Designing Upside-Down: Trash Zones and Cracker Boxes

DESIGNING UPSIDE-DOWN Trash Zones and Cracker Boxes

TAYLOR BLAIR

DESIGNING UPSIDEDOWN Trash Zones and Cracker Boxes

TAYLOR BLAIR

Industrial Design Senior Thesis Iowa State University Class of 2020

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Iowa State University, the College of Design, the Industrial Design program, and innumerable inspiring professors for providing the environment, learning, and creative freedom that led me to a position where this project was even possible. Thank you to Steve Herrnstadt for your guidance and help through the process of writing and creating this senior project. Our long and meandering conversations always led to new insights, important breakthroughs, or simply a nice time. Thank you to my grandma for her stories and photographs from her childhood. Lastly, I could not have made it through this project without the support and encouragement of Ebere Agwuncha and Lynette Kwaw-Mensah.

In the process of completing this project, it evolved almost accidentally into precisely what I have always wanted industrial design to be. But it is not an accident. I have learned a great deal in putting this project together, but perhaps most importantly, I have learned to trust the process: it will take you where you need to go.

Taylor Blair May 2020

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CONTENTS

0. WHAT HAPPENED?

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Grandma Blair and Systemic Challenges

1. WHERE ARE WE?

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History of Food Packaging

2. HOW DID WE GET HERE?

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Engines of Change

3. WHAT CAN WE DO?

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Waste Reduction Strategies

4. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

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Constructing a Conceptual Design Framework

5. DESIGN NARRATIVES:

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Trash Zones and Cracker Boxes

6. DESIGNING UPSIDE-DOWN

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Methodology and Broader Application

REFERENCES AND IMAGES

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0.

WHAT HAPPENED? My grandma, Roynola, was born in 1933 and grew up on a farm a mile or so northwest of Plainville, a small town in rural west-central Illinois. On the farm, her family led an almost zero-waste life. In the span of one generation, this style of living in the United States has become all but impossible. What happened?

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The aerial photograph above in 1938. My grandma's childhood home is in the center of the image.

Roynola's family had a garden for fruits and vegetables, cold packing much of it in reusable glass jars stored in the root cellar. They bought bulk goods from a small general store in reusable paper or burlap sacks, which after tattered, would find other uses on the farm. Any organic waste they produced went to the chickens or hogs, and milk came from their cows. Manure from the animals fertilized the crops. If the family wanted chicken, they killed, plucked, and cooked it themselves. For pork or beef, the surrounding families would gather periodically to kill and process their animals communally. Her father, Frank, was always in charge of shooting the animals because he reliably killed in one shot - both humane and a conscious of resources. The men carved, salted, and hung large pieces of meat to cure in wood shed over the winter while the women made sausage from the trimmings and offal. When the meat was finished curing it was cold packed in jars.

My grandma's family lived in their own, nearly-closed nutrient loop: a micro-version of the circular economy many sustainability advocates call for today.

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View of the house looking south. Plainville, IL was approximately a mile south down the road on the left.

The fenced backyard of the house with a view towards the barn yard.

Roynola working in the vegetable garden behind the house.

Ramp into upper level of the barn where the hay was stored. Below were the horses and cows.

Cows by the fence, drinking water and eating. The family raised dairy cows, beef cattle, and hogs.

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A gaggle of geese. They also raised chickens, ducks, and turkeys.

Roynola, age 4, with her favorite dog, Teddy, and a white heifer calf.

Roynola and cousin Edith with dolls. View of house.

Baby Roynola with her father, Frank, posing behind the house.

Roynola with a dog, Bounce, in front of a bountiful summer garden.

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The one-room school house Roynola attended through the 7th grade, before moving off farm.

Roynola's mother, Gladys, in the garden, most likely spring planting.

Roynola on her horse, Cricket. Her father, to the left, is on crutches after suffering an injury in the field.

All farm pictures in this section were scanned from Roynola's family album.

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The top three images show a wide variety of farm equipment lined up for sale. The bottom image is the farm auction in process.

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Roynola's parents pictured shortly after auciton held when the family moved to Quincy, IL in 1946.

In 1946, the doctor urged her father to stop farming because of his heart condition or risk death. Soon after, when Roynola was thirteen, the family moved off the farm to Quincy, Illinois. She was excited to enroll in a regular high school, as opposed to the one-room schoolhouse she had attended up to that point. She was thrilled finally to have electricity, and the glistening post-war supermarkets seemed almost too good to be true.

Leaving the rural zero-waste lifestyle unquestionably made her life better.

Even though she remembers her childhood on the farm warmly, she would not choose to move back to the broad fields of Plainville, Illinois, even if the house hadn't been razed decades ago.

My grandma's story is one small part of the larger story of human progress. The same positive changes seen individually in my grandma's life have also dramatically improved living standards for millions, if not billions, of people. Listening to my grandma's stories about these early years made me realize just how radically the systems we live under have changed.

These positive changes, though, also brought with them enormous negative consequences.

Recognizing the scope of this change, the answer cannot be to go back to the way she and her family lived on the plains of rural Illinois - if that was even possible. Like her childhood home, the very system itself that made this lifestyle possible no longer exists. Instead, the answer must be to look forward, to imagine a new system, and set out to build it ourselves.

What does this future look like?

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This project is the search for the answer to this question, specifically looking for solutions to the rising levels of food packaging waste we produce as a society.

Food packaging waste is a massive and pressing human and ecological problem in need of immediate solutions, and it is an issue that I have worked on before. The basic foundations of this project were laid in a sophomore-year paper I wrote about plastic packaging in grocery stores.

I began writing that paper with many preconceived notions, nearly all of which were shattered by the end. My research unveiled that the story of the contemporary supermarket is much more complex than I had ever realized. It was also during this research that I had the first conversations with my grandma about her life on the farm.

This recognition, that this systemic problem might be best understood through stories, has since formed a central part of this project. In fact, this project culminates not in traditional industrial design proposals, but in many separate narratives approaching the problem of food packaging waste from different directions and at varying scales.

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The first three sections of this text are a presentation of the research I undertook to gain an understanding of our current system. Starting by following the historical and current technological status of food packaging, I then explored the larger social, political, cultural, technological, and other factors that drove this innovation.

With this foundational knowledge, I then examine what options we have to deal with food packaging waste, as well as the barriers we face in doing so. These three sections focus specifically on food packaging, but as is the nature of complex systems, the scope necessarily expands when in contact with the broader forces that undergird our lives.

In the fourth section, I use this research to construct a conceptual systems-level intervention. Then, in the fifth section, I explore food packaging product design solutions within this conceptual framework.

Beyond practicable design solutions to tackle food packaging waste, this project is in itself is a case study of a way to design that takes into account the complexity of the world to position industrial design to have an active role in building a sustainable, equitable, and just world.

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A cold pack canning setup made from a creaming bucket by my grandma's father, around 1940. The wooden pieces are used to keep the glass from coming in direct contact with the bottom heat source and to separate the two layers of jars. Object and images from author's personal collection.

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BACK TO THE BEGINNING This project is not about my grandma, but our conversations set me on the path to this project. Many parts of her life on the farm were alien to me, requiring further research to understand them fully. This research often led to unexpected places. For example, stories of cold packing methods led me to investigate the history of canning, which uncovered surprising connections between war and our food supply. Reusable glass jars prompted questions about the history of glass. This same widening of research happened for many areas of her life on the farm.

Soon it became clear that if I was to take a systems-level approach to design solutions, I needed to start at the very beginning of food packaging and work to understand its development, materials, and technology up to the present.

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1.

WHERE ARE WE? Humanity did not wake up one day and suddenly find pairs of perfectly sculpted golden Twinkies upon carefully folded trays encased in plastic wrapping, all inside brightly-colored cardstock boxes. Twinkies and their packaging are, in fact, the culmination of hundreds of thousands of years of technological advancement.

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3 & 4

A pair of Twinkies sealed in plastic film alongside a banana in its natural packaging.

This section charts the evolution of food packaging from prehistory to today, building the foundational knowledge required for us to understand where we are.

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WHY WE STORE FOOD Humans choose to store food for many reasons. At its most basic, storage increases the period between harvest or production, and consumption.

Food storage has always been an essential part of human life, but has become even more important as the proportion of the population reliant on others to make their food climbs. Historically a domestic task, in our contemporary economy food storage and distribution is highly commercialized and requires scientific precision, both in packaging technology and in the logistical planning that delivers the goods to retailers.

