Somebody who has strong opinions about Cherry MX switch actuation force is not, statistically speaking, somebody who wears cologne. I say this with love, having been both people at different points. Igor Mitin’s PUSHHH concept ignores that overlap problem entirely and builds a perfume around the keyboard key, putting a chunky square cap on the bottle that doubles as the plunger. Mitin runs with that mismatch instead of avoiding it, treating the cap less like hardware and more like a gesture everyone already knows from their phone. One push, and the bottle behaves like a message you just fired off to someone.
Mitin works out of Melbourne as an art director who has spent his career on fragrance and beauty packaging, picking up a Pentawards Gold in 2024 and a Red Dot Design Concept award in 2022, on top of a Best of the Best Red Dot Design Concept win back in 2011. PUSHHH is his own self initiated project, built without a client breathing over his shoulder, which probably explains why it gets to be this playful. Each scent carries a one word name you would actually type, CRUSH, XOXO, COOL, YAY, and OMG, printed straight across the face of the cap. The glass underneath is a squat rounded square in transparent red, pink, amber, and teal, sized closer to something you would clip onto a bag than something you would park on a dresser.
Designer: Igor Mitin
Keyboard people take their keycaps seriously, hunting down artisan sculpts through drops that sell out before the page finishes loading, and PUSHHH lifts that exact silhouette and plants it on a category that usually behaves nothing like that. Perfume branding loves hushed minimalism, black serif type, a name in French nobody can pronounce right. PUSHHH walks in the opposite direction entirely, leans all the way into the keyboard bit, and somehow the whole thing still reads as a coherent, good looking object rather than a gimmick bolted onto glass.
The system around the bottle keeps the joke going in the best way. Keychain minis, collectible colorways, and personalized gift editions all stretch the one push idea into things you would genuinely want to wear, and campaign lines like “Say it. Spray it. Wear it.” lean into the texting bit with a straight face. Mitin’s own flat lays stage the bottles next to headphones, sunglasses, a Casio, and keyring charms, and that styling choice tells you exactly what PUSHHH thinks it is. Not a fragrance counter object. A bag charm sitting proudly next to your Labubu.
What I like most is how specific the whole thing is. A lot of concept fragrance work chases a vague mood, some smoke and a moodboard and a name that sounds expensive. PUSHHH picked one clean idea, the keyboard key as plunger, and let every other decision follow from it, the colors, the words, the merch, the styling. That kind of discipline is rare even in briefed, paid work, let alone something Mitin built purely because the idea was fun enough to chase. I would buy the CRUSH bottle off a shelf the second it existed, and honestly, that is the whole review.
Expanded foam or polystyrene has had a good run as the default packaging filler, mostly because it’s cheap, light, and nobody was really committed to sustainability for the last half century so the industry is pretty set in its ways now. Expanded foam does not decompose, it does not do anything useful once you rip it out of the box, and it has spent decades sitting quietly in landfills being extremely unbothered by the concept of consequences. Designers have been chipping away at its throne for years, swapping in mushroom mycelium, seaweed film, pressed pulp, whatever grows fast and decomposes faster. Scentra joins that lineup with a twist nobody else has really tried. Rosemary.
Instead of growing a material or pulping something into a smooth foam substitute, this one compresses actual rosemary waste, stems and all, into a block held together with a seaweed binder. The result looks rustic rather than manufactured, and it carries the plant’s natural scent right there in the fibers. Crack the box open and rosemary hits you before the product does. Foam never managed that trick, and honestly, it never tried.
Designers: Zhixi Dai, Zhou Yun, Wang Zhan
The rosemary itself comes from an organic farm in Guizhou, China, run under Omni Biotech’s AOLUX line, where trimmings that would normally get swept up and discarded are collected instead. The farm also employs local workers from low income families as part of a rural revitalization push, so the sourcing story has a human angle sitting quietly underneath the material one. Designer Zhixi Dai led the project with Zhou Yun and Wang Zhan rounding out the team, and between them they turned a farming byproduct into something structural enough to actually protect glass.
The block is cut with a cavity shaped exactly like the essential oil bottle it holds, silhouette and all, so the packaging reads almost like a little doorway with the product framed inside it. Pull the bottle out and you are left holding a chunk of compressed herb that still smells like the plant it came from. Set it on a shelf, add a few more drops of oil when the scent fades, and it keeps working as a passive diffuser. No batteries, no wiring, no porcelain filter to keep clean. Just plant matter doing what plant matter does.
