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As new laws are enacted, with new global policies that shift the onus of Scopes 1, 2 and 3 to the businesses that produce the stuff we fill our lives and homes with, the big wake-up will finally happen. Somehow, we have allowed a society to evolve where the biggest polluters have zero responsibility for the devastation their products cause once they have served their useful life. Can you imagine a medical business with such scant responsibility, let alone liability for the healthcare they deliver? There really is no difference. That’s why our Metrics That Matter are so fundamental to the new creative process.
Sometimes it’s not about what you know. It’s about what you ask. Knowing the questions is better than old knowledge, because every single project or material or brief is different, and the possible solutions are changing very rapidly. The following are great questions to unearth the real positive impact your creative can cause.
All too often the creative agency is briefed halfway through the gestation of the product. This hampers the level of creativity you can apply to the solution. Push your clients to include you much earlier in the process so you can challenge: ‘why does it have to be in liquid form?’, ‘could this fit into a prefill permanent packaging model’, ‘can we design this differently so it is genderless / waterless / modular / infinitely more circular?’.
In 2022, we ran out of our annual allocation of natural resources by July 28th. This means we used 1.75 planet’s worth of resource, taking the materials from our children’s future, using it today and calling it GDP. Clearly this cannot continue.
A brilliant question to ask of every project is ‘does this delay Earth Overshoot Day?’ If the answer is YES, the project/business is set for success. If it is NO, then it is fundamentally wrong and belongs in the last century when we didn’t know better. We need to design for a different future NOW. And it is you, the creative industry, that have the skills to do so.
Life cycle analyses are expensive for a reason. The amount of data needed is huge, including facts of material provenance, transportation footprints, emissions through material extraction or manufacture and the impact during actual usage. The key metric often missed is the impact of a product at the end of its life. Meaning life cycle analyses aren’t what they say they are, a measurement of a product’s impact through its entire existence. Just measuring the impact of materials is not enough. You need to know how they are going to be used, where they are shipped from and to, and what happens to them at the end of their useful life.
For this reason, we don’t give comparable metrics on materials in PlasticFree. It would be misleading when we have no idea how such materials are going to be used, shipped or combined. Think about this when presented with LCA facts that push you to use, or not use certain materials. Ask to see that LCA. You’ll then realise just how inevitably restricted it is in what it measures.
We have decades of fake facts built up throughout the internet, now considered truth.‘Organic cotton uses more water than non-organic’ – fake fact. ‘Aluminium is too energy intensive and pollutive to be a green material’ – fake fact. To counteract this plethora of fake facts, we constantly consult our global experts to dig deeper and find material truths, and believe that PlasticFree is as transparent and trustworthy as possible. Make sure all your fact sources can say the same.
As a creative you have the visionary skillset to go beyond – beyond just a material tweak, a recycled polymer, a slightly better version of the status quo. What the world needs now is for mankind to actually live in a different, less wasteful, more regenerative way. So pushing for system change versus material swap should always be one of your proposals. Your clients rarely have the bandwidth or, dare we say it, ability to think beyond tweaks on the steering wheel. That’s your job, our job. Let’s get busy.
Most companies now know the extent of the change that needs to happen within their business to guarantee they survive. And let’s not pretend this is about consumer education – people buy what they are sold and we need to simply sell them something different, something better. No, the roadblock ahead is higher up the food chain. How can you prove that this solution is not just best for the planet and every living thing upon it, but also best for business? If you crack that, you can sell the wildest of dreams.
