A sustainability guide for anyone involved in the design and production of physical things.

Intro

This website is a work in progress. If we were to wait until it’s finished to share it with you however, you would never see it. Because sustainability research, design and innovation will never stop. Should never stop.

Writing a handbook on sustainability has been a passion project of mine for a long time. A useful resource for designers, inventors, startup founders or just everyday folk wanting to learn more about the products we buy, consume and dispose of every day of our lives.

This is not gospel, it is not perfect. But we promise to be honest about the things we don’t know and hopefully, together, we can fill in the gaps in all of our knowledge on how we can treat the planet we call home with the care it so desperately needs.

Jo Barnard, Creative Director, Morrama.

Collaborators

Everyone at Morrama
Emma Lacey, Sustainability Consultant

What is Sustainability?

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals set out in 2015 are designed to be a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all”. Goal 12 is to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns. But what do we even mean by the term ‘sustainable’?

We all sort of know what it means, but it’s remarkably hard to put it into words. The overarching definition (also written by the UN) is:

“Sustainability is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

But how do we put that into practice? What does that mean for design and development? How do we make our products more ‘sustainable’?

Clients coming to Morrama have differing thoughts on the matter. For some, reducing polymer consumption through plastic-free solutions is top of the agenda. For others, it’s about ensuring their products are locally made, or switching to recyclable materials. These all seem sensible steps towards being more sustainable to me. But is one better than the next?

Ultimately there is no one size fits all solution to sustainability and understanding the context is vital. Whilst plastic is clogging up our oceans, using very low energy plastic films to reduce food waste in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are causing devastating global warming is surely a good thing. 

About a third of all the world’s food goes to waste, and producing, transporting and letting that food rot releases 8-10% of global greenhouse gases. (The Guardian)

What about a brand selling reusable stainless steel bottles in an effort to reduce our consumption of single use plastic bottles? It certainly requires much more energy to produce a stainless steel bottle than a PET plastic bottle from the supermarket. How can a brand be sure that a consumer is going to use it enough times that it will actually be better for the environment? Well, they can’t, but it’s up to us as designers, producers and business owners to work out the numbers as accurately as possible, and then share them with our customers. 

Only by being honest with our stakeholders, our customers and - most importantly - ourselves, can we collectively work together to make a difference.

This word ‘honesty’ is something that the industry has been severely lacking in over the past decade when it comes to sustainability. Greenwashing has become a marketing tool and has served to do nothing but confuse consumers. We’ve been told to believe plastic is solely responsible for climate change, that water bottles are OK now because they are made from 100% recycled PET and don’t get me started on tote bags. 

Reusable HDPE bags are, for each use, almost 200 times less damaging to the climate than cotton holdalls favoured by environmentalists, and have less than one-third of the CO2 emissions than paper bags which are given out by retailers such as Primark. 

The following document will explain the thought, considerations and often the compromises needed to steer a product trajectory onto the path of becoming more sustainable; showing there is never just one method of making a product sustainable. It is a mixture of different choices and strategies - adapted for each and every product, user and context.

We didn’t say it was going to be easy...

The important question…

For those of you reading this that are (or one day could be) responsible for the design, development, production and consumption of a product then we ask you to start any project with this one question:

Will your product make a big enough positive impact on people, services and/or environment to justify the inevitable Co2e that will go into the production and consumption, and the inevitable waste it will create? 

If you already know the answer is yes, amazing! 

If you aren’t sure, then good news, you are doing the right thing by reading this and we hope this document provides you with a few answers.

If you know, deep down, the answer to be no, then please, please stop and think hard about whether you should continue. And if you think ‘well I’ll just put a percentage of the profits towards carbon off-setting’ then you are just kidding both yourself and your customers. This Greenpeace article does an awesome job of explaining why.

Design has the power to change lives, bring joy, save us time and bring us together, however it also important to remember that:

90% of a product’s environmental impact is determined at the design stage (Patagonia).