We have seen versions of this waste to material pipeline before. Beer mash has been pressed into leather, spent grain has been molded into stools, rice husk has been packed into furniture. What usually happens in those stories is the waste becomes inert once it is shaped, useful for its structure and nothing else. Scentra skips that step. The rosemary does not stop being rosemary just because it got compressed into a block. It keeps its oils, its texture, its smell, all the things that made it worth growing in the first place.
That is really the whole pitch here, and it is a good one. Most eco packaging asks you to feel good about something you cannot see or verify, a recycling percentage or a compostability claim buried in fine print. This one just smells like rosemary. You do not need a certificate for that, though it has one anyway, having picked up the Best Eco Design win at the European Product Design Awards.
Every broke gym rat has done this at some point. You run out of dumbbells, you eyeball two water jugs, you duct tape a broom handle across them, and suddenly you have a homemade kettlebell that looks like a science fair project gone wrong. It works, technically, but it also looks like something you’d hide before your date comes over. Purra just looked at that entire genre of improvised home gym equipment and decided to make it official, good looking, and branded. The result is a plastic handle that clips onto a pair of their mineral water bottles and turns them into an actual kettlebell, weight marking and all.
Designed as a marketing stunt tied to Purra’s presence at HYROX Bangkok, the handle snaps over two 1.5 liter bottles to hit exactly 3 kilograms, which is either a happy coincidence or someone in R&D did their homework. The dome is molded in the same powder blue as Purra’s label, debossed with the brand name, and shaped with the same scalloped horns you’d find on a competition kettlebell. Nothing about it screams cheap giveaway. It screams someone in the marketing department actually asked an industrial designer for help instead of ordering branded tote bags like everyone else.
Designer: Purra (Singha Corporation)
I have made my own version of this exact object during the pandemic, so I have some opinions on how well the real thing pulls it off. The horn spacing on the handle matches a proper competition kettlebell almost to the millimeter, wide enough for a two handed swing without your knuckles clipping the bottle caps. That is the detail that separates a design object from a novelty prop. A lot of branded merch gets the silhouette right and ignores the ergonomics entirely, and you end up with something that photographs well and hurts your wrist on rep three.
Two 1.5 liter bottles of water land you at 3 kilograms on the nose, and the handle stamps that number right into the plastic like it wants to be taken seriously as an actual training tool. Most branded merch settles for looking the part. This one does the arithmetic and shows its work, which is a small thing but it’s the kind of small thing that tells you someone cared past the pitch deck.
Purra is Singha’s mineral water brand, sourced from nearly 1,000 feet underground in Sing Buri, and the kind of company that already runs annual designer bottle collaborations, so a marketing play like this isn’t a stretch for them creatively. HYROX is arguably the best possible stage for it, since the format runs on eight fixed equipment stations and the kettlebell is one of them, so a water brand showing up with literal kettlebell bottles is closer to a punchline than a pitch.
Whether this thing gets mass produced or stays a one-off activation prop is unclear, and honestly that’s fine. Not every good idea needs a retail SKU to justify existing. Sometimes the point is just proving the trick works, and this one does. I won’t be surprised if we start seeing 3D builds on online platforms for people to print on their own!
Plastic has long been the default choice for packaging because of its durability, flexibility, and low cost. Today, however, designers are proving that high-performance packaging does not have to come at the expense of the environment. Advances in renewable materials, circular design, and biodegradable alternatives are reshaping the industry. The result is they’re replacing conventional plastics with solutions that are just as functional while generating far less waste.
By 2026, sustainable packaging design has moved beyond prototypes and niche applications into everyday retail. Seaweed packaging films, molded pulp, mono-material packaging, compostable foams, and dissolvable packaging are protecting everything from food and cosmetics to consumer goods without relying on single-use plastics. These seven innovative packaging concepts showcase how thoughtful material choices and intelligent engineering are creating plastic-free packaging products and biodegradable packaging 2026 that are durable, practical, and designed with their entire lifecycle in mind.
1. Seaweed and Mono-Material Paper Finally Reach Store Shelves
The biggest shift in sustainable packaging design isn’t a futuristic material, but its accessibility. In 2026, innovations such as seaweed packaging films and mono-material packaging have moved beyond experimental concepts into mainstream retail. These next-generation materials deliver the durability and shelf life brands expect while significantly reducing their environmental impact.
