The Bruntland Commission Report  defined sustainable development as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” For a company to grow and secure its growth in the future, it needs to embed sustainability into all its products, services and processes.

For everything that is manufactured, it makes sense to look at sustainability from the very beginning of the process, and thus the concept of eco-design has evolved over time. If a company wants to design a product with sustainability principles in mind, all it needs to do is to consider its eco-design and its life-cycle impacts and then minimize the biggest environmental impacts identified from this analysis. This is the first step to sustainable design. During product or packaging design, the environmental impact should be considered at every stage in the life-cycle, from the raw material extraction through to the end of the product’s life. Designers already do this when considering form or function; for example, a common design question is “how strong does packaging need to be to transport the product safely from the manufacturer to the consumer?”. It is therefore only a small step for businesses to start to consider the life-cycle from a wider sustainability point of view. The Design Council recently estimated that 80 % of the cost of a product is set at the design stage, and therefore reducing the environmental impact of any product during  the concept design is actually the most beneficial stage at which to make cost savings. There are a number of tools and techniques that can be used to design products more sustainably, and the right technique will depend on each company’s aims and objectives if a company has set targets for moving to 100% recyclable packaging, then it would need to look at “Design for recyclability” and move towards using mono materials that can easily be separated at point of disposal and recycled in most local authorities’ collection streams. Companies need to be careful, however:

• Consider the recyclability of the materials from which the product or packaging is made.
• Minimize the different types of materials used and, if possible, move to a single material product.
• Look at how the materials are fixed together; for example, moving from screws to snap clips reduces the amount of time it takes to dismantle the product and they could also be made from the same material.