The Design Management Review‘s current issue features a piece by our sustainability experts Grant Kristofek and Mark Bates. Colorblind, our extensive in-house research project on consumers and their perception and digestion of all things green, is the focus of the piece.
Download it here.
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.
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