Instead of relying on complex multi-layer plastic composites that are difficult to recycle, designers are using simplified material systems that can be recycled, composted, or naturally dissolve after use. Sustainable packaging design is no longer driven by marketing claims alone but by thoughtful engineering that minimizes waste throughout a product’s lifecycle. The result is packaging that combines functionality, visual appeal, and circular design principles while leaving little to no trace once its purpose has been fulfilled.
Seaweed packaging is proving to be a practical alternative to single-use plastic, and Seaweed U showcases its potential through edible food packaging. Crafted from seaweed extracts and plant-based ingredients, the wrappers and dissolvable pouches protect snacks while becoming part of the meal itself. Instead of generating waste, the packaging delivers vitamins, minerals, and gut-friendly polysaccharides. The material is dehydrated and tested for durability, temperature resistance, and water resistance, ensuring it performs as a functional, sustainable replacement for conventional plastic packaging.
Seaweed U goes beyond replacing plastic by transforming packaging into an interactive food experience. Its range includes fruity edible snack wrappers, dissolvable meal pouches, and versatile sheets that inspire creative cooking. By blending convenience with nutrition, the product makes seaweed more approachable for everyday consumption while eliminating unnecessary waste.
2. Seaweed Packaging Replaces Plastic Without Looking Fragile
Among the most exciting innovations in sustainable packaging are seaweed-based films developed by companies like Notpla and Sway. Made from marine algae, these materials offer a fresh alternative to conventional plastic while maintaining the flexibility needed to wrap food, sachets, and everyday consumer products. They have a soft, silky feel yet remain durable enough to protect their contents.
What makes these sustainable packaging designs stand out is what happens after use. Some dissolve safely in water, while others naturally decompose in compost within a matter of weeks, leaving behind no long-lasting plastic waste. Their translucent finish and subtle organic texture reflect the material’s natural origins, resulting in packaging that feels honest, thoughtfully designed, and perfectly aligned with the growing demand for environmentally responsible products.
Plastic pollution continues to threaten ecosystems worldwide, making sustainable packaging more important than ever. Notpla offers a compelling alternative by replacing single-use plastic with a biodegradable material made from brown seaweed and plants. Strong enough for food packaging, condiment sachets, cups, thin films, and paper coatings, the material performs like conventional packaging without leaving behind centuries of waste. Since seaweed grows rapidly without freshwater, fertilizer, or agricultural land, it is a renewable resource that supports a more sustainable production cycle while reducing dependence on fossil-fuel-based plastics.
What sets Notpla apart is its end of life. Instead of lingering in landfills or breaking into harmful microplastics, the material naturally decomposes within four to six weeks and can be composted at home. It has already been used at major sporting events and by food delivery and consumer brands looking to reduce their environmental footprint.
3. Molded Pulp Has Become Precision Packaging
Molded pulp has quietly evolved from humble egg cartons into one of the most sophisticated forms of plastic-free packaging available today. Engineered fiber structures now protect electronics, cosmetics, and premium products with precisely molded forms that eliminate the need for foam inserts. The material has a warm, matte finish with a subtle texture that feels more refined than expanded polystyrene while providing impressive impact absorption during shipping and handling.
Advances in fiber molding have enabled greater precision, allowing molded pulp trays to achieve tight tolerances and elegant structural details. Clean edges, sculpted contours, and carefully engineered forms elevate the material beyond its recycled origins, giving it a premium appearance without compromising sustainability. Instead of simply replacing plastic, molded pulp offers a packaging solution that combines protection, functionality, and understated aesthetics in a single renewable material.
Created for Cambio Roasters, this molded pulp packaging transforms a simple coffee pod container into a practical, waste-reducing product. Made entirely from renewable fiber, the lightweight yet sturdy container features vertical ribs that strengthen its structure while securely holding up to ten coffee pods during transport and storage. A glue-free paper belly band replaces conventional adhesive labels, making every component easier to recycle. The clean, minimal design keeps material use to a minimum while delivering the durability expected from modern food packaging.
The sustainable packaging design continues to serve a purpose even after the coffee pods have been used. It functions as a convenient storage bin for collecting spent pods before recycling and can also be reused as a small compost container for coffee grounds and other kitchen scraps. By combining renewable molded pulp with thoughtful multi-use functionality, the product reduces unnecessary waste and encourages more sustainable everyday habits without sacrificing convenience or practicality.