For consumers, food storage enables a more consistent and balanced diet throughout the year, especially in areas that experience cold winters. In kitchens, food storage reduces waste, allowing unused or uneaten food to be consumed at a later date. Individual packaging, prevalent in today's grocery stores, facilitates simple and sanitary food mobility. On a larger scale, food stockpiles able to be deployed in response to natural disaster, war, or other emergencies is central to national security planning.

Food storage and food packaging have different meanings. "Storage" is used generally for higher-volume examples, like a grain silo, while "packaging" will generally be used in the context of our contemporary consumer economy. Because the departure point for this project is food packaging waste within the contemporary grocery store, "food packaging" is the most commonly used term, but not exclusively. Basically, in this project, "packaging" and "storage" are both used broadly to discuss how humans save food for later consumption.

Food preservation and food packaging methods evolved in tandem.

Preservation extends the shelf life of foods by slowing physical deterioration and significantly reducing or halting the growth of microorganisms. Preservation techniques vary widely across the globe, always connected to the local climate and available resources. Examples of traditional preservation include drying, curing, canning, candying, salting, pickling, fermentation, burying, confit, among many others. Often, these methods of food preparation drove food packaging innovation.

Other times, the inherent inadequacies of storage options necessitated preservation methods advance. Commonly, these methods evolved into foundational elements of local cuisine and culture.

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Commercial food preservation has matured into an exact science, regulated by strict governmental guidelines to protect consumers. These methods, while utilizing modern chemistry and advanced manufacturing capabilities, operate in fundamentally the same ways as their domestic ancestors have for millennia. Advances in preservation and storage methods have significantly reduced pre-consumer food waste in the developed world and facilitated globe-spanning supply lines. This contemporary global web of food production and packaging is a wild transformation away from the long human history of place-rooted food production and consumption.

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A Kapsiki braided granary, Northern Camaroon. Original photograph, Figure 7.1, p. 129 in Walter E.A. van Beek: The dancing dead. Ritual and religion among the Kapsiki/Higi of North Cameroon and Northeastern Nigeria, Oxford University Press 2012.

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Prehistory The first human ancestors evolved from primates seven million years ago. Five million years later they began to fashion crude stone tools, and about two million years ago spread across Eurasia. For most of this time, food did not require packaging because it was promptly consumed close to where it was found. Life was a constant fight for survival; saving for the future was not possible, if even considered.

Many foods come directly from nature pre-packaged. The outer membrane of fruits and vegetables allows the plant’s fruit to develop and ripen safely, and uses color and scent to lure animals, including humans, to consume the fruit and spread its seeds. This second function is quite similar to the current function of branding and advertising. This natural packaging is often edible, such as in apples, or at the very least biodegradable, sustaining a local nutrient loop.

Over the course of history, humans have used tree leaves, bamboo, lotus leaves, palm leaves, gourds, coconut shells, and shells.

Sometimes these uses were “un-designed,� and others they were creatively adapted to specified uses. Early on, humans began using the fur, hides, organs, and bones of animals as clothing and food storage, fully utilizing all parts of the animal they killed. The bladder and stomachs of killed animals have a long history of use as food and liquid storage. Later, natural materials like grasses, twigs, and reeds began to be woven into mats, bowels, or baskets, laying the foundation for later development of textiles.

It is impossible to say with complete certainty what was used during the very earliest periods of human history because there are no written records. Owing to the use of biodegradable materials, the archaeological record yields little information for the study of early packaging solutions. While researchers can only speculate what early humans may have used, we know that as humans transitioned from nomadic hunter-gatherer society into stationary communities, the need for packaging solutions that aided the transportation and storage of food became a necessity for survival.

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TIMELINE OF PACKAGING MATERIALITY This section is an overview of the evolution of food packaging materiality from prehistory to today. The chronological order of the timeline is approximate, a necessity because different peoples around the globe developed many of the same technologies independently and at widely varying times. It should be noted that this timeline is not at all exhaustive, as each section could be the sole focus of an entire chapter or even a book. In the text and pictures, I have chosen a few interesting applications of each material to include. While the timeline progresses chronologically, all of these materials remain in use today, even if in different ways or with different importance. Every food requires a different approach to packaging and knowing the intrinsic qualities of materials, and their historical application is useful when considering future designs.

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Traditional Thai desserts wrapped in banana leaves and fastened shut with a small wooden sticks.

Photograph by Yvan Cohen.

Contemporary.

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Gourd vessel with rattan stitched lid, and matching drinking cup. Made by the Senufo people, primarily of Northern Ivory Coast.

From an online antique dealer.

Early 20th Century.

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Wood The earliest use of wood for food storage was likely hollowed-out logs. This could have been either appropriating a naturally-occurring hollow or intentionally carving a space for food storage purposes.

Later, people began to construct boxes, crates, and barrels, increasing in complexity over time. In China, thin sheets of mulberry bark were used to wrap and store foods as early as 200BCE, the precursor of paper packaging, to be discussed in more detail later in the timeline.

The first truly large-scale use of wood as a food packaging material was wooden barrels. The Celts invented these watertight, convexsided wooden containers before 350BCE, and barrens went on to become the predominant method of food and liquid storage and distribution in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Beyond storage, barrels also found use in the production of spirits, wine, and beer.

Durable and able to be lifted, rolled, and stacked, barrels justified their additional cost over other packaging materials. Barrels were used to transport grains, liquids, and other dry goods. So important were barrels that an entire profession, coopers, was dedicated to their construction and maintenance.

Wood for packaging can come from many species of trees, each of which has different qualities, both positive and negative. The two predominant categories of wood are softwoods such as pine and cedar, and hardwoods like oak and hickory. Among others, walnut or maple cutting boards, olive-wood salt cellars, and wooden barrels for the aging and transportation of wine and spirits are still in wide use.

Other applications of wood have been primarily replaced within our global agricultural commodity market by pallet-based logistics and containerization.

Stone

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Stone is widely available around the world has a long history of being used for food storage. Examples from the archaeological record come from such disparate locations as Crete, Egypt, Peru, and Laos, among many others. As diverse as the origins are their forms and use. Stone can be carved relatively easily, depending on its hardness, and finished in many ways. Many types of stone are impermeable and heavy, meaning it can safely store foods and liquids for long

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A view of Knob Creek bourbon whiskey aging barrels, Kentucky.

Contemporary.

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An olive wood salt cellar with pivoting lid. Made in Tunisia. From online seller.

Contemporary.

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An Ancient Egyptian alabastron, a vessel used for holding oil. The name refers to the stone it is carved from, Egyptian alabaster, also known as travertine. From Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

5th Century BCE. 25

periods. Stone vessels can safely store both wet and dry foods, water, oils, wines, or even cosmetics. Many, like the massive and intricately carved basalt platters created by the Inca civilization, were used for ceremonial offerings and other religious purposes.

Drawbacks of stone are its weight, natural variations in texture and quality, and the reductive process of stone carving. While stone storage solutions continue to be used to this day, the invention of pottery and subsequent inventions greatly lessened its use.

Textiles The first textile, felt, originated in Central Asia during the late Stone Age. Felt can only be made with wool, and so its invention followed the domestication of sheep. Wool is unique because its fibers have scales that only allow movement in one direction, facilitating the formation of mats that do not untangle. Felt is still used in clothing, housing, and food storage. The first woven textiles of cotton or silk appeared in India, Egypt, and China around 5,000 years ago and immediately found food-related applications.

The fibers of the jute plant, native to South Asia, were long used in the production of ropes, but the first mill to mass-produce the textile burlap was established near Calcutta in 1855. English traders exported raw fibers and finished textiles, and soon burlap was in extensive global use. Burlap sacks are still used because their durability and breathability make it highly suitable for transporting coffee, tobacco, tea, grains, and other dry goods. Food packaging produces interesting side-developments, such as standard volume or weight measurements. For example, even though they are not used for potatoes anymore, the "sack" is still the common measurement unit among Idaho potato farmers, representing about 100 pounds.

Fiber can come from animals, such as wool, plants, like cotton, or, more recently, synthetics, like rayon or polyester. The style of weave gives textiles wide-ranging structural qualities, from quite stiff to soft and flowing. Many storage methods combine textiles with a rigid material to keep dust and animals out while allowing for air circulation. This diversity enables a wide range of uses for textiles in food packaging.

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Cylindrical two-handled basalt bowl decorated with twelve relief snakes.

