Workshop

We spoke to Stephan for the Courier podcast. Listen above or read the story below.

‘The idea is to have every brand, every company that you can think of, have a page on their website at /packaging. So if you're Nike, it would be nike.com/packaging. And on that page, you would talk about your philosophy around packaging, what you're doing to reduce the amount of packaging, what you're doing to help consumers know how to dispose or reuse your packaging, where you want to go next, what are the things that are still unsolved that you are planning to work on, etc.

The reason why we're doing this is, first of all, there's a huge shift in consumers who want to buy from companies that are thinking about [sustainable packaging], and they have a hard time finding the companies that do this. The information is very fragmented and hard to find. So standardising around that URL sets up the expectation that if you're buying from a company, you can go to that URL and find some useful information on there.

And then also for companies as an ecosystem to learn from each other, to open source their knowledge about what they've done and what’s worked for them. There are very few studies published. Patagonia had a really great one about why they continued using poly-mailers despite the fact that they're made of plastic. It’s because they found that the footprint was much lower than allowing the product to get damaged in transit and all the return shipping. And so that actually was a pretty seminal piece that was published years ago, but it's one of the very rare pieces. And so we really wanted to promote the idea that everyone should be sharing this knowledge and making it easily available and that consumers would be interested in that. 

So, if you go to slashpackaging.org, you can search for any company in the world and it'll show you their listing and what they have currently on their /packaging page which, for the most part, is a 404 error!'