Tag Archives: plastic

Coca-Cola, the world’s largest plastic polluter, is testing out the viability of paper bottles

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It seems like the title of the world’s largest plastic polluter (for 4 years in a row) is finally beginning to get on the nerves of the executives at Coca-Cola. After making a statement only last year that they don’t intend on breaking free from plastic, the company’s slowly begun re-evaluating its supply chain and choice of materials.

Thanks to a partnership with Danish company Paboco (Paper Bottle Company), Coca-Cola has now unveiled its first ‘paper bottle’. Available for a limited online trial in Hungary, Coca-Cola is planning a run of 2,000 bottles of the plant-based beverage AdeZ. It’s barely anything to begin with, but it is a start… and it gives Paboco, the company behind the bottle’s design, a much-needed boost.

Paboco’s paper bottle comes with an inner bio-polymer lining to provide a waterproof barrier (so that the paper doesn’t get soggy). The outer layer is made from a Nordic wood-pulp-based paper, and provides the perfect substrate for printing on, eliminating the need for a label. The bottle itself can be molded quite like plastic bottles are, paving the way for the use of forms, textures, and patterns to help the product stand-out… and the necks of the bottle can be threaded too, allowing for the use of a paper cap (with the option of the crimped metal caps too). While the bottle is biodegradable, Coca-Cola hopes to develop a design and supply chain that allows bottles to be recycled just like paper. “Our vision is to create a paper bottle that can be recycled like any other type of paper, and this prototype is the first step on the way to achieving this,” said Stijn Franssen, EMEA R&D Packaging Innovation Manager at Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola’s limited run should be met with a bit of skepticism (after all, 2000 bottles isn’t enough, is it?) but the challenges faced by the company are understandable. Bottles can easily get crushed or damaged when transported in large volumes, a complication that exponentially increases with CO2-filled pressurized beverage containers. AdeZ, however, seems to be the perfect candidate for this trial run, given that it’s a thick, dairy-free smoothie that contains seeds, fruit juices, and vitamins. If successful, Coca-Cola may look to gradually expand on this approach, helping it achieve the company’s “World Without Waste” sustainable packaging goal of substantially reducing its waste footprint and developing solutions for easily recycling its bottles and cans, and shifting to using only 100% recyclable packaging materials by the year 2030.

Designers: Paboco & Coca-Cola

Images via Coca Cola and Paboco

5 years in the making, this chair is produced in a single mold, reduces waste & saves space!

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Chairs are one of the most common projects given to design students because it takes a lot of creativity to turn an everyday mundane object that has already been redesigned a million times into something innovative – it is the design world’s equivalent of “How will you sell me this regular pen?” Designers Martinelli Venezia and Alessandro Stabile discussed the idea of a chair that represents the contemporary world, in terms of production technology, sales methods, and features. The chair had to be an iconic, democratic product, meant to be sold online, and explored the theme of hyper-seriality.

Chair 1:1 was born after a rigorous five-year design process. Venezia and Stabile had finally achieved their goal and created a mountable/demountable chair whose every piece was molded in one go. This optimized the mold size, speeded up production, and reduced waste drastically when compared to a traditional chair. “The chair is sold just as it comes out of the mold, bypassing several steps; it will be the buyer who will complete the process: this is what we call hyper-seriality,” says the designer duo. “When looking at the Chair 1:1, it is inevitable to have a blast from the past, remembering the boxed toy kits. As in that case, there are no screws nor bolts: assembly is effortless and immediate. Mounting an object makes a bond with it and makes you feel its full value; it builds an affection that stops you from getting rid of it.”

The fastening elements of the individual parts are made to be easily producible and extremely resistant. It has been designed to be easily stored, shipped, and transported – 26 boxed up chairs take up only 1 square meter which is the key to increasing online sales as well as shipping sustainably! “While designing, we have often wondered whether in a world saturated with products, it was right to work in the direction of hyper-seriality with a material such as plastic. We believe, however, that the real mistake is to combine it with other materials that make it hard to recycle as well as to use it for packaging or in disposable products,” explain Venezia and Stabile. A sustainable product also has a long lifespan which reduces the need to replacement and therefore reduces excessive consumption as well as production waste which is why Chair 1:1  is made with single-material.

Designers: Martinelli Venezia and Alessandro Stabile

chair1

The Apple AirPods Max ‘Light’ are an affordable, alternative pair of headphones with a plastic design

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These budget-friendly pair of headphones were designed to give the AirPods Max their very own iPhone SE moment.

As the iPhone breached the $1000 price-mark for the first time, Apple parallelly unveiled the SE, an affordable smartphone that provided the Apple experience, but without that hefty price tag. Designer Muhammet Uzuntaş has envisioned something similar for the $550 AirPods Max. Titled the Apple AirPods Max Light (a bit of a word-salad there), these conceptual headphones take Apple’s high-end audio experience and make them more accessible. The headphones come with a plastic body, while constantly maintaining the original silhouette. The headband is retained from the AirPods Max, although the cans themselves are made from plastic as opposed to anodized aluminum… that would help eliminate that condensation problem some of the AirPods Max headphones have been having. The band extends all the way to the sides, intersecting with the individual ear-cups. The right side of the band features a rolling cylinder which lets you control the volume by sliding forwards or backwards (as opposed to the crown in the original design), and the earpieces even slide up and down the cylindrical channel to help you adjust the fitting of the overall product.

