Tag Archives: eco-friendly packaging

When Paper Does the Heavy Lifting: Sunology’s Storey Packaging

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Most of us don’t give packaging a second thought. It arrives, we tear it open, and it goes straight into the recycling bin or, less nobly, the bin under the sink we keep telling ourselves we’ll sort through on a weekend. But every once in a while, a piece of packaging stops you mid-unbox and makes you think: someone really cared about this.

The Storey Battery by French solar tech company Sunology is a compact home energy storage unit, the kind that quietly stores power from your solar panels or the grid and releases it back when you need it most. It can run household appliances through an outage, reduce your electricity costs, and help you step a little further away from grid dependency. Plug-and-play clean energy, designed for the person who cares about both good design and their electricity bill. Swedish industrial design firm Propeller Design handled both the product and its packaging, and if you’ve seen the Storey itself, you already know this is a studio that doesn’t phone things in. The battery has soft, clean forms and an aluminum housing that belongs in a living room, not buried in a utility closet. It also won the BIG SEE Grand Prix 2026 Design Award, which feels entirely deserved.

Designer: Propeller Design

But the packaging is what I want to talk about, because the packaging is quietly extraordinary. The Storey weighs 30.5 kilograms. That’s serious weight for anything to withstand during shipping and freight, and for decades the default answer to that kind of engineering challenge has been foam, plastic, more foam, and maybe some more plastic just to be safe. Propeller went a completely different direction. The entire solution is fiber-based. No plastic. Not even a little bit.

They built the structure around strong honeycomb board, paperboard corner reinforcements, and paper straps. If you’ve ever seen honeycomb board in cross-section, you’ll know it’s deceptively capable. The cellular geometry distributes weight in a way that makes it genuinely strong, the kind of structural work that plastic foam has been quietly getting credit for all this time. The paper straps wrap around the battery unit like a considered branding detail rather than an afterthought, and one of them comes tagged with a small kraft card that reads “Reuse me!” alongside a clean line illustration of a cable. It’s a small gesture, but it signals the right values without making a speech about it.

I think what Propeller understood here, and what a lot of packaging designers still miss, is that sustainable materials don’t have to mean a downgraded experience. There’s a quiet assumption embedded in a lot of eco-friendly packaging that you’re trading aesthetics for ethics, that paper means compromise. This design challenges that directly. The unboxing feels deliberate and considered. The honeycomb cradles the Storey like it was made for it, because it was. The yellow straps against the pale, soft form of the battery are almost gift-like in appearance. It’s the kind of opening experience that justifies being filmed, which, in 2026, is not a small thing to say about any piece of industrial packaging.

The industry conversation around plastic-free packaging has been going strong for years, but execution still tends to lag behind intention. Companies announce pledges and deliver on them for products where plastic-free engineering is relatively manageable. Designing out plastic on a 30.5-kilogram product that needs to survive freight conditions across a global supply chain is an entirely different engineering problem, and Propeller actually solved it rather than simply worked around it.

The Storey battery is built for a future where home energy storage becomes a normal part of domestic life. It follows that its packaging should feel like it belongs in that same forward-thinking vision. Paper strong enough to carry 30 kilograms of clean energy technology is not a small design win. It’s a proof of concept, and one that the rest of the industry probably needs to study closely.

The post When Paper Does the Heavy Lifting: Sunology’s Storey Packaging first appeared on Yanko Design.

Microalgae packaging becomes biostimulant after use

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Most people (at least those who are thoughtful and aware enough) are now pretty conscious about how we consume things and where all our waste goes. This also means there is no shortage of product designers who have been experimenting on how to recycle and upcycle materials and products that reach end of life. Product waste is something we also need to think about since this will forever be part of human development.

Designer: Laura Bordini

By Osmosis is a project by Laura Bordini that explores how to use product waste and turn it into a biomaterial that can serve a different purpose and then eventually be used to help grow plants, creating a circular process. She used microalgae biomass that came out of the water purification process of a waste disposal center in Lindlar, Germany. Out of that, she was able to create agricultural biostimulants. The microalgae biomaterial can be turned into things like packaging before turning them into stimulants to promote plant growth and create better soil quality.

One of the packaging that she was able to create is a flower holder made from microalgae and wood powder. Since flowers have an end date as well, the packaging can them be repurposed as biostimulant if you’ll not be using it anymore. Another item she was able to create was seed containers, which again, is pretty apt for this circular process of ecological regeneration. We can also see plantable cards with messages like “Nice to seed you” and it’s made up of seeds and microalgae.

Algae is not a major material that product designers think of but with this experiment, she’s hoping that creators can see it as a future material for their products. It’s materials like these as well as the process to extract and create them that make the ecological regeneration a reality and hopefully, eventually become the norm.

The post Microalgae packaging becomes biostimulant after use first appeared on Yanko Design.

Eco-friendly coffee pod brand pairs product with sustainable packaging

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As a regular (addicted) coffee drinker, I use different methods to get my caffeine fix. Most of the time I just use a good ole coffee brewer but when I need a sort-of espresso fix, my coffee pod machine is the most convenient way since I don’t have an actual espresso machine. However we know that this isn’t the most environmentally-friendly way to consume coffee. But we’re seeing several brands come up with a more sustainable way forward for the k-cup industry.

Designer: Zenpack for Cambio

Cambio Roasters is one such brand that came up with organic coffee pods that were made up of just two materials: #5 polypropylene plastic and aluminum. But they didn’t want to just stop with the pods but come up with sustainable packaging as well. Zenpack created this container with eco-friendly materials that can serve also as a mini recycling bin for the pods before you bring them to the actual recycling bin.

The container is made from molded pulp with added vertical ribs to give it more structure. It is able to hold 10 pods both for when it is shipped and for when you want to hold your used pods. Even the label is sustainable as it’s a glue-free belly band with a tear strip. All of the elements of this packaging can be thrown into a larger receptacle recycling bin. The container can also be used as a temporary compost bin for your coffee grounds and other kitchen scraps.

With people becoming more conscious with how they consume products, it is good that more sustainable brands are emerging. We stan these brands that not only think of their main products but also their packaging, which can sometimes get lost in the shuffle.

The post Eco-friendly coffee pod brand pairs product with sustainable packaging first appeared on Yanko Design.