Re-use is the sincerest form of Recycling
Originally posted on Linked-In.
The question: Do you care about Sustainability? Is it the right thing to do or just the latest fade?
My answer: My firm believes in creating design standards that empower and enforce this wherever possible. I have always directed my clients along the lines of “re-use is the sincerest form of recycling.”
When it comes to the idea that sustainability is the latest trend. I believe that people are throwing it about to either get on the band wagon of manipulating consumers and suppliers, or as an effort to beef up their Corporate Responsibility program while this is in vogue. There are a few organizations that do it because that’s their core belief system. I am not talking about them.
As professionals in marketing, branding and package design, I think we all need to read David Baker’s eye-popping article titled “The Sad Fade of Branding and When Sustainable Isn’t” and then ask ourselves whether we are developing recommendations that will sustain themselves once the hype has calmed.
We love those brands who help us feel better about who we are by letting us define ourselves using their morals and values, like sustainability.
Personally, I question the sustainability of business models like NAU (the current poster child for the sustainability movement.) Sure its smart to get the consumer to pay for the shipping, which on some level eases our collective guilt over the fact that we drove an SUV or high performance German automobile to the mall to pick out our stuff, instead of from a catalog or website. In reality this model isn’t sustainable, because our generation has already made peace with our duality: wanting to be green on one hand and thinking nothing of a weekend shopping trip to shop in a city 3,000 miles from home. We want it all and we want it now (thank you Freddy Mercury!)
The good news this hype will likely result in sustainability and eco-friendliness being just another minimum price of entry point within corporate accountability. And this, despite all of the noise, is good for humanity.