Likely used as a receptacle for liquid offerings. Inca civilization, Peru. From the British Museum.

Late 15th Century AD.

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A group of Kyrgyz women begin the traditional process of making wool felt. Photograph by Altynai Osmoeva.

Contemporary.

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Compilation showing the jute plant, jute twine, and woven burlap.

Contemporary.

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Stacked burlap sacks holding grain for transport.

Contemporary.

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Pottery Pottery is one of the earliest human inventions, emerging at some point on all continents except Antarctica. The earliest pottery vessels come from around Jiangxi, China, circa 18,000 BCE. Some scholars speculate that the initial discovery may have been by observing the hardened layer clay found underneath extinguished fires. At its most basic, pottery is created by forming clay into shape and heating it, "firing," until permanent changes to its physical qualities occur. Fired pottery is rigid and resistant to liquids. The three main types of pottery are, in order of invention: earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain.

Earthenware uses clays fired at low temperatures, initially in pitfires or open bonfires. Earthenware is porous, and so was not optimal for storing liquids until after the development of porcelain glazes. Combining this porosity with the strategic application of glazed surfaces, the Korean onggi is an ideal fermentation and storage vessel, most famously for kimchi. Records show Korean fermentation methods developed nearly two thousand years ago, and still form the central pillar of Korean cuisine. Similar examples of symbiotic development of preservation methods, packaging, and regional cuisines exist worldwide.

Stoneware developed next. Fired at higher temperatures and requiring finer clay, it is usually nonporous and ideal for liquids.

Chinese stoneware has existed thousands of years, whereas it was only produced in significant quantities in Europe from the Middle Ages onward. Because of its nonporous durability, stoneware has been a common material for food storage since its invention.

Porcelain is the most complex type of pottery to produce, requiring highly-refined materials and extremely high firing temperatures.

Owing to porcelain's high firing temperature, it undergoes vitrification, a process similar to that of glass. This process yields an impermeable structure so strong it can be made translucently thin without breaking. Porcelain appeared in China about 2,200 years ago and was not mastered outside of East Asia until the 18th century.

Pottery can be hand sculpted, coiled, wheel-spun, pressed, slabformed, injection-molded, slip-casted, 3D printed, and others. It is still in extensive use for cooking, storage, and consuming foods.

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Greek amphorae, ceramic vessels used mostly to store and transport wine taken from ancient Mediterranean shipwrecks.

Note the characteristic round bottoms. Displayed how they might have been stacked inside galleys.

From Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology, Turkey.

Bronze Age.

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Dozens of onggi, or "breathing pottery," shown outside in winter.

Fermentation methods and earthenware vessels work symbiotically to provide food year-round.

Contemporary.

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3D printed ceramic. By Dutch ceramics artist Olivier Van Herpt.

Contemporary.

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Glass Advances pottery led to the discovery of glassmaking. Glass is made by melting together limestone, soda, sand, and silica. Rudimentary glass technology rose around 3600 BCE in Mesopotamia. Significant innovations made by the ancient Egyptians around 1500BCE led to the creation of glass figurines, cups, and many other religious and household items. The first glass products were made similarly as clay coil pots, with long red-hot glass coils pressed together and smoothed out. Later, molten glass was poured into molds, or pressed into shape. Pots, cups, and bowls were popular items. The Phoenicians invented the blowpipe in 300BCE, speeding production and creating new creative and practical applications for glass. Before the discovery of clear glass in the early Christian era, all glass was colored. Over the following millennium, glass technology spread across the continent, and innovation occurred slowly.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the split molding allowed for more intricate raised decorations and asymmetrical forms. This process drastically reduced the cost of glass vessels, opening up new avenues for more widespread, utilitarian applications; previously, glass had been accessible to the wealthy or for religious purposes.

The automatic rotary bottle making machine, patented in 1889, was the next significant leap in glass technology. The well-known milk bottle was made using this machine. Contemporary machines can produce up to 20,000 bottles per day.

While highly versatile, recyclable, and reusable, glass is also heavy and prone to shattering. Glass is still used for alcohol, oil, jams, sauces, and others, especially acidic liquids like vinegar. With the rise of plastic in the 20th century, many products traditionally packaged in glass moved to lightweight, shatterproof plastic packaging.

Metal The development of metal at around 3,000 BCE was a turning point for humanity. The first uses of metal by humans were copper tools and weapons. Malleable and relatively accessible near the surface, it was the discovery of furnaces to process copper-rich ores that greatly increased production. Later, it was discovered that adding 30

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A Roman blown-glass jug with a wide lip and handle.

Clear or light gray glass was a new invention in this period. From Metropolitan Museum of Art collection.

3rd–4th century A.D.

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This style of mold-blown glass bowl saw widespread domestic use in Germany.

From the Getty Collection.

Fifteenth century.

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A Texas woman inspecting a glass canning jar with two young girls inside a large, well-stocked root cellar.

Early-mid 20th Century.

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into copper created bronze, a stronger yet still ductile alloy less prone to tarnishing. The Chinese ding, a highly decorated cauldron, is an important religious artifact used for cooking, storage, and ritual offerings to gods or ancestors. Copper and bronze artifacts can be found throughout Eurasia and in the new world.

Metalworking developed slowly over the next few thousand years, opening new materials, like iron, to new utilitarian and artistic applications. An important step forwards was the discovery of tin plating. Tinning, as it is also known, is the process of thinly covering, “plating,� iron with tin. Discovered in Bohemia around 1200 CE, the method was kept a secret until stolen by a spy employed by the Duke of Saxony in 1640. From there, the technology spread across the continent and eventually to the rest of the world.

By the mid-1700s, London tobacconists began selling snuff in metal canisters, either plain iron, steel, or tin-plated. While snuff thought of as acceptable use, there was a widely held belief by the people of the time that metal packaging made food poisonous. Eventually, this fear faded, and in the early 19th-century, a technique for safe food storage and preservation in tin cans was developed in France.

After cans were proven safe, other food storage applications came.

Steel cans replaced tin after William Underwood introduced the technology to the United States Initially extremely expensive after being first extracted in 1825, aluminum steadily fell in price, and its use expanded. Commercial aluminum foils entered the market in the early 1900s, and by the 1950s, aluminum foil for food was widely available in supermarkets for home use. Aluminum cans entered the market in 1959 but never replaced steel-walled cans, but did become the primary metal used for soda and beer cans.

Artist’s paints were first packaged in soft metal tubes in 1841, and toothpaste followed in the 1890s, but food products did not make use of this packaging until the 1960s.

Metal continues to be a popular packaging material. It is readily recyclable and plentiful. While plastic has encroached on many of its uses, other areas, such as canned goods, do not seem to be at risk of changing soon.

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The ding, a bronze ceremonial cauldron.

China, Late Shang Dynasty.

From Shanghai Museum.

Circa 1000 BCE.

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An English toleware snuffbox. Toleware was the common name for lacquered tin. From an online antique dealer.

Late 18th Century.

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A display from fine art product company Winsor & Newton, showing the development of metal paint tubes.

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Paper Paper was first developed circa 100 BCE in China and later introduced to Europe through Silk Road trade. Paper is likely the oldest version of what is known as “flexible packaging.” Wood pulpbased paper, developed in 1867, replaced paper made from flax fiber and old linen rags. In 1852, Francis Wolle invented the paper bag machine, followed by Margaret E. Knight’s 1871 design for a machine to mass-produce flat-bottomed paper bags that could carry more than the previous envelope-style design.

By the turn of the century, it was possible to integrate label printing into the manufacturing line. Further innovations in construction led to large bags strong enough to replace the more expensive cotton flour sacks. Paper sheets can be used to wrap all sorts of food. Waxed paper can safely wrap wet foods like meat, although polystyrene trays have mostly overtaken this function.

The Chinese invented cardboard in the 1600s, but it was not until the 1890s that the American baking company Nabisco used it to package Uneeda Biscuits. These wax-coated cardboard boxes, historians argue, is the first time food was packed and sold in singleuse disposable packaging, a significant turning point in the history of food packaging. Before Nabisco’s revolutionary folding paper boxes, customers would select biscuits from a large barrel at their local store and take them home in a paper bag, leading to a stale, moldy or unhygienic product. Following Nabisco’s lead, the rest of the industry quickly adopted similar packaging technology, signaling the beginning of consumer food packaging as we know it today.

