Silver is the New Green? Shifting to Sustainable Living Through Design

Small shifts towards sustainable living can make a big difference. Imagine a can of Coke. Red, right? Maybe not. The designer Harc Lee has invented a can with a difference. It's a can of Coke with no color, simply an embossed Coke symbol. It's funky and it's sleek, but is it sustainable design?

Now, if this were a campaign from Coke, some might accuse the company of greenwashing, trying to make itself look like a paragon of sustainable living by creating an "eco" can. However, the design is actually a proposal from a design firm, a simple suggestion that reflects the idea that miniscule changes, when performed on a large scale, make a huge difference. Why no paint? Well, creating a thin film of paint and adding it to a can involves materials and energy. While these contributions of energy and materials might seem tiny, the net impact of making a change like this can be profound. When we're looking at producing millions of cans, reducing the use of one thin layer of paint can make a big difference.

Or consider the disposable cup from retailers like Starbucks. Yes, it's preferable to use a reusable cup, unless you take it home and wash it in its own personal sink of hot, soapy water. However, a lot of people are not going to use a reusable cup. Starbucks used to provide two cups, one as a sleeve for the other so you could avoid burning your hands. Now, Starbucks provides a small corrugated sleeve that's about a third of the size of the cup, if that. Same purpose, different design. Each person who uses one of these sleeves instead of an extra cup sends one cup to the landfill, but the sleeve can be recycled. One cup instead of two cups in the landfill, time and again. That's a lot of cups.

Changes like this might seem like they simply skim the surface of what sustainable living means. And yes, they are not changing our culture into one that treats all manufactured items as cradle-to-cradle endeavors, using a waste as a resource. They're not embracing permaculture and the back-to-the-land movement. But neither should they simply be treated as a publicity stunt. The net impact of a shift in production can be profound, especially when you're talking about the products of a very large corporation. In addition to thinking about transformative cultural change, we can also consider moving to using less as a matter of course. Perhaps over time, using less will transform into using waste as a resource, transforming our culture into one that values materials at all stages of their life cycle.