Every coffee drinker will love the Liplid, an easily recyclable and biodegradable lid made from PulPac’s Dry Moulded Fibre that sits inside the cup, reducing spillage. But this is no student design concept: Sweden’s sustainable pioneer Max Burgers has ordered two million of these. It all seems almost laughably simple and obvious - which, as every designer knows, is the ultimate accolade.
Liplid states that its final coatings will be fully natural and will not impact the recyclability of the lids. However, you should confirm this and ensure that the chosen coatings will not have a negative impact if the lids were to biodegrade in the natural environment.
It might pain us to say it given our mission, but Liplid’s positioning is spot on: in listing the lid’s benefits, its sustainable credentials come in position five of six. We know how important it is to go plastic-free, but customers care about their drinking experience first. Can you find similarly powerful ways to ‘sell in’ the shift to plastic-free as part of a wider move to a better product?
We hope we have got you excited about the Liplid. But it remains an incremental change and we need lots of incremental changes, fast. Just consider the entire coffee cup and its lifecycle: what is the main beverage container made from; what is the coffee/tea/hot chocolate packaged in prior to preparation; are the stirrers and sugar packets plastic-free; how are all of these transported to the restaurant? And that is before you get to the rest of the fast food industry.