Paper and cardboard packaging continued to find new uses in food packaging well into the 20th century and is still seen throughout today’s supermarkets, even though plastic has taken over many of its previous applications. In fact, boxes now serve mostly as physical protection and as a banding space, while the food product itself resides in a plastic envelope within.

With rising environmental concerns over plastic, some products have begun to return to wax-coated paper, especially recycled paper, to reduce their use of single-use plastic.

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Knight’s 1871 design, with only minor changes, remains in production to today and is included in the MoMA permanent collection.

Contemporary.

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An image from the early retail design division of Nabisco, experimenting with how new packaging could be displayed within existing grocery stores. Packaging design innovation does not just change food, but the ways and places we shop too.

Late 19th Century.

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Cardboard boxes with HDPE plastic inner bags fill the shelves of the grocery store breakfast aisle.

Contemporary.

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A really long time passes...

To be exact, it took two thousand years after paper's invention for a new food packaging material, plastic, to be artificially synthesized.

Plastic The term "plastic" is an almost unusably broad term because it encompasses a loosely-related group of over ten thousand materials, each with their specific qualities and applications. In general, plastic is unique among common materials as it is composed of long, chainlike molecules called polymers. These molecules give plastic its ability to take many different forms and exhibit so many varied qualities. While humans have been using natural polymers such as shellac and hard rubber for thousands of years, polymers were not artificially synthesized until the invention of Bakelite by Leo Baekeland in 1907. Bakelite is a thermoset plastic, meaning its shape is permanent after hardening. The plastics used for food packaging are nearly always thermoplastics, a type of plastic that can be melted and reshaped more than once.

The comb was plastic's first successful commercial application. Able to mimic the look and feel of luxury ivory combs fashionable at the time, celluloid combs were enormously popular. One of the earliest consumer applications of single-use plastic to food packaging 36

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A hair comb of cast and carved black celluloid.

Designed by Auguste Bonaz, Paris. From an online antique dealer.

Circa 1920

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A typical clear PE plastic bread bag. These bags are usually printed with branding when used in grocery stores. From an online seller.

Contemporary.

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An advertisement showing a housewife admiring her colorful collection of plastic Tupperware containers.

The Tupperware brand has been so successful that the brand name has become popularly genericized to refer to all reusable household plastic food containers.

Mid-20th Century.

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was the polyethylene bag for bread. In the bread aisles of today's supermarkets, this packaging material is still the most common.

While this was one of the first applications of plastic in supermarket food packaging, it was just the beginning. Over the following decades, almost all products in grocery stores transitioned to plastic packaging.

Plastic is not only versatile but is almost always cheaper than alternative packaging materials, a combination that has led to decreased food prices and increased availability. Well-designed plastic packaging from harvest to store shelf has been a crucial factor in the substantial reduction in pre-consumer food waste in developed countries. This figure can be up to 40% in developing countries. Reductions in food waste mean fewer food shortages and a smaller ecological impact from farming, owing to the reduction of acres are required to offset losses previously experienced during transportation. Further, the production of the often reviled plastic shopping bag officially called a "t-shirt bag," releases half as many greenhouse gases and requires less energy and water to produce than brown paper grocery bags. If the plastic products found in supermarkets were designed to take advantage of their incredible durability for longer lifespans, plastic use could actually reduce carbon emissions.

Plastic, while a fantastic material in some ways, has many drawbacks.

The largest of plastic's shortcomings is that it is produced from petroleum, a nonrenewable resource. Annually, approximately 8% of global supplies of oil and gas go towards producing plastic, contributing considerably to global climate change. Because of its nonrenewable status, even longer-lifespan plastic products can still be problematic. Even worse is the use of plastic to make products and packaging meant to be thrown away immediately after use. If it is not reused or recycled, plastic usually ends up in landfills or is lost as litter into the environment, many times polluting waterways and the ocean. Up to 4% of plastic finds its way into the ocean, causing large patches of floating waste to coalesce in gyres formed by currents. In Los Angeles County, a study found a staggering 19% of litter in their ocean-bound storm drains was plastic bags.

Plastic waste not reused, recycled, landfilled, or lost into the natural environment is often incinerated. This releases not just the carbon 38

sequestered millions of years ago, but also chemicals such as dioxins, furans, chlorine and carbon monoxide, among many others with frightening adverse health effects.

Plastic is not just dangerous when incinerated. There is increasing scientific data that chemicals found in everyday plastic can have harmful health effects. Recently, strong evidence has emerged that certain chemical additives used in the production of plastic, like phthalates and bisphenol-A (BPA), function as endocrine disruptors in humans. These chemicals can mimic human hormones and cause infertility and other reproductive damage. Adult men with high levels of phthalates in their bodies have a lower sperm count and quality when compared to men with none or low levels. Monitoring by the CDC has shown that 90% of Americans have detectable levels of BPA in their blood. Migration of these chemicals increases when the packaging comes in contact with fatty, salty, or acidic foods categories of food that are very popular. These and other plastic additives have been banned in some countries around the world, but plastic utilizes numerous potentially hazardous chemicals, many of which we are just beginning to understand—banning these one-byone leaves the population open to harmful effects until after they are discovered, evaluated, and banned.

In response to concerns over the unsustainability of conventional plastics, some companies have begun to turn towards plantbased plastic as an alternative. The manufacture of plant-based plastic, or "bioplastic," emits on average 24 percent less carbon than conventional plastic, and can be produced from renewable resources like sugarcane and corn. The Coca-Cola Company developed and launched the "Plant Bottle" in 2009, which contained 30 percent plant-based plastic. Between 2009 and 2015, 35 billion of these bottles were produced, representing the first time bioplastics had been used successfully at a large-scale.

Despite the promising-sounding name, bioplastics are certainly not perfect. Most bioplastics are neither biodegradable nor recyclable, and the production of base materials can cause environmental damage. Farming of the constituent sugar cane or corn uses large amounts of water, pesticides, and fertilizers, and competes for land with crops grown for food.

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In recent years, new types of plastic designed to be biodegradable have become slightly more viable for food packaging. Instead of persisting in the environment for thousands of years like conventional plastic, these materials break down similar to organic materials. The problem with these materials is that modern landfills are explicitly designed to avoid biodegradation, which would make them dangerously unstable. Because biodegradable plastic must hold up to use before disposal, they must be composted in a particular, controlled environment, or they will not break down. A final difficulty with biodegradable plastic is that they are generally not recyclable, leading to confusion for consumers, and recycling plants having to expend resources to sort out biodegradable from conventional plastic before processing.

In the modern supermarket, almost every product is sold to the consumer enclosed in plastic, the overwhelming majority of which is thrown away directly after use. This wasteful practice is only possible because it is cheap – but single-use plastic comes at a high cost to our environment and society. Worldwide growth in the use of plastic is fueling climate change, disrupting ecosystems, and harming human health.

High-tech Hybrids and Other New Materials Recent decades have seen increasing innovation in food packaging materiality. These advances have tended to be new materials, new uses of existing materials, or high-tech hybrid materials.

Cellulose fiber is finding more and more applications for food packaging. Thin films made from wood-derived cellulose are versatile and are completely biodegradable. Cellulose can also be combined with plant-based starches and replace conventional polystyrene foam. An advanced type of paper, “Paptic Paper,” has incredible elastic properties, able to stretch and mold like cellophane. Mycelium, the “roots” of mushrooms, has been shown to have possible packaging uses as well. Besides this short list, many companies and researchers are finding novel ways to capture and use the byproducts of other manufacturing or farming processes to create extremely low-impact, often completely biodegradable packaging materials.

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A beach in Mumbai, India, strewn with trash, especially single-use plastics. In early 2019, India announced a plan to eliminate single-use plastics by 2022.

Contemporary.

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Produce in compostable cellulose nets made from wood a harvested during forest thinning, have replaced plastic nets for fruit and vegetables in all leading Austrian supermarkets Contemporary.

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IKEA has begun to use mycelium-based wine bottle packaging , originally developed by the company Ecovative Design.

Contemporary.

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Many of these new applications are actually high-tech hybrids of existing materials. “Stone Paper,” a paper substitute, is made by either mixing calcium carbonate dust with high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and extruding it into sheets, or by laminating the dust between two thin sheets of HDPE. This material is durable, avoids deforestation, and produces much less water pollution than conventional paper manufacture. Depending on the composition, Stone Paper may be able to be recycled back into calcium carbonate after use. Another example is a possible new hybrid between natural materials such as sisal fiber and nanoclay particles. This hybrid is biodegradable, waterproof, and non-porous, because of the molecular properties of nanoclay.

