Recently I’ve been walking down the streets of downtown Toronto and to no surprise, most stores have their window displays redecorated to the back to school promotion theme. Most stores just focuses on how great of a deal (or should I say ‘steal’) to buy all new back to school products right now, for example the advertisement for Staples but one store in particular caught my eye. Chapters have started to promote their back to school promotion but beyond the deals that the customer would get on great products and books, they’ve taken their campaign to an extra mile by endorsing their potential costumers with the fact that they can do their seasonal shopping while doing good to the environment. As much as I like their new advertising strategy, there’s one thing that I was bothered by. And that was the use of the recycling symbol as an analogy towards sustainability.
This is not the first time that people have misused the recycling symbol for this purpose, as the majority of the public is still not too familiar towards what sustainability mean. According to Wikipedia, sustainability is defined as the ability of an ecosystem to maintain ecological processes, functions, biodiversity and productivity into the future. As I’ve mentioned in my previous post, Definition of Good Design, sustainability is a criteria that should be considered throughout the lifespan of a product or a service. With this beings said, recycling comes into play when it comes the designer requires to make material selections for the product involved.
While the definition of sustainability focuses on the ability of the ecosystem, recycling (according to the trusty Wikipedia again) involves processing used materials into new products to prevent waste of potentially useful materials, reduce the consumption of fresh raw material/energy usage/air pollution/water pollution by reducing the needs for ‘conventional’ waste disposal. It is also noted that recycling is the key component of modern waste management, the third R in the 3R concept. The two concepts are deeply related to one another but I must stress that the 2 are NOT the same, thus the symbol that people use as an analogy for the 2 should be different as well.
When you Google images for the keyword “recycle” or “recycling” you will find yourself going through pages of various depictions on the 3R logo, a triangle formed by 3 arrows; a significant icon that was designed by Gary Dean Anderson whom won first place in a contest held by the Container Corporation of America in 1970 (click here for further reading). It was the sudden raise of environmental awareness in the 70s that sparked the idea for a paperboard company to initiate a competition in search for the perfect graphic representation of the recycling concept, but no one has seem to realize that the same opportunity lies upon sustainability as well.
Current images that you can search online that relates to sustainability are mostly images of hands holding a plant or the planet earth in their palms or just a simple graphic depiction of earth (usually in shades of green). But there isn’t a universally recognized design that fully represents this concept. As the consumer becomes more sustainability aware in their consumption choices, an official icon to identify sustainable products would help them with their decisions with a lot less effort. Who would be the next Gary Dean Anderson during the new green revolution? It could be you, me, or the person sitting next to you.
- Chun-Lam