The AirPods Max Light bridge a very visible gap in Apple’s product range. A gap left by the visible lack of Beats By Dre products on Apple’s shelves. Although conceptual, the AirPods Max Lite aim to fill that void with their affordable-yet-premium design and performance!

Designer: Muhammet Uzuntaş

Watch a 1978 X-Wing Toy Restored to New Condition (without Using The Force)

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Proving there are few things more satisfying to watch than a job well done, YouTuber Rescue & Restore documents the process by which he carefully returns an original 1978 Star Wars X-Wing toy to its former glory. Of course, my parents never bought me any of these name-brand Star Wars toys growing up because they were too expensive, so all I got were the knock-offs, and I’m pretty sure my Z-wing was mostly made out of lead.

Using a process called retrobriting, which appears to involve submerging the pieces in a liquid solution and blasting them with UV lights, Rescue & Restore is able to bleach all the yellowing from the white plastic. He then replaces the electronics (responsible for the light and laser sounds), adds a new set of decals, and cleans the clear cockpit window with an ultra-fine polishing compound. Honestly, I feel like my car’s windshield could use some of that too.

Do you also own a vintage X-Wing toy that’s seen better days, but don’t feel like restoring it to its former glory before selling? No worries, don’t do anything and just tell everyone it’s actually an incredibly rare ‘submerged in a Dagobah swamp’ variation, but you’re willing to let it go for only double what the regular model is worth.

[via Laughing Squid]

This award-winning to-go coffee cup comes with its own integrated origami lid!

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The LIDfree is less of a redesign and more of a re-imagination of lids themselves. A sustainable improvement on plastic lids would probably be to design lids that are made out of paper instead… but to redesign a cup in a way that it doesn’t need a lid? That’s truly something worth marveling. Meet the LIDfree, a to-go paper cup that comes with its own fold-in lid. While the lid isn’t 100% spill-proof (not even the plastic ones are), it does a few key things really well.

A. Preventing spillage.
B. Merging of two products (cup and lid) into one.
C. Giving you a central channel to put your straw (and even giving you the option to not use one)
and finally, D. replacing a wasteful plastic part with a recyclable paper one.

The LIDfree cup features a nifty folding rim that collapses inwards to shut the cup. While it leaves a central hole open, the design still, for the most part, remains spill-proof as the hole remains at an elevated position when the cup is lying on its side. Moreover, the central hole is perfect for inserting straws of any width (hopefully eco-friendly ones!) as the origami elements expand and contract to the diameter of the straw. Drinking from the cup is as simple as opening the rim outwards to turn it into a regular cup, and when opened, the LIDfree cup remains stackable, ensuring that the design satisfies all needs, from that of the barista to the consumer, to finally the environment!

The LIDfree Cup is a winner of the Golden Pin Design Award for the year 2020.

Designers: Chia-Chun Chuang & Pei-Chun Hsueh

This modular low-cost flotation device uses recycled plastic bottles!

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The World Health Organization is spearheading efforts to help children in low-income areas learn how to swim, and the SAVIOUR concept attempts at creating highly-effective, low-cost training tools for children as they gradually pick up swimming. The Saviour is a modular system of interlocking tubes that help you create flotation devices. The tubes don’t float themselves, but rather, allow you to attach multiple plastic bottles around the rim to help the overall product stay afloat. You can either assemble the Saviour to form a U-shaped training apparatus, or join multiple pieces to close the U, turning it into an O-shaped device that children can use as a tube.

The Saviour is low-cost, and its individual modules can easily be 3D-printed based on demand. Moreover, it utilizes plastic bottles, helping recycle waste into something vastly more useful. If a plastic bottle gets damaged, it can easily be replaced with another one, allowing you to quickly upgrade/repair your training gear. Besides, the colorful bands on the Saviour help increase its visibility, allowing you to spot it floating on the water from a distance!

The Saviour Modular Swimming Set is a winner of the Golden Pin Design Award for the year 2020.

Designers: Chih-Shan Huang & Wan-Ju Wu

The world’s first item-tracker made from recycled ocean-plastic

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The choice of material for Chipolo’s latest Ocean Series trackers is quite poetic if you ask me. The trackers help you keep track of your personal belongings – things of value to you – but ironically or poetically enough, they’re made from the things you don’t consider valuable… single-use plastics.