Hybrids of existing materials have a long history, and their creation often stems from the inherent shortcomings of individual materials.

The issues with packaging crackers are a good example of this problem. A cardboard box provides reliable physical protection, but very little environmental control. Nabisco’s Uneeda Biscuit packaging design was an important innovation because it used waxcoated cardboard to create a packaging material that provided both physical and environmental stability. Plastic replaced wax-coated boxes when it became commercially viable. Now, plastic films are often used on the inside of paper bags and boxes for pasta, chips, crackers, and other dry goods.

A notable example of a modern hybrid material is Tetra Pak, most commonly seen as juice or milk cartons. Since its invention in the late 1940s, Tetra Pak evolved from a simple plastic-coated paper carton to an aseptic carton made of a complex layering of polyethylene, aluminum, and paper. In their innovative aseptic cartons, or “bricks,” milk can be stored at room temperature for many weeks and are a common sight on un-refrigerated grocery shelves around the world. Because of its composition, this hybridmaterial requires a specialized recycling process. Despite being the largest food-packaging producer in the world, only about 20% of Tetra Pak products are recycled, leading to calls for regulation.

Hybrid materials allow packaging to do much more than store food safely. Microwave popcorn and foods like HotPockets® incorporate susceptors into their packaging. These thin laminated metallic films 42

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This Creamette Pasta package has a plastic window inset in a cardboard box. Because of this window, the packaging states it is not recyclable.

Removing the window allows it to be recycled.

Contemporary.

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An Italian Tetra Pak promotional image.

Originally commercialized as triangular milk packages, Tetra Pak technology quickly expanded to a wide range of foods and liquids.

Early 1960s.

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5

6

3 2 1 37

A diagram of the layers of the Tetra Pak Brick.

1 - Polyethylene (water barrier) 2 - Paperboard (structure) 3 - Polyethylene (bonding) 4 - Foil (oxygen, light, avor) 5 - Polyethylene (bonding) 6 - Polyethylene (sealing) 43

effectively absorb microwave waves to generate and strategically direct heat. In microwave popcorn, the susceptor is placed on the bottom and is used to more quickly and evenly pop the corn kernels. In HotPocketsÂŽ, a susceptor integrated into a sleeve evenly crisps and browns the entire surface of the food. Because of their laminated construction, these products are not recyclable.

Improvements in nanotechnology are beginning to find applications in food packaging. Some examples are radio frequency identification (RFID) devices, nanosensors, biosensors, and electronic noses.

These technologies enable “smart packaging� that can ensure food quality, modernize supermarket inventory methods, and facilitate new consumer interactions. While these have not yet become commonplace in food packaging, they will likely come to market in the future as the technology continues to improve.

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LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD Throughout human history, food storage innovations were the crucial factor that either limited or permitted larger transformations in society. The storage of grains is what allowed the first permanent population centers to grow, for example. Long term storage of seasonal surpluses, permitted cultures to expand their focus beyond the narrow constraints of base survival. Food storage was the foundation of nearly all technological, cultural, social, political, or other advancements we live with today.

But things have changed. Food storage remains the crucial constraint to life, but now, with the rate of change accelerating, much contemporary food packaging innovation is in response to larger developments already underway. Projections show a steep worldwide increase in demand for packaged food, especially as a result of the rapid industrialization of high-population countries in the Global South. As happened in the United States and Europe, a long history of local markets is quickly ceding to large chain grocery stores. Regardless of place, these globally-linked supermarkets bring the same negative consequences. Innovative material, design, and system-level solutions will be required to balance the demand of these growing markets - and the very real human needs behind them with an increasingly precarious global environmental situation.

This is not a simple task. When researching this section, it became clear that the material and technological developments are visible and easily documentable manifestations of greater societal, cultural, economic, political, and other changes.

Recognition that it is actually these larger forces that drive food packaging advancements forms the core of the next section.

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2.

HOW DID WE GET WHERE? The previous section was an effort to understand where we are by learning about where we have been. In the process of doing so, it became clear that these visible technological advances were merely the products of much larger forces.

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American artist Andy Warhol, famous in part for his many depictions of modern branded food packaging, seen in a New York City supermarket, 1964. Photograph by Bob Adelman.

A designer's work never exists in isolation. Instead, our work represents a single node within a complex web of overlapping forces and systems. This section explores these pervasive but often hidden forces which shape all aspects of our lives, including the food system. These "engines of change," as I call them, interact and overlap, some are the products of others, and most affect all the others.

I am a cisgender white man born and raised in the United States. These identities and their inherent privileges fundamentally shape how I view the world. While each is thoroughly researched, the following sections should by no means be taken as comprehensive, nor fully inclusive. I encourage the reader to continue exploring these topics, question my positions, call out omissions, and especially to think about how these forces interact with your daily life.

This section seeks to understand these engines of change as they relate to food packaging, but as is their nature, sometimes expands into broader subjects.

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Location, Location, Location For most of human history, physical location was the principal factor that defined human life. A location's climate, geography, and geology fostered a location-specific diversity of flora, fauna, and available materials for human use. From widely varying local palates, different ways of living, doing, thinking, making, and belonging formed across the globe. These come to being and are inextricable from the local culture, language, religion, cuisine, architecture, history, and many other factors.

In the context of food and food storage, location is paramount. As discussed in the previous section, this history of packaging materiality is long and meandering. For many reasons - too many to explore here - the development of these technologies occurred at different rates around the world, and often the same breakthroughs were achieved independently.

The most critical constraint on these developments was local resources.

Local flora and fauna formed the foundation of the cuisine, which in turn influenced packaging.

Climate, weather, and seasons were also an important constraint. These conditions influence what crops are grown and animals hunted, but also for what period people had to store food. Seasonally-available crops were stored and rationed until stocks could be replenished. Long cold winters required the development of reliable storage and preservation methods to survive. In areas with monsoon seasons, means to keep food dry and secure were important. Dry, hot climates necessitate the development of ways to capture and safely store clean water.

The qualities of a location have profound effects on the built environment, which from the very earliest human settlements, has incorporated food storage. Ancient Mesopotamians constructed large airy structures to prevent cereal grains from rotting and provide protection from insects, rodents, floods, and theft. Seen in various forms around the world, root cellars, usually partially or entirely underground, maintain cool temperatures and stable humidity year-round, optimal for storing food.

These are just two examples, among a nearly endless variety.

While this sort of locally-connected food production, storage, and consumption still exists, it is becoming increasingly rare. Especially in post-industrial countries, connection to place has been almost completely severed. Most Americans now buy groceries from large chain

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Four typical suburban neighborhood streets taken from Google Earth. Locations are Florida, California, Wisconsin, and Maine. Can you tell which is which?

supermarkets with relatively uniform product offerings nationwide.

Produce, once only available seasonally, is flown in from the opposite hemisphere. Foods are aseptically produced and packaged, extending traditional shelf life from days or weeks to months or years. Now, for nearly all Americans, the principal food storage architecture is the refrigerator and the pantry. Almost every food arrives home entombed in plastic, originating from an unseen factory likely hundreds or thousands of miles away.

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This transformation represents a nearly complete dissolution of the relationship between humans and their place. Severing this intimate connection relegates the regional diversity of cuisine to cultural relic rather than living tradition. While it is true that this transition has raised living standards for many millions of people, the change was required principally to satisfy the needs of a long and complex supply chain. In the short term, this undermines our personal and communal self-reliance and dilutes local cultures. In the long term, we lose valuable cultural information and ways, making communities less resilient and eventually wholly reliant on the almighty supply chain.

Industrialization, Urbanization, and The Triumph of the Supermarket Innovation in food packaging occurred slowly over millennia until 18thand 19th-century industrialization brought rapid social and economic change. Beginning in Great Britain before spreading to continental Europe and North America, industrialization radically transformed the human relationship with food. In less than two centuries, massive global supply chains have risen to replace the decentralized web of self-sufficient localities. In most industrialized, and especially in post-industrial countries like the United States, dependence on external systems for food is universal.

Early humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers until the development of agriculture created the stability necessary for more permanent settlements. Large cities with populations reliant on supply lines have existed throughout history, but the vast majority of humans lived in small self-reliant settlements. The archaeological record shows that the supply lines feeding some large historic cities were complex and sometimes extended across entire continents. Even so, the systems that supply our contemporary societies are incomparably large and complex in comparison.

