Designing for Sustainability
For 30 years Ultra Creative has been serving up a unique client gift during the holidays. From brand parodies to more complex creations, our Ultra Holiday Chocolate project is an annual undertaking in trend tracking, package design, and delight delivery.
This year as part of an overall study of our own internal sustainability practices, and externally watching the increased attention to the circular economy, we ventured even further into our desire to create a holiday chocolate package and experience that was not only creative and delicious, but also pulled the levers of sustainability in a way we had never done before. Additionally, we considered the environmental impact as we looked at each step in the design process.
We set out to improve our practices and understanding of the complexities of creating sustainable packaging, not to create the most sustainable Ultra Chocolate gift. As we suspected and came to learn, sustainable choices are a series of trade-offs creatively, and push boundaries that can be difficult to move, particularly when it comes to the budget.
With that in mind, here is the set questions for any brand or project questioning sustainability & design, and how we answered them in BlankSpace, Ultra’s client gift for 2019.
The Ultra Chocolate process has traditionally started with a scrape: scraps of inspiration, trends, directions, and design – printed and collected in huge piles and pinned to our project wall. But this year we took our inspiration scrape digital and collected scrap in folders that we shared via projection.
As a team we felt this was a successful change and not a difficult adaptation, although it lacked the collaborative, tangible, “pinning” and moving of influences and confluences that we’d experienced as a team.
Initially we searched for custom made molded pulp packaging (a la egg cartons) but gave up after our research realized that both the physical size of our ultimate package, and our minimum order was much too small.
We played with existing structures for something that held the same spark as the pulp packaging we longed to use. Nothing felt correct and we didn’t want to compromise the design or try to design against something that was already in the zeitgeist, like a moulded take-out container.
Ultimately we designed an action-oriented folded box made with FSC certified paper from Neenah and Mohawk. Unfortunately, the gray paper we chose was widely out of stock in the US and no replacement could be found, so a carton was shipped from Europe, degrading our efforts considerably.
This year we focused on finding a local chocolatier so that we could work with them directly and avoid both shipping costs and all the shipping materials it takes to get the chocolate to our assembly space before it’s packaged for our gift.
Our chocolatier creates vegan (maple syrup) or honey sweetened chocolates with honey from their own rooftop bees, as opposed to chocolate made with dairy and sugar, industries which struggle with sustainability.
The majority of the BlankSpace box utilizes gray uncoated paper and black, soy based ink. Our hope was that this singular ink cut down on the amount of waste and cleanup that would occur during the press runs. We utilized half-tone dots in places to achieve some of the gradation of tone we needed.
The exterior of the box is wrapped in black paper with black core board, eliminating the need to print additional heavy ink.
We chose to have the chocolates wrapped in parchment, as opposed to compostable cellophane, to continue the environmentally friendly vibe, and the timeless “space-age sample” aesthetic.
This year the outer carton and shipping carton were combined into a singular shipable piece. This eliminated an exterior box that we’d needed in years past.
The carton and box are recyclable.
Our choice of printer was based in our confidence of execution and in the ways their methods would help further our sustainability goals.
We chose a local printer, to keep shipping considerations out of the question. Our printer for BlankSpace utilizes heat from the printing presses to help heat their building, and they used “wind-generated electricity for the power“ to print our materials.
TAKEAWAYS & NEXT STEPS
There are practices and techniques we can bring forward into the coming years’ holiday chocolate process and discoveries from our experience that we can use for many projects agency wide.
For years we’ve used FSC papers and certainly considered elements of environmental impact, but we didn’t pursue those projects with the same lens as this. The deeper dive we took this year invigorated the project, creating interesting choices and opportunity costs that we never considered before.
Compared to years past we greatly improved our sustainability, which is something to be proud of, but we still have a long way we can go to do even better.