Product Reviews

Part manifesto and part textbook, Designing Sustainable Packaging provides just what you want from a guide to a creative field: a sound overview of the subject in its contemporary context, followed by practical tutorials and examples. Scott Boylston is a college professor in Savannah, Georgia, but the book's American slant is offset by British spelling and appearances from limeys like Innocent.

Boylston ploughs straight into the fundamentals of what packaging is for and why today's industry is doing it all wrong. There's more than enough background here to make you sound like a sustainability guru at your next dinner party, leavened with profiles of people who are trying to make their boxes less noxious. At the sandal-wearing end, Twist sells natural sponges for kitchen use wrapped in a box that folds into a bird feeder. Meanwhile, high-tech behemoths such as HP are also coming up with ways to ship more in less. This is welcome news to someone who recently sliced two fingers trying to get into a Canon inkjet cartridge blister pack, only to discover another two layers of wrapping beneath - and all this to deliver a product measured in picolitres.

Among the chin-rubbing are some handy facts. Did you know that about 20% of the Pantone PMS colours are printed using ultra-toxic substances such as heavy metals? Metallics and fluoros are obvious suspects, but many of the warm reds also contain barium. Avoiding all of these

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would make a dull world, but for corporate identities at least, it would make sense to avoid dooming the client to repeating the same eco boo-boo on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the website quoted as a source of further information doesn't seem to contain it.

After all this chat, we arrive about halfway through the book at 'Materials and construction'. Following Josef Albers' exhortation to 'unprejudiced experiment... a free handling of materials without practical aims', the tutorials start with an Origami crane and quickly progresses to a tour through the scores, locks, tabs and wraps that are the nuts and bolts of paper-based packaging. This rather brief section punches (and folds, cuts and glues) above its weight thanks to the carefully thought-out photos and illustrations, which continue into the final chapter, a series of prototyping examples.

Rather than the factory floor, these are from the author's own students, and although they're very good, they only get as far as mock ups, not mass production. They're also, like the whole book, heavily biased towards paperboard as a material, but in fairness, it's one that's uniquely versatile, accessible and of course biodegradable.

Greening other materials is trickier. The sad story of Heineken's 'world bottle', or WOBO, is told by its creator, John Habraken: invented in the 1960s as a beer container to be re-used as a building system, it was brilliantly designed but didn't catch on. Dutch designer Rinus van den Berg has come up with a plastic successor, the shape of which enables it to lock to its neighbour, forming anything from a six-pack to a house. The problem remains that a single design would need to become ubiquitous to collect enough empties to build anything.

Boylston signs off a chatty and impressively content-heavy book with a full index, a slightly random glossary, and a bibliography, complete with an apologia for printed books, which 'if they are looked after and shared... will provide renewable supplies of knowledge'. Indeed.