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, creating 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 context is everything. Take food waste, for example: currently a third of all the world’s food is wasted and the emissions from producing, transporting and decomposing that waste account for 8–10% of global greenhouse gases. So, whilst many people are concerned about single-use plastic clogging up our oceans, using low-energy plastic film packaging can play a crucial role in extending shelf life and reducing food waste, making it a sustainable choice in this context.  

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 ones? It certainly requires much more energy to produce a bottle in stainless steel than PET. How can a brand be sure that a consumer is going to use it enough times for it to 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 to help nudge their behaviour.

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 paper packaging solutions are better and that tote bags are saving the planet, when in fact, reusable HDPE bags are, for each use, almost 200 times less damaging to the climate.  

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. 

This Sustainable Design Handbook outlines the thinking, considerations, and often the compromises involved in steering a product’s trajectory toward lower environmental impact—demonstrating that there is never a single solution. It requires a combination of choices and strategies, tailored to each 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:

80% of a product's environmental impact is determined during the design phase (European Commission).