Conventional paper beverage cartons may appear eco-friendly, but their layered construction makes recycling far more complicated than most consumers realize. Typically, they combine paper with a thin plastic lining, requiring specialized facilities to separate the two materials before they can be recycled. Since this infrastructure is limited, recycling rates remain low despite the widespread use of paper cartons.
Designed by Pushan Panda, Bruk addresses this challenge with a simple yet intuitive solution. The sustainable packaging concept allows users to split the carton open from the top, much like peeling a banana, easily separating the paper shell from the HDPE liner. By enabling materials to be recycled independently using conventional equipment, Bruk simplifies the recycling process while using less plastic than traditional plastic bottles and eliminating the need for complex separation systems.
4. Mono-Material Paper Laminates Make Recycling Easier
Traditional flexible packaging often combines plastic, foil, and adhesives into complex structures that are difficult for recycling systems to separate. Mono-material packaging changes that equation by relying almost entirely on engineered paper. Recent paper laminate innovations deliver impressive durability while remaining compatible with kerbside recycling infrastructure, making them a more sustainable alternative to conventional flexible packaging.
Under compression, these paper-based packs feel firmer than standard paper while retaining the flexibility needed for folding and sealing without cracking. The absence of hidden plastic layers creates an authentic material expression, allowing the natural texture, fibers, and color of the paper to become part of the design language.
FlexiBag Reinforced is Mondi’s latest recyclable pre-made packaging solution made from mono-polyethylene (mono-PE), designed to deliver enhanced strength and performance. The bag features improved puncture resistance, increased stiffness, and superior sealability, making it suitable for demanding packaging applications. Its customizable barrier properties provide medium to high protection against moisture, oxygen, and grease, helping maintain product freshness while remaining recyclable where PE film collection and recycling systems are available.
FlexiBag Reinforced can be tailored to specific customer requirements and incorporates customizable levels of post-consumer recycled (PCR) content through a mass-balance approach. By combining recyclable mono-material construction with high mechanical performance and flexible barrier protection, the packaging offers a sustainable alternative to conventional multi-material plastic bags
5. Mycelium and Paper Foam Add Texture to Sustainable Design
Some of the most compelling biodegradable packaging innovations of 2026 are grown or molded from natural materials rather than manufactured from fossil fuels. Mycelium, cultivated from fungal roots, forms lightweight protective shells that naturally replace expanded foam, while PaperFoam, made from renewable starch and natural fibers, offers a lightweight, molded alternative for protective trays, food packaging, and delicate consumer products. Both materials bring distinctive tactile qualities that set them apart from conventional plastics. Mycelium has a soft, velvety surface with naturally irregular textures, while PaperFoam feels smooth, airy, and gently resilient despite its strength.
Neither material nor paper products tries to imitate plastic perfectly. Instead, both celebrate their organic appearance and texture, transforming packaging into a sensory experience. By engaging consumers through touch as much as visual design, these materials reinforce sustainability in a way that feels authentic rather than relying solely on environmental messaging.
Stamp Egg is a thoughtfully designed egg packaging concept that reimagines the traditional carton using PaperFoam, a bio-based material made from starch, cellulose fibers, and water. Lightweight, highly recyclable, and home-compostable, the packaging offers a low-carbon alternative to plastic and pulp trays without compromising protection. Inspired by the perforated layout of postage stamps, the detachable design allows each egg compartment to be separated into individual protective pods. The stackable structure makes storage more efficient, simplifies transport, and enables users to carry single eggs for lunches or picnics while keeping them securely protected.
The molded PaperFoam construction provides the strength needed to cushion eggs while maintaining a lightweight profile. Its dimpled form prevents eggs from touching each other, while an improved hinge makes each compartment easy to detach without reducing durability. The natural material can be embossed directly with branding and product information, eliminating the need for additional labels and simplifying recycling. Combining practical functionality with sustainable materials, Stamp Egg demonstrates how innovative packaging can reduce waste while enhancing convenience, product protection, and overall user experience.
6. Packaging That Is Designed to Disappear
Perhaps the most radical innovation in sustainable packaging isn’t the material itself but its intended end-of-life behavior. Designers are increasingly engineering packages that actively encourage disassembly, separation, or disappearance after use. Water-soluble films dissolve intentionally, peel-apart constructions separate materials for easier recycling, and compostable wraps break down into natural matter without leaving synthetic residues behind. Every interaction after opening has become part of the design brief.
