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Designing Sustainable Packaging,

book written by Scott Boylston

published by Laurence King Publishing

At first glance, the soft cardboard brown cover and white lettering invites you with sobering simplicity, which in turn is the over all premise of this book. Having said that, cover to cover is jam packed with valuable case studies, tutorials, how-to guides and resources.

Brought to us by the visionaries at Laurence King Publishing. Before you even get to the meat of this book, Mr. Boylston opens a very brave door by calling out industry leaders to own up to the responsibility they owe their consumers and future buyers.  

Scott Boylston states that leaders of the merch industry have called sustainable packaging a 'specialty niche' or a 'contradiction in terms' basically saying that they don't have time to make their products available with minimal, sustainable and responsible packaging options. The short sightedness by these companies is astounding. 

Boylston poses the pivotal question that all packaging designers should ask themselves when faced with a product, 'is packaging even necessary?'

Though we'd like to see the responsibility of minimal packaging taken on by the manufactures, there are still people/consumers out there who just don't care. People with children who have to live in this world and all our non-biodegradable products that we leave behind, are buying their triple packaged paperweights, snow-globes and disposable cameras. 

What can be done?

Scott Boylston has done the research to help us make it easier to make a choice for a better, less damaging future.

Designing Sustainable Packaging is a handsome resource book for graphic designers and business leaders to learn theory and sustainable packaging practice through interviews with industry insiders and step-by-step tutorials. I also recommend this book to anyone who gives a shit, then for that person to give it to someone who doesn't give a shit and then watch them deny the ugly truth of the packaging industry.

The only way this book could be any better would be if it were written 20 years ago and supplied as required reading for business executives and marketing managers.