• March 29, 2024

Sustainable pack debate opened up by Iggesund

Iggesund Paperboard is working with the American crowdsourcing company Crowdspring to challenge the world’s designers to improve existing consumer packaging.

“Every day we all see examples of packaging that could be improved by a better choice of materials or a better design,” said Staffan Sjöberg, who is in charge of the project at Iggesund. “Now we’re giving designers all over the world the chance to contribute their ideas on how to replace packaging made of glass, plastic or metal with solutions that use paperboard.”

Sjöberg said that Iggesund was not looking for inexpensive ideas that could be put into commercial use. Instead, the aim was to get a picture of how global designers believed they could steer packaging development in a more sustainable direction.

“We will not claim any commercial rights to the ideas that come in,” Sjöberg said. “We’re just interested in getting a snapshot of how designers believe they can improve the packaging they see in the shops they visit on a daily basis. We want to publish the ideas and maybe reproduce some of them in physical form but we are not interested in exploiting them commercially.”

For Crowdspring the collaboration with Iggesund Paperboard is an unusual project. Normally the online marketplace’s services are used when someone wants either a number of inexpensive design proposals or a wide range of ideas.

“This is an unusual reason for initiating a project with us,” said Mike Samson, who is co-ordinating the project with Iggesund. “But we believe its combination of sustainability and innovative thinking will attract many of the thousands of designers listed in our database.”