Instead of creating objects that persist indefinitely, these systems are carefully planned to vanish efficiently once their protective function ends. The result is packaging whose final act is just as thoughtfully designed as its first.
The Dissolving Bottle reinvents shampoo packaging by transforming the container itself into the product. Created as a bottle-shaped solid shampoo bar, it eliminates the need for single-use plastic packaging by gradually dissolving with every wash until nothing remains. Sculpted to resemble a conventional shampoo bottle, the design makes the transition from liquid shampoos to solid bars more familiar while offering a practical, plastic-free alternative for everyday hair care. Made to leave zero packaging waste behind, the product combines daily functionality with an innovative approach to sustainable personal care.
Designed by Philippine creative agency BBDO Guerrero, the Dissolving Bottle balances environmental responsibility with user-friendly design. The solid shampoo bar is embossed with playful messages directly onto its surface, removing the need for additional labels or plastic sleeves. Its compact, all-in-one format simplifies storage and travel while encouraging consumers to rethink disposable packaging.
7. Focus on Honest Industrial Design
In 2026, seaweed films and mono-material paper packs have moved beyond pilot projects into mainstream retail. Brands are choosing materials that naturally decompose without compromising shelf life or visual appeal. Instead of layered plastic composites that linger in landfills for centuries, designers are embracing simplified material systems that can be recycled, composted, or dissolved with minimal intervention.
Sustainable packaging design has become less about marketing claims and more about engineering packaging that performs efficiently while leaving almost nothing behind after its job is done.
Seed Scoop Fertilizer is an innovative packaging concept that combines seed storage, a planting tool, and fertilizer into a single zero-waste product. Designed by students from the Royal College of Art, the package includes a scoop made from nutrient-rich peanut shell material that protects the seeds during storage while serving as a practical gardening tool. Users first remove the seeds, then use the scoop to dig the soil and plant them, allowing every component of the package to serve a functional purpose before disposal.
Once planting is complete, the biodegradable scoop can be broken into pieces and mixed into the soil, where it gradually decomposes into a natural fertilizer. Made from discarded peanut shells, the material repurposes agricultural waste into a nutrient-rich resource that supports plant growth instead of ending up in a landfill.
These sustainable packaging designs and biodegradable packaging 2026 show that the future of design is becoming more human, intuitive, and environmentally conscious. Together, these packaging innovations show that the future of packaging isn’t just plastic-free, but it’s designed to perform well, minimize waste, and leave a lighter footprint long after the product has been used.
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.
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.
Pantone has officially colored pasta night, and I’m not even slightly mad about it. Bertolli, the Italian food brand that’s been a pantry staple since 1865, just partnered with Pantone to give its best-selling Alfredo sauce an official “Inspired by Pantone” color. The shade? A creamy, off-white hue that’s as comforting to look at as it is to eat. And while some might chalk this up to a clever marketing stunt, I think the collaboration is actually doing something more interesting than it appears.
Let’s start with what Pantone actually does, because it matters here. Pantone doesn’t just slap its name on a color for fun. For decades, the brand has been the definitive authority on color across industries ranging from fashion to interiors to product design. When Pantone certifies a color, it assigns it cultural and commercial weight. It says: this hue means something. Giving that recognition to a pasta sauce is either absurd genius or genuinely inspired branding, depending on your appetite for that sort of thing. Personally, I lean toward the former.
Designer: Bertolli x Pantone
The campaign introduces the creamy off-white as Alfredo’s defining visual identity, with limited-edition Bertolli jars wrapped in Pantone-inspired branding that puts the color front and center. The familiar Pantone square appears on the jar packaging, with a transparent cutout so the sauce itself becomes the swatch. It’s a clever design choice. You’re not just looking at the color, you’re looking through the label to see it in its most natural state.
The brand also ran a sweepstakes giveaway with cookware and kitchen accessories curated in the same creamy off-white palette. Think: a stand mixer, pots and pans, a Dutch oven, cooking utensils. All in Alfredo. The fact that Bertolli thought to extend the color story beyond the jar itself shows real creative confidence. A kitchen dressed in Alfredo white is, objectively, a mood.
