JKR

I feel a little embarrassed talking about the social aspect of commercial design. I think this reflects a wider shift over the past couple of decades. Back in the seventies, ‘good design’ (e.g. work that was socially aware, that did not over-use materials, that offered an appropriate solution, rather than a fancy one etc. etc.) was the benchmark for quality. Some still carry the torch of course, but I would observe that where design used to be framed in societal terms, it is now typically framed in cultural ones. So many of us (including myself) are happy to praise surface sheen, and not poke about too deeply. Corporate social responsibility is now a department not a guiding spirit. Just a hunch, but it might explain why I don’t expect a post on more sustainable packaging for the lunchbox to quicken many pulses, and indeed that the entire subject is ripe for ‘god, more nanny state nonsense’ cynicism. But bear with…

The New York Times ran an interesting piece a couple of weeks ago that looked at how schools were effectively guilting kids into bringing lunches not wrapped in plastic or foil, and were encouraging the replacement of paper sandwich bags with reusable tuperware. It was eye opening on a few levels. Firstly from a U.S. perspective, this was viewed (even by a liberal paper) as asking a lot of long suffering parents. “What if you ran out of Tupperware?” it wondered. So their system is basically even more spoilt than ours. And the guilting out approach probably contributes to any society being made up of big babies who cannot make the right choice of their own free thinking. It shifts the responsibility. It’s also interesting that while the lunchbox contents need to appear sustainable, back at home the bread, spread etc. etc. come from the usual landfill bound packaging candidates. But on the other hand, if you teach kids young about their packaging footprint, one hopes the lessons will stick.

So what’s my point? I guess that we are not too far removed from the States, culturally, which means we can expect similar packaging initiatives here. I would imagine this has a commercial dimension. For those parents in competition with other parents at the school gates to be seen as socially aware, buying the right things to go in the lunch box will be a driver of choice. It follows that any pre-packed foods – the smoothies, yogurts, biscuits (but one imagines not the turkey twiizzlers) will be ahead of the curve if their packaging is seen to be reusable at best, sustainable as a bare minimum. Perhaps it’s time for a water brand to sell big reusable vessels which can be decanted into a reusable aluminum bottle (branded, naturally)? Or for smoothies to come in chalk substrate polymers which can bio-degrade. Which might sound pie in the sky, but one can be sure legislation will come along any day now, so the smart brands might as well capture a little ‘thought leader’ kudos by being pro-active. See, I managed to drag the social implications back to commercial ones in short order.

Finally, back to those U.S. parents faced with the Herculean task of buying a couple of extra tupperwares. Just to note that not much in design or society is ever really that new, consider the history of reusable lunch boxes. At the turn of the nineteenth century,  kids used old biscuit and cigar tins which they redecorated themselves. This ‘re-use, re-cycle’ approach would now be a ‘Guardian reader’ parents idea of cutting edge folksie style guess. Later, for grown ups, along came Dome lunch boxes – an American classic from the late thirties. They were a robust design for working men, with capacity in the lid for a Thermos, and protected food in a way the previous thin handled ‘pales’ could not.

These two strands informed the children’s tin lunch boxes common in the Fifties with the Aladdin company and others producing ones decorated with heroes of the day such as Hopalong Cassidy. They are now considered design classics but they were phased out in the seventies because playground mums feared the robust tins had potential as weapons, hence the flimsy (arguably less sustainable) plastic ones we see today. So there you go – bloody do-gooders with the best intentions making an arguably misguided choice for the rest of us. Playground politics and packaging have enjoyed a long relationship.