Through a strategic partnership with Oceanworks.co to source ocean-based plastic waste, the Chipolo ONE Ocean tracking device comes made with a recycled-plastic body. Fishing nets, trawls, and ropes floating in the sea are collected in the shallow areas of the ocean near the shoreline, before being cleaned, treated, and turned into polypropylene plastic pellets. These pellets are the primary raw material used to create the outer body of Chipolo’s tracking device. While it isn’t much plastic to begin with (each tracking chip is the size of a coin), Chipolo is committed to helping reduce plastic waste in the ocean… in fact, they’re even committing to pledge $1 from the profits of each Chipolo ONE Ocean sold towards the non-profit organization Oceanic Global to support ocean clean-up efforts.

The Chipolo ONE Ocean joins its popular line of tracking devices, helping you keep track of your belongings from your keys to your wallet, or even your backpack. Just attach your Chipolo to any item you want to track and connect it with the Chipolo app on your iPhone or Android phone. You can ring the tracking device from the Chipolo App to find them, or see its last known location on a map, if they’re out of the Bluetooth range. The devices are backward-compatible too, and you can double press your Chipolo device to help locate your connected smartphone if you can’t find it. Each Chipolo ONE Ocean comes powered by a CR2032 coin battery, giving it a battery life of up to 2 years.

Designers: Chipolo in collaboration with Oceanworks.co and Oceanic Global

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Can NIVEA’s 3D printed shower gel refill station prototype really reduce plastic packaging waste?

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Brands are consciously moving towards eco-friendly practices and the first hurdle every single one of them has to overcome is plastic packaging waste. NIVEA’s parent company is German giant Beiersdorf and they are on a mission to reduce packaging waste by minimizing and closing their material cycles. And for NIVEA that meant launching a shower gel refill station! Now it is a good first step and has its pros but also has some cons. The biggest con is that shower gels itself are not good for the environment and there is no way to know how many bottles actually get rinsed clean before they are recycled – otherwise, it doesn’t work. Shower gels also need a lot of water to be made, and as climate change makes the world hotter/drier, the water crisis is already a big issue in many countries. A solution to that? Bar soaps! NIVEA makes those too, they use less water and can be packaged in recycled paper – that is the real solution but if this refill station reduces some plastic waste and sparks a movement for the brand to take bigger steps, then we are here to see it.

The prototype is going to be tested in select locations where the brand will gather data on how consumers are interacting, feeling, reacting to the concept of reusable bottles. The prototype machine was made with their in-house 3D printers. NIVEA hopes that with this refill station they will make it convenient for consumers to reuse containers and reduce plastic usage. Once they experience that it is easy to make small sustainable lifestyle changes, they will be quicker to adopt it as a habit. The refill station has been carefully designed, developed, and engineered by a cross-functional team within Beiersdorf’s global packaging and R&D functions. Consumers can refill up to three times before sending their bottles to be recycled and get a new one for hygiene reasons – this limitation slows down the plastic consumption problem but without longevity in the solution, it will not end the cycle.

Caroline Zia, Senior Formula Developer at Beiersdorf wanted to make sure that the concept worked for sustainability and for the consumer’s experience. “The formulations need to withstand the additional burden of refilling and we had to carefully choose our products after extensive internal testing. Also, the machine had to be programmed for additional cleaning protocols so that we could guarantee multiple filling loops and still meet our safety and sustainability criteria,’ she explains. The machine’s design had to also account for the retailer’s interior requirements while providing easy user experience. “We decided to use light as visual support to guide the users. Whenever one of the dedicated refill-bottles has been filled or a bar code has been printed, the integrated LED lights give feedback to the consumer,” says Marta Suslow, Concept Designer at Beiersdorf’s packaging department. Other details include formula choice and refill cycles, sophisticated pumps, color-changing lights, a label printer, and a programmed microcontroller.

While this is a good start, personal care brands, especially global giants like NIVEA can step up their game to find real solutions that make it a sustainable choice. You already have the product and the presence, pivot to reducing plastic waste at a larger scale as well as reduce water consumption with one ‘clean’ move – soap.

Designers: Marta Suslow, Caroline Zia, Koushik Sreedhar, Bernhard Felten, Cecile Ratschow of Beiersdorf

 

This 3D-printed structure prevents your face mask from collapsing as you breathe

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What we really need is for everyone to wear face-masks that prevent the transmission of germs. What we DON’T need is for those face-masks to make it harder for us to breathe, right? As you inhale, most flimsy fabric masks collapse inwards because of the negative air-pressure created inside the mask… it’s honestly something most people can deal with, but if you’re someone with pre-existing respiratory difficulties, it could make regular breathing rather difficult.

The Cannula mask avoids this problem with its reinforcing endoskeleton. A thin plastic grille, this skeleton gives the mask its defining structure, preventing it from pressing against your face the same way a hanger prevents clothes from getting crushed by retaining its shape. Designed to be worn by people with respiratory difficulties, the endoskeleton even comes with a hollow spine that allows you to plug a nasal cannula to it, letting you direct fresh oxygen right to the wearer’s nose; effectively allowing them to inhale and exhale freely without worrying about a flimsy mask smothering them every time they try to breathe.

Designer: BDCI