Now, is this a bit of a marketing flex? Yes. Absolutely. But brands claiming colors as their own is nothing new. Tiffany Blue has its own Pantone number. UPS brown is officially trademarked. Owning a color is a legitimate form of brand identity. The difference is that Alfredo sauce has always had an identity problem. Tomato sauce gets the cultural spotlight. Marinara is the classic. Arrabbiata gets the personality points. Alfredo, despite being wildly popular, tends to get lumped into “the other one.” Rich, creamy, beloved by practically everyone who has ever sat down to a bowl of pasta, but rarely celebrated on its own terms.
This is Bertolli’s argument that Alfredo deserves its own moment, its own aesthetic language. And credit where it’s due: using Pantone to tell that story is a smart move. Color is one of the most immediate, emotional forms of communication we have. When Pantone named Viva Magenta the Color of the Year, people talked about it for months. Attaching that same institutional gravitas to a sauce most people have in their fridge right now? That’s a cultural bridge worth crossing.
The campaign also encouraged people to “Take the Alfredo” through social media activations and influencer partnerships. The phrase is a little clunky, but the intention behind it is clear: they want Alfredo to feel like a statement, not just a side dish.
I do think the success of a campaign like this lives or dies by whether it earns its concept, and this one mostly does. The visual execution is clean and considered. The product and the partner make intuitive sense together. Pantone’s “Inspired by” series has previously drawn from art and culture, so extending it to food isn’t much of a leap when you think about how central color is to the way we experience appetite. We eat with our eyes first, and that creamy off-white carries its own quiet appeal.
Bertolli has been feeding people for over 150 years. Getting Pantone to officially say the brand’s signature sauce has a color worth naming? That’s just a long overdue introduction.
Back in the 90s, every packaging was a craft project. Milk cartons were turned into pen-stands, Pringles cans into kaleidoscopes, Coca-Cola bottles into backyard rockets… and that approach made a lot more sense than throwing packaging into the waste bin. We’d go out of our way to repurpose these objects, giving them a (sometimes unintended) second life. We don’t do that anymore because for the most part, brands don’t believe in fun packaging anymore. However, Yanlun Wu’s trying to reverse that approach.
A winner of the A’ Design Award, Wu’s packaging for traditional Chinese mooncakes looks like your standard tin box. With cultural elements evoking the beauty of the Mid-Autumn festival, this box forms an integral part of a ritualistic gifting experience, where you visit your loved ones with mooncakes, wishing them good health and prosperity. The packaging for a mooncake plays a simple dual-purpose role – it encases the cakes for safe transport, but it also serves as a visual signifier of quality – a good packaging is indicative of a well-thought gift. However, that dual-purpose role ends once the moon-cakes are consumed. Wu’s packaging, however, turns the lid of the mooncake box into a traditional paper lantern, giving it life even after you’ve consumed the dessert.
Designer: Yanlun Wu
Lanterns form an integral part of the Mid-Autumn festival too. Apart from eating mooncakes, gazing at the moon, and bonding with family, people also light paper lanterns which are either hung outside houses, or sent cascading into the sky. Wu’s design aligns with the former. Each food-safe tin box comes with a lid that has a foldable lantern pressed into it. Once you’re done with the mooncakes, simply unfold the lantern and you’ve got a traditional keepsake that allows you to enjoy Wu’s packaging well beyond its original purpose.
That’s the beauty of what Wu’s trying to achieve here – giving the package a third purpose and a second life. Each lantern comes adorned with traditional Chinese motifs that represent the Mid-Autumn festival. “This innovative dual-lifecycle design combats waste by turning disposable packaging into a lasting decorative object, seamlessly blending traditional Chinese mid-autumn symbolism with modern sustainable practice,” Wu says.
The plant pot is not a product most people think about reinventing. It holds soil, it sits on a shelf, and eventually you wrestle it off the root ball and toss it in a bin. End of story. But three design students from Münster School of Design looked at that ordinary object and saw something worth fixing, and the result is POT+, a 3-in-1 recyclable cardboard plant pot that manages to be both surprisingly clever and genuinely necessary.
Sophie Greif, Paul Sommerfeld, and Paula Storm developed POT+ over just eight weeks as part of a course on sustainable cardboard packaging. Eight weeks is not a lot of time. It barely covers a single design iteration at most studios, which makes what they produced even more impressive. The concept is straightforward: a biodegradable, glue-free cardboard pot that doubles as a scoop and includes a built-in plant tag. Three tools, one object, zero plastic.
