Week 12

MY IDEA:

Sustainability. How can this raise awareness and educate in a modern, efficient way?

I strongly believe that although brands are required by law to follow sustainable practice, they aren’t. This is evidenced in my experience with greenwashing – brands using the colour green to suggest their brand is environmentally friendly when in reality, it couldn’t be further from the truth. A great example of this is Coca-cola Life which I explored in my dissertation previously studying:

The identity of Coca-Cola Life is green, and the writing is organic looking. The brand created a logo, and titled their plastic bottle “PlantBottle”. On further investigation, the production of the plastic bottle was actually equally as harmful (if not more) due to using sugar cane derivatives. The original bottle was PET plastic, resulting in immense amounts of harmful carbon dioxide emissions. The PlantBottle uses sugar-cane and therefore destroys crops.


This is something I’m really passionate about.
For this weeks project, I have been thinking about looking at how a shift of application could really promote and raise awareness of sustainability.

A shopping experience; but the shopper wears virtual reality glasses that identify whether brands they desire are sustainable. They can go shopping whilst wearing these glasses as they are disguised. In order for the glasses to recognise brands, the glasses would have a micro-sim with a database of verified sustainable brands (that are updated daily).

  • I have edited pictures of Nano SIM’s and placed them combined into the glasses (picture taken off Google images). As the glasses are clear you can see the SIM.

How can I strengthen the link of sustainability between a user and a brand?

First things first; there are so many categories of sustainable practice. Some examples being: compostable, organic, no palm oil, no plastic, saving the rainforests, ethical trading, recyclable, reusable, carbon footprint, the list goes on. There are so many variants and it gets to a point where we as consumers have to just “filter” products to the most important things we want to personally eliminate from our lives. Let’s face it, unless we live in a cave, have no luxuries, hunt for our own food and clothing, creating medicines from plants – it’s unrealistic to have a 100% sustainable lifestyle. I’m disappointed that it has to be this way, but it’s unfortunately the price we pay for evolution. We are in too deep at this point, and this is why it’s so important to slow down our damage to planet earth. We will never reverse the damage done but we can try to slow the impact of future damage.

I really dislike plastic. If plastic packaging claims it’s recyclable… That still doesn’t mean the whole package and could just be 10% of the package that gets recycled. Do consumers know this? Sadly not (although I think people are becoming increasingly aware). They recycle the whole package thinking they’ve done a good deed (myself included), only to realise the whole bag of recycling can be discarded as one lid is categorised as ‘contamination’. I was horrified when I first learnt this.

Supplier chains are smart; they know if they get the “seal of approval” then it doesn’t matter what actually happens to the product. This is where my product comes into play. Perspective aims to expose brands for what they really are and therefore encourages honest, ethical principles behind food production and packaging.

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