A recent Financial Times article, entitled “Plastic: The Elephant In the Room” by Sam Knight, was particularly meaningful to me. It illustrated an important point. Too often, ecological issues are presented in simplistic, black and white terms–plastic is bad, glass is good; things that decompose are good, things that don’t are bad. However, the reality is that sustainable solutions need to address complex issues involving many gray areas and dichotomies.

Case in point: during a recent visit at a recycling facility, I discovered that polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, typically used in milk packaging, have a very high commercial value, because they are recyclable. Meanwhile, colored glass bottles have a very low commercial value, because the brown glass that results from their recycling is considered undesirable. So, the PET bottles are carefully rescued from the trash, while the rest of the glass piles up in great big mounds around the facility.

For us designers, this complexity presents a great opportunity to offer consumers ecologically sensible choices and to make these choices attractive to them. By applying our knowledge of design along with our understanding of economic tradeoffs and chemical and biological impact to the product development process, we have the ability to not only to provide sustainable solutions, but also to make the ordinary extraordinary. For example, PET is now being recycled in great quantities for decking and park bench products. While this material is ordinarily gray, it fades in the sunlight, aesthetically enhancing it and adding charm to the overall design.

Of course, the biggest contribution we can make is to apply the adage of Mis Van Der Roh, “Less is more”, and maybe add the words of Dieter Rams, “Less, but better!”. Neither Van derRohe nor Rams meant that we should design less, but that we should create more value by eliminating the confusing, the wasteful, and the unnecessary. We are discovering that this is both an urgent and complex design challenge.