The plastic plant pot problem is bigger than most of us realize. Most of those thin, flimsy pots that come with supermarket herbs or garden centre annuals are not recyclable. They fall into a category of plastics too contaminated with soil and organic material to process properly, so they end up in landfill. Billions of them, every year. Environmental groups have flagged this as one of the garden industry’s most persistent and overlooked waste problems, and yet the plastic pot has remained almost entirely unchanged for decades. We have essentially built a throwaway infrastructure around plants, which is a genuinely bizarre thing to do for products sold in the name of nature.
POT+ addresses this directly and without fanfare. Made from 100% recyclable cardboard, it can be tossed straight into the paper recycling bin after use. It is water-resistant and stable for up to two weeks, which covers the window between purchase and repotting for most plants. Beyond that, the ergonomic design and integrated scoop make the actual task of repotting cleaner and easier. And the built-in plant tag is one of those small details that makes you wonder why it was not always part of the package. Anyone who has scratched a plant name on a popsicle stick and promptly lost it will know exactly what I mean.
What strikes me about POT+ is how it reframes the idea of sustainable design. So much green design falls into the trap of asking people to change their behavior significantly in exchange for a smaller environmental footprint. POT+ does not do that. The user experience is genuinely better: fewer tools to fumble with, a biodegradable pot that sidesteps the recycling bin debate, and a plant tag already built in. The sustainability is incidental from the user’s perspective, even though it is clearly the central intention from the designers’.
That alignment between good design and ethical design is harder to achieve than it looks. Students are often praised for one or the other, but rarely both. Sophie, Paul, and Paula merged perspectives from Communication & Product Design and Media & Product Design, which likely accounts for the final product feeling as considered in its branding as it is in its function. POT+ has a clear identity. It looks intentional, not experimental.
The Green Product Award recognized it for good reason. But the more interesting conversation is about what POT+ signals for design education. Eight weeks, three students, three different disciplines, and a finished concept that could genuinely replace a product category. That is not a student project in the diminutive sense of the phrase. It is the kind of outcome that most professional design teams would be proud to put their name on.
The plastic plant pot has been a quiet environmental problem for decades, hiding in plain sight because it is so mundane, so ubiquitous, so easy to overlook. POT+ does not try to be remarkable. It just quietly gets the job done better. And right now, that might be the most useful kind of design there is.
Every time I order food delivery, I already know what’s coming before I open the bag. A stack of plastic containers, lids that barely seal, and that guilty beat when I toss everything in the trash about five minutes after eating. It’s a ritual nobody talks about but everyone performs. It happens millions of times a day.
That’s the problem Kaja Brunke decided to sit with. The Polish designer, who earned her Master’s from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, didn’t approach meal delivery packaging with the usual sustainability playbook. She didn’t swap the plastic for bamboo and call it done. She asked a harder question: what if the container was never meant to be thrown away at all?
The result is ReBento, a returnable, reusable container system designed specifically for subscription meal delivery. It just won the Packaging category at the Green Product Award 2026, and once you understand what it’s actually doing, it’s hard to unsee how obvious the solution feels, and how long it took for someone to build it properly.
ReBento works like this: meals are delivered in durable, leak-proof containers. Inside, removable glass compartments let you separate and reheat food directly in the box, no transfer required. After you’re done, empty containers are collected by couriers on their next delivery run and cycled back into the system. No secondary logistics chain to build. No complicated drop-off points. It integrates into the delivery infrastructure that already exists.
That last part is what makes it genuinely clever. Most sustainable packaging concepts are designed in isolation, as if the supply chain is a blank canvas waiting to be reimagined. ReBento was designed around the reality that already exists. Brunke clearly understood that a solution only works if it doesn’t require the whole system to change around it. Couriers are already going door to door. Why not have them pick something up on the way back?
The glass compartments are a thoughtful detail that deserves more attention than they might initially get. Glass is heavy, yes, but it’s also the reason the dining experience actually improves. Food doesn’t absorb the smell of the container. You can reheat without transferring to another dish. The meal arrives as it was meant to be eaten. For anyone who has peeled hot soup-soaked rice out of a soggy paper container, that alone is worth talking about.
What Brunke has built is not just a product. It’s a framework for how meal delivery could work if the industry decided to take the waste problem seriously, rather than paper over it. The sector has largely settled for greenwashing: compostable containers that require industrial composting facilities most cities don’t have, or “recyclable” plastic that rarely makes it through the actual recycling process. ReBento sidesteps the whole debate by making durability the point.