Industrialization prompted millions of people to leave rural areas and move to population centers where factory work plentiful. Country living was hard, and cities offered hope for a better, modern life. As the population of cities rose, the food systems supplying them responded 50

accordingly. Until the later years of the 19th-century, street markets and locally-owned dry goods retailers, greengrocers, butchers, and bakers met this growing demand, but eventually, chain stores replaced these small local businesses.

The industrialization of the food-production system was integral to this transition. Larger and larger operations supplanted a rich tapestry of small-scale farmers and ranchers. This transition was especially visible in meat production. Cattle were driven overland from the western plains to Kansas stockyards and shipped to massive Midwestern slaughterhouses.

Processed meat was then loaded onto refrigerated railcars and sent to butchers and grocery stores across the country. This new scale of industrialized meat production transformed the American landscape.

Millions of cattle replaced native buffalo herds; prairie and old-growth forests were cleared to grow corn and wheat. Meat production rapidly became completely centralized and served a single nationalized market.

Centralization of food production begat its commodification. Soon, from offices in New York or London, men in suits could buy, sell, and profit

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The workings of an industrialized pork packing plant: killing, cutting, rendering, salting. Exhibited by the Cincinnati Pork Packers' Association, at the 1873 Vienna International Exposition.

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from food they did not produce and never saw. Food today is an abstract capital commodity - a line on a spreadsheet. All areas of the American food system underwent similarly radical transformations. Unless bought from a local business, nearly all foods are now produced en masse in large factories and shipped to supermarkets across the United States.

In the postwar years, federal racially-restricted postwar housing programs incentivized suburbanization. Glittering well-stocked supermarkets became a defining feature of these growing suburbs. In 1930, the United States had 300,000 grocery stores, 83% of which were not part of a chain.

By 2009 there were only 35,600 grocery stores in the US, with chain stores making 95% of the sales.

The postwar surge of supermarket popularity mirrored the increasing use of single-use plastic in food packaging. Supply chain management requirements for these large supermarket chains necessitated the standardization of their offerings. The turn to plastic was obvious as it is cheap, versatile, and effective. Unsurprisingly, during the same approximate timeframe, annual world plastic production soared from 1.5 million tons in 1950 to 250 million tons in 2009. Because single-use plastic allows for an extensive range of foodstuffs to be stored side-byside on the same shelves, for longer periods, the number of products in the average supermarket grew from an average of 8,948 in 1975 to almost 47,000 in 2008.

With so many products in stock, supermarkets require sophisticated technology to operate smoothly. These systems operate mostly out of sight, except for the unique black and white label icon found on nearly every product in the store. These icons, called Universal Product Codes (UPC), were invented in 1948 but not applied to consumer packaging until 1974. The widespread adoption of UPC streamlined the function of grocery stores. UPC reduced the time it took to check out a customer and increased the accuracy of the transaction. Because inventory could be automatically maintained via computer, shelves could be more efficiently restocked and popular items reordered. Insightful data could be generated by analyzing the trends, especially after customer discount cards allowed the data to be disaggregated down to the individual level.

With their economies-of-scale, increasingly consolidated supermarket chains could easily out-compete and smaller retailers, forcing out many regional or locally-owned grocers. This trend continues. In response to 52

the consolidation of the market, a movement of cooperatively owned grocery stores sprung up in the 70s. While this type of store still exists today, the market share of cooperatively owned grocery stores is minuscule in comparison to the chain supermarkets that dominate the market. Importantly for food packaging, while their ownership structure is different, their method of packaging does not significantly differ from those of large chains. In the last few decades, big-box retailers like Walmart and Target have begun to expand their grocery offerings, with Walmart becoming the United State's largest food retailer in 2001, now making up over 25% of all grocery sales in the country.

For the food industry, the primary criteria to determine the success of food packaging design are effectiveness and cost. With these two criteria in front of mind, the packaging is optimized to fit within the various interlocking systems that supply supermarkets. Because each food for sale is sourced from different suppliers, implementing broad change across the industry is nearly impossible. While food companies may outwardly recognize the importance of reducing food packaging waste, the highlycompetitive nature of the market stymies progress if such changes do not directly increase profits.

Branding The Aisles In contemporary grocery stores, branding and packaging design are inseparable. While food brands are, of course, associated with a food product, their main interface in our lives is through packaging and advertisements.

As mentioned briefly in the Timeline of Packaging Materiality, the original "branding" was the skin of fruits, the smell and color of flowers, and other ingenious devices nature evolved to attract pollinators or spread seeds.

These natural devices serve many of the same purposes as branding today, enticing customers to purchase their product with eye-catching color, shape, texture, and words.

The first US trademark applied to consumer food packaging is thought to be Smith Brother's Cough Drops, the first cough drop brand made and sold in the United States. Sold initially from countertop glass jars, they soon found that their popular product was being mimicked by others, causing confusion among customers and hurting sales.

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To fight this, the brothers began selling the drops in small paper boxes stamped with their faces. When this proved successful in protecting market share and building trust with consumers, other brands started to copy them. A few years later, Dr. Lyon's Tooth Powder stamped their trademark on a tin can. Soon every product did the same.

Since this time, the influence of branding on packaging design has only grown. As technical obstacles became less constraining, the role of packaging design has changed almost entirely to developing brand languages that build a relationship with consumers. Children would be less likely to beg their parents for sugary breakfast cereal if not for the brightly colored packaging featuring characters they see every day in television ads during their favorite cartoon shows. Brands compete to catch the consumer's eye on crowded grocery store shelves. Food packaging has become a fundamental extension of the marketing scheme, as well as a technically-sound packaging solution for food.

Stores like Aldi, a discount grocer that keeps margins low by only selling in-house brands, could be a model for the future. Without inter-brand competition on their shelves, stores like Aldi are in a unique position to reduce packaging waste drastically. Because all products are made by in house, these chains could theoretically reduce packaging to the absolute minimum needed to communicate, opening many possibilities for packaging innovation.

Trends show that consumers are beginning to favor brands that are taking sustainability issues seriously, provoking limited incremental change.

In response to consumer demand, or to be better stewards of natural resources, some brands have reduced the use of plastic or switched to recycled materials - making sure, of course, to alert consumers of these changes.

However, on the whole, food packaging waste is continuing to increase worldwide. Up to this point, the pace of change towards more sustainable packaging designs has been slow because branded packaging space is valuable, packaging materials are cheap, and no one is responsible for the waste. This lack of responsibility for packaging waste could be viewed as the most crucial impediment to progress. Branding will undoubtedly play a role in the future of food packaging, and companies able to fuse sustainability and branding will likely find success first.

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A mid-century Nabisco salesman stocks a supermarket shelf with his distinctively-branded merchandise. Image from the book, Out of The Cracker Barrel, by William Cahn (1969).

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War (What Is It Good For?) Food packaging innovation! But seriously, three of the most important leaps in food packaging resulted directly from the logistical requirements of militaries.

For much of European history, small professional armies were the norm, with large scale conscriptions happening rarely. For most monarchs, the idea of arming and training their people was frightening. This changed during the French Revolutionary era when the practice of a levĂŠe en masse, or mass conscription, was originated. Mass conscription meant that nearly all non-disabled men 18 to 25 were to join the French army.

This practice continued into the Napoleonic era and formed the basis for the massive armies seen in the American Civil War, and later both World Wars. Warmaking has always been intimately connected and reliant on mundane human logistics, and these fantastically large armies stretched these logistics to their breaking point.

To find a better way of supplying his large armies against the British, Austrian, Prussian, and Russian armies in the early years of the Napoleonic Wars, the French government created a prize of 12,000 francs to develop a cheap and effective way of preserving and transporting large amounts of food. In 1809, Nicholas Appert, a Parisian confectioner, presented a revolutionary method of canning.

Appert’s method involved filling wide-mouthed glass bottles with almost any type of food, sealing it with a cork and vise, and then boiling it. Soon after, British inventor Peter Durand applied the same basic concept to a tin can, a more advanced version of which we use to this day.

Widespread adoption of the tin can did not occur until the twentieth century, when the can opener, invented in 1855 by Robert Yeates, became widely available. Before the can opener, cans could only be opened with a hammer and chisel. Canned food was vitally important in the Crimean War, the U.S. Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and then especially in World War One, when millions of men were deployed across the continent.

The next leap in food packaging was the result of large investments in polymer science during World War Two. During the early twentieth century, there were advances in polymer science but minimal commercial application. It wasn’t until World War Two when almost all metals were

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diverted to the war effort, that plastic saw its first truly large scale application. With investment and encouragement from the United States Military, American companies began applying plastic in novel ways to aid the war effort. At the end of World War Two, these companies quickly directed their now-refined plastic technology to the American consumer market. With the surge in population and prosperity following the war, this signaled the beginning of the plastics era.

During the twentieth century, the United States Military developed many food innovations that have changed the way Americans eat and how food is packaged. One of the most obvious is the “Meal, Ready-to-Eat,” or MREs. These are prepackaged meals that are seen in the consumer market in the form of protein and energy bars, TV dinners made for both oven and microwave (also a military invention), and methods to preserve usually fast-spoiling foods like bread and tortillas. The plastic cooler you take with you on a picnic was also invented by the US Military, along with the Saran Wrap on the sandwiches inside of it.

Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with saying that “an army marches on its stomach,” and so it is not surprising that the military would spur food preservation and logistical innovations.

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Example of United States Military issue "Meal, Ready-to-Eat." Image taken from Amazon listing: "Genuine U.S. Military Surplus Assorted Flavor (4-Pack)."

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Culture: Conquest and Consumerism Perhaps the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence is that all people have an inherent right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." In hindsight, it is almost the perfect encapsulation of American culture that when this bold declaration of our collective humanity was incorporated into the United States Constitution, it changed to "life, liberty, or property." From the very beginning of the United States, nearly all aspects of American culture has revolved around the accumulation of wealth and material goods. As the famous French writer Alexis de Tocqueville commented in 1831, "Love of money is either the chief or a secondary motive at the bottom of everything the Americans do." The American economy, history, and culture have always been inseparable from consumerism. Crucially, while sometimes regarded as merely a product of the 20th-century, colonialism and slavery are the direct antecedents of America's unsustainable culture of consumerism.

This section explores this history as well as other factors as they relate to the formation of contemporary American consumerism, to help understand what produced our current food system. Throughout, I will use the term American to refer to the prevailing culture of the United States, which means whiteness is centered. As a white man myself, I recognize that I have blind spots that alter my perception of these subjects.

In the early 17th-century, Great Britain founded the thirteen New World colonies that would later rebel to form the United States of America.

While European colonists chose to come to North America for varying reasons, the fundamental reason for the existence of the colonies was economic. The American Colonies were to be the crowning jewel of the British empire, at that point rapidly spreading around the globe. The colonies exported raw materials to the motherland and imported finished goods from Great Britain and Europe. Life was often hard, and protestant values of thrift and self-reliance were preached from the pulpit. These values, often mythologized as foundational to American values, were explicitly meant to guide people through the early hard times so they or their children can reap the bounty later. John Wesley, the 18th-century founder of Methodism, said, "we must exhort all Christians to gain all they can, and to save all they can; that is, in effect, to grow rich."

While practicing prudence and thrift in their own lives, early colonizers did so explicitly with the goal that their descendants would not have to. This 58

initial deprivation, instead of cementing frugality into American culture, in actuality laid the groundwork for the later explosion of consumerism. The accumulation of material possessions served as outward signs of success, helping develop the veneer of a just, meritocratic society and economy.

In early America, the belief among poor laborers that if they worked hard, success would follow, found a stark contrast in the rapidly growing wealth of a select few families.

The rise of this wealthy class was the direct result of the use of chattel slavery of kidnapped African people. This horrific practice fueled the economy of both the North and South before and after the American Revolution - but slavery's impact was felt far beyond the economy, influencing all aspects of American society to this day. Foundational to American slavery was the construction of race. While slavery had existed throughout human history, it is in America that slavery was first explicitly racially-determined. To create a permanent underclass for long-term exploitation, America invented a novel concept: "whiteness," one in contrast to "blackness" in every way. This black-white binary also conveniently removed the possibility that poor whites and enslaved blacks would join forces to rebel against the deepening inequalities of the economic system.

The formation of a firmly white American identity, by definition, excluded the indigenous people of North America as well. For the white Americans pushing westward, the removal of existing indigenous nations became a necessity. To justify this violent expansion, prominent newspaper columnist John Louis O'Sullivan coined the term "Manifest Destiny" in 1845. While the words were new, the spirit they embodied was not.

O'Sullivan put words to the wide-spread belief that the existence of other peoples and nations on the continent was "thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted

by Providence." Westward expansion, then, was not just an opportunity for economic expansion, but the fulfillment of a God-ordained American crusade to the Pacific. Duplicitous treaties and outright genocide of millions cleared the way for this white expansion Westward.

Under this contrived racial order and within the pursuit of Manifest Destiny, to be white was to be American, and to resist was to be conquered. Western expansion saw rugged individualism flourish, an internalization of endless natural resources, and of divine entitlement 59

to take and use for yourself all you could see. Those in defiance of, or unintentionally in the way of, this conception of American-ness, were naturally omitted from it. It excluded non-white people by default, but anyone standing in the way of "progress" could also easily be branded as un-American.

This condition persists. Today, many see environmental concerns as the products of foreign plots against the American economy, or at the very least below concern for real Americans. The conflation of the American identity with whiteness, the economic exploitation of natural resources, and the expansion of American political power, is a cultural hurdle we have not yet even neared clearing. Dismantling white supremacy, and its pervasive consequences throughout American culture, must be central to all conversations about sustainability.

The centrality of consumerism in American culture only grew over time.

In the postwar boom, the American Dream was a house in the suburbs filled with all the marvelous products of the humming economy. This dream was, of course, systematically denied to non-white people, and mostly benefited white men. In this period, the media strongly influenced the entrenchment of unsustainable consumer practices. Television shows of the 1950s, such as I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver, painted the archetype of domesticity for millions of American households.

The idealized lives of white, middle-class nuclear families with a male breadwinner and female homemaker formed cultural norms for an entire generation. Commercial breaks sold the products viewers could buy to attain the lifestyle they saw on screen.

The message conveyed was that to buy was to be happy and relevant.

Importantly, to buy was to move up in society, and so to be seen as stationary was to be left behind. "Conspicuous Consumption," a term coined by Thorstein Veblen in the late 19th century, was inseparable from modernity. This modernity demanded you replace your car for the new model, microwave your food, and dress in the latest trends. To reject this culture of consumption, you stepped outside of the mainstream: you became un-American.

Social media brought conspicuous consumption into the 21st-century.

Users present a perfect curated version of their life to sometimes millions of followers. The contrast between followers' lives and what they consume on social media breeds dissatisfaction and spurs consumption. Influencers, celebrities self-made through clever use of social media platforms, 60

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An iconic depiction of Manifest Destiny. American Progress, painting by John Gast (1872).

Edits made by the author.

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get paid to promote specific products to their followers, talking about products as if they are essential parts of their idealized life. Data collection targets online advertisements with incredible precision, down to the individual. Online you are always visible and are constantly consuming information. For advertisers, displaying ersatz lifestyles to drive purchasing patterns is nothing new, but within the digital ecosystem, they have attained a new, powerfully intimate penetration into our lives.

While there have been prominent anti-consumerist voices in our past, such as Henry David Thoreau, they were evidently not successful. Because of the influence of American media and economic policy worldwide over the past century, this culture of consumption has spread globally. While much has changed over the history of the United States, the presence of consumerism has been constant. With its foundation in colonialism, slavery, and genocide, consumerism has been reinforced and deepened in our culture, finding new expressions and iterations for each generation.

But maybe the solution to this reckless consumption lies within this same culture: could we harness the spirit of limitless possibility and preordained exceptionalism baked into the American cultural DNA - until now, reinforcing a profoundly unsustainable system - to build a sustainable future? The answer will be for us to find.

The nature of culture is that it affects our behavior without us needing to be consciously aware of it, regardless of whether we abhor the collective history that formed it. Food packaging may seem far from these topics, but as an output of American consumerism, it too is inseparable from this long, painful history. Recognizing and confronting this history, then, is a necessity to finding solutions.

