit local conditions rather than the “one size fits all” approach?