I’ll be honest: I’m a little impatient for something like this to reach the mainstream. Subscription meal delivery is one of the fastest-growing segments of the food industry, and the packaging waste it generates is staggering. The irony is that the subscription model is actually the ideal environment for a returnable container system. The logistics are already in place. The customer relationship is already ongoing. The pieces are all there.
Brunke came to design through an unusual path: advanced math and physics in high school, a year on exchange in Illinois, and a degree grounded in solution-based thinking. You can feel that background in ReBento. It’s not a conceptual piece that looks beautiful in a portfolio and stops there. It’s a system that has been thought through to the point of asking: how does this actually get picked up, cleaned, and sent back out again?
That’s the kind of design thinking that doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves, because it’s not flashy. A returnable bento box won’t stop traffic the way a concept car does. But the best design isn’t always the loudest. Sometimes it’s the kind that makes you wonder why it took this long.
Walk into any supermarket and you’ll notice that the food gets a lot of attention, but the packaging it comes in? Almost none. We’ve become so accustomed to grabbing a plastic-wrapped chicken breast or a shrink-sealed block of cheese and tossing the container without a second thought that it has essentially become invisible. Which is exactly why Lars Biedermann’s ReLoopBox caught my attention the moment I came across it.
ReLoopBox is a circular, reusable container system designed to replace the disposable plastic packaging that floods our grocery stores, refrigerators, and eventually, our landfills. On the surface, it sounds like a straightforward sustainability pitch. But the more you look at it, the more you realize that Biedermann, an industrial design graduate from FH Joanneum in Austria, wasn’t just designing a container. He was designing a completely different logic for how food packaging should work.
The system uses standardized, vacuum-sealed containers made from copolyester, silicone, and stainless steel. These aren’t flimsy alternatives to plastic wrap. They’re built to be durable, reusable, and returnable, meant to circulate between consumers, manufacturers, and retailers rather than taking a one-way trip to the bin. Each container is embedded with a digital chip that tracks it through the supply chain, handling inventory and logistics with minimal friction. It’s the kind of detail that quietly separates a thoughtful design from a well-intentioned one.
The vacuum seal is also doing real work here, and it’s worth noting. One of the grimmer realities in food sustainability is that a significant portion of what we buy never actually gets eaten. Food goes bad too quickly, and a lot of that comes down to packaging that doesn’t do much beyond keeping things contained for the journey home. A vacuum environment slows spoilage significantly, which means ReLoopBox isn’t just arguing against plastic waste. It’s also quietly taking aim at food waste. That’s two problems addressed through one design decision, and I appreciate when a solution earns its own complexity.
Aesthetically, the design is clean and considered, which matters more than people give it credit for. Sustainable products have historically struggled with an image problem. They tend to look corrective rather than desirable, like they’re asking you to make a sacrifice. ReLoopBox doesn’t carry that energy. It looks like something that belongs in a well-designed kitchen, which is probably the smartest thing Biedermann could have done. If a product doesn’t look good, it doesn’t get adopted, and if it doesn’t get adopted, the environmental argument is moot.
My honest take is that the real challenge for a system like this isn’t the design itself, which is genuinely impressive. It’s behavioral. Getting consumers to return containers, getting retailers to build the infrastructure to accept them, getting manufacturers to commit to a circular model instead of a linear one, that’s a much bigger lift than any design brief can anticipate. We’ve seen well-designed reuse programs come and go because the return loop is where things tend to fall apart. Biedermann seems to understand this, which is why the digital chip integration is such a critical piece of the system. It removes guesswork from the tracking process and makes the logistics side of the loop far more manageable.
What makes ReLoopBox feel genuinely fresh isn’t that it proposes reuse. We’ve had reusable containers for decades. It’s that it proposes a reuse system, one that thinks about the full journey of a container rather than just the moment it sits on a shelf. Biedermann has described his practice as holistic design with a goal of contributing something positive to the world, and that philosophy is visible in every layer of this project.
Whether ReLoopBox eventually scales into something we see in mainstream retail remains an open question. But as a piece of design thinking, it’s the kind of proposal that makes you look at the grocery aisle a little differently, and realize that even the most mundane objects are still waiting to be redesigned.