Sorry, But Let's Talk About Capitalism Fundamentally connecting nearly all of these factors is our economic system, capitalism. Capitalism emerged in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries following the dissolution of feudalism. Capitalism is an economic system centered on private ownership, where free-market competition determines prices, production, and distribution. Competition is central to capitalism, and it incentivizes companies to maximize profit over all else. Capitalism's endless quest to maximize profit and shareholder value impacts nearly every aspect of our food system. As capitalism expanded, more areas of human activity became commodified, able to be bought 62

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A happy nuclear family in a 1950s Seven-Up advertisement. The accompanying text reads, " It's natural for Jimmie and Janie to share their 7-Up with the puppets because children want others to like what they like. So pure, so good, so completely wholesome, crystal-clear 7-Up can be enjoyed by the very youngest. It adds extra fun to all family activities."

and sold. Like air and water, food is a fundamental requirement for human survival. In a humane and efficient economic system, food would be plentiful and accessible to all. However, like nearly every facet of life under capitalism, food has been commodified. While capitalism appears to give the consumer the power of choice, this is not true for many. In the United States alone, 45 million people face food insecurity. Foods excessively high in calories, salt, and sugar are the most profitable, and consequently, nearly two-thirds of Americans are obese.

The profit motive dictates farmer income, foods manufactured, packaging design, where goods are available, and at what price. Today, only a small fraction of our population are farmers, and like the majority of Americans, even they rely on supermarkets for their groceries. If a small, rural, farming community's grocery store is not profitable enough for a large grocery chain, then it will be closed regardless of the human cost. Because of this, 63

in a perverse twist, the very people who provide us food often live in "food deserts," having to travel sometimes up to an hour to access the nearest grocery store.

A defining characteristic of the capitalist system is that at all levels of production, businesses avoid paying the full costs incurred. Capitalism's ability to disregard these costs, known in economics as externalities, is essential to the system being able to function. Food packaging waste is an excellent example of an externality. When bringing a product to market, the manufacturer only has to worry about the pre-consumer cost of the packaging. Businesses have no incentive to consider downstream packaging waste because it is the consumer who is responsible for disposing of it. Conveniently for both, consumers have affordable access to garbage disposal. Because the manufacturer and consumer are both able to largely externalize this cost, an incredibly wasteful and destructive system thrives.

Business decisions under capitalism serve only the accumulation of more capital, ambivalent to the needs of people and the planet. The pressures

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A famous Depression-era photograph by Margaret Bourke-White (1937).

of constant intense competition necessitate endless economic growth, directly in conflict with the Earth's finite resources. Infinite growth demands new markets and secure supply lines of raw materials. Wars of aggression, not only to control these raw materials but to maintain hegemonic control over the world's economic and political systems, are a direct and unavoidable consequence of capitalism.

The steady rhythm of economic boom and bust endured without fail nearly every decade entrenches these trends. During each collapse, more and more families lose their ancestral acreages, locally-owned groceries collapse, and nascent sustainable innovations halt. Without fail, massive multinational conglomerates are standing by, accepting bailouts from the government while scooping up the derelict farm, replacing the defunct local grocer, and abandoning unprofitable communities. A standardized assortment of cheap, addictive foods replaces regional cuisines.

Convenience comes at a discount. Shoppers experience superficial choice, comparing two brands owned by the same company. Reliance deepens.

Inequality deepens. Consolidation, nearly to the point of monopoly, spreads deeper into the food system.

Capitalism, without harsh regulatory intervention from the government, will always regard human wellbeing and ecological protection as afterthoughts. In contrast, under an economic system not centered solely on maximizing profit and shareholder value, these factors would naturally factor into production. Everything in our world, including food packaging, would undoubtedly look very different.

FINDING EMPOWERMENT Despite the ability of the forces discussed in this section to foundationally shape all aspects of our lives, we still have power to alter the status quo.

Change will not come easily, but understanding these forces and systems is key to finding a path forward. With this deeper understanding of the engines change, both in and outside of food packaging, we are in a stronger position to find solutions.

These systems were built by people: we can rebuild them.

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WHAT CAN WE DO? With a greater understanding of the material evolution of food packaging, and the connected engines of change, we are left with the problem: incredible amounts of foodpackaging waste.

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A 2017 photograph of "y-tipped" garbage in a small UK town from an article in The Telegraph. Fly-tipping is the practice of illegally dumping garbage, and is a growing problem across the UK.

This section considers possible waste-reduction methods, impediments to change, and a systems-level rethinking of the problem.

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WASTE REDUCTION STRATEGIES Source Reduction Source reduction is optimal because it avoids the use of materials on the front-end, instead of dealing with the consequences afterward. The best method is choosing not to use certain materials at all, especially single-use plastics. Second to this is finding ways to reduce the amount used. Two options for this are "lightweighting" and take-back or refillable packaging.

Lightweighting is the practice of reducing the amount of material required to perform the desired function. It can be employed for any material but is especially prevalent in plastic manufacturing. For example, since 1977, the weight of 2-liter soda bottles has decreased by 25%, saving approximately 206 million pounds of plastic each year. Another example is the 30% weight reduction of the 1-gallon milk jug attained over the last 20 years.

The financial savings are a boon to the bottom line as well as for the environment.

Take-back programs, common in many European countries, make use of reusable high-quality packages, usually glass. Systems like this used to be widespread in the United States, especially for milk and other dairy products, but have decreased dramatically since the introduction of cheap plastic jugs and supermarkets. Some milk and beverage companies still have take-back programs, but they are rare.

Outside of industry, consumers can find creative ways to reuse products in their own lives or communities. Glass jars are durable and can be reused in many different ways. Depending on the plastic, it can also be used repeatedly, as can cardboard and paper packaging.

Recycling Recycling reduces waste by turning it into new consumer products. Metals and glass are the best materials for recycling because the quality of these materials does not degrade during the recycling process. Aluminum cans can be endlessly recycled into new cans, for example. An estimated twothirds of all aluminum that has ever been produced is still in use today.

Recycling glass requires approximately 33% less energy than making new glass from raw materials.

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Data from the European Federation of Bottled Waters (EFBW), showing the decline in weight of1.5 liter PET water bottles. Trade groups like EFBW have a vested interest in lightweighting being accepted as a waste-reduction method.

Paper recycling is common, but each time paper is recycled, the quality of the output lowers. Paper fiber can usually be recycled 5-7 times before the fiber is of too low quality to be used. Depending on its composition, this paper fiber can be composted, but at this stage is usually landfilled or incinerated.

Plastics can also be recycled. The initial introduction of plastic recycling in the United States was funded by investment from the plastic industry itself. In the late 1980s, widespread public outcry over the wastefulness of polystyrene takeout containers threatened to culminate in outright bans.

To avoid this, a consortium of plastics manufacturers came together and invested around forty million dollars in advancing the then rudimentary plastic recycling technology. Roger Bernstein of the American Chemistry Council, a pro-plastic lobbying group, called recycling a "guilt eraser," and perhaps unsurprisingly, the plastic industry's monetary support of recycling ended soon after the public focus on the issue dissipated.

Since this initial spark, plastic recycling rates in the US have been steadily increasing. Even so, they remain as of 2012 at a startlingly low 9%.

Similar to paper, the nature of plastic means it is not able to be truly recycled like glass or metal. Recycling plastic requires considerable amounts of energy and harmful chemicals to produce lower-quality 69

derivative products – downcycling, not recycling. Most plastic can only be recycled one or two times before only lower quality products are possible.

An additional complication is that much of the world's used plastic is shipped to the developing world where it is recycled in unhealthy and dangerous environments. In these countries, lower-value plastic is many times deemed not worth recycling, so it is commonly incinerated with little to no environmental or workplace protections.

Legislation Government intervention is a possible strategy to encourage source reductions of single-use plastic. Because waste-disposal is usually so inexpensive, economic penalties can help make the externalized costs tangible to consumers and industry, spurring changes in behavior. In 2002, Ireland introduced a fifteen-cent fee on plastic bags and saw a 94% drop in their use in just a few weeks. While initially unpopular, the "plastax" was quickly accepted by the public and even led to using plastic bags being viewed as a cultural faux pas akin to wearing fur. In 2007, San Francisco

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The much-maligned "T-Shirt" bag, as it is technically known, complete with a friendly message encouraging sustainability. From an online listing: 1000 bags for $103.00.

passed a plastic bag ban, sparking a wave of similar legislation across the United States. In just the following year, four hundred plastics-related pieces of legislation were debated across all levels of government.

Opponents of plastic fees rightly point out that they have a disproportionate effect on lower-income individuals and families.

Additionally, they cite the reduction of consumer choices, and that people may not always have their reusable bags with them. All solutions to complex problems will be imperfect, but many of these objections can be solved with exemptions or better planning on the part of the consumer.

Once people are used to the new system, they will be better at living under it and will be better at remembering bags. With the evident success of fees on plastic bags, this approach could be applied to other wasteful