Designing a new packaging? Read this first.
There are two components to any piece of packaging; one is its physical form and two is its visual design.
The singular most aim of any packaging is protecting the product from damage. This constitues to how a packaging manifests in its physical form.
Packaging thus is a shield for products.
The practice of packaging brought a design opportunity to the forefront. It enabled products to stand out through branding and visual design.
Part 1 - Physical Form: A Brief Rundown
Early packaging examples include - wrapping food or incense sticks with leaves for freshness, storing drinks in wooden barrels or covering spices in paper. A lot of these were natural, biodegrable, mono materials. Metal containers used as packaging was probably the first form of highly processed non-mono material packaging. But these were intended to long last and made for reuse.
With the advent of consumerism, the field of packaging saw many technological advancements. {Side rant: I really dislike the word advancement, becuase to be honest what we infact advanced is trash}.
In the 16th century, folded cartons were designed for salt packaging. This was done at larger commercial scale and with time, there were a tremendous amounts of innvoations with materials such as plastic and paper for large scale production.
A quick study of colagte toothpaste packaging
Fast forward to today, Colgate toothpaste packaging. I chose to dissect Colgate because of its widespread use. There are a few components to its entire loop of physical packaging from manufacting till use. These are:
- From the factory, individually boxed toothpastes sit inside a bigger carton and shipped.
- From the bigger carton, individual toothpaste cartons are transfered to an aisle of a shop or a warehouse.
- Depending on the mode of customer purchase (online or offline), these are further shipped/packaged inside another cardboard box or a paper/plastic/cloth bag.
- At the time of consumption, the user separates the toothpaste tube from its carton.
So basically when you buy a colgate toothpaste, you have essentially also used: toothpaste tube and cap, a cardboard box or paper/plastic/cloth bag and a big carton. These are many complexities to usage, reuse and wastage for each of these touchpoints. But I have broken it down in this way to point at the bigger picture of the number of resources we employ when consusing one product.
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Now another thing to note would be: each year 1.5 billion toothpaste tubes are thrown away, which essentially means that all the above packaging touchpoints are also produced in enormous quantities.
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Above presented thoughts are important thinking points for all packaging designers. I know it has been on more minds than before [a big sigh!].
Whether be a large-scale (like Colgate) or small-scale production, incorporating problem solving when designing can lead to much needed innovative design ideas.
In the beginning, young designers may be inclied to find easily available solutions and it is okay to do that but also keep thinking of solutions as you go. So here are a few questions to think about when designing new packaging:
1. From where is the product sold out of? How many times does it incorporate transporting? How many times does it need to packaged?
2. How can the product be packaged in order to fulfil needs for a longer period? For example, if its a daily use product, can the quantity of products packaging together be in a high quantity that covers the customer needs for a few months or up to a year.
3. How many types of materials is each of the packaging using at each step? Plastic, paper, glass, metals, chemicals.
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Back to Colgate, their landscape and their efforts
Since we are discussing Colgate’s journey, its important to understand their efforts. They have a huge responsibility. With time, they did realise how hard to recycle toothpaste tubes made with multiple layers/types of plastic were dumped straight into landfills. And so they have worked on a new tube and cap.
They have moved to offering a mono-material packaged plastic tube, made entirely with HDPE #2 plastic and a PP #5 plastic cap. This was a conscious choice, since HDPE #2 is the most recycled plastic amongst all others and it can also be recycled up to 10 times.
The individual paper cartons are relatively easier to recycle. Paper fibers can be recycled into new products. The printed matter ends up as waste product.
With this being said, the reality is very different. Out of all the plastics trashed in the world, 15% is collected for recycling and around 9% of that is ultimately recycled. For paper and cardboard, 59–68% are recycled globally.
This makes me realise that Colgate has only just begun their efforts into incorporating recyclable packaging.
Part 2 of this article will contain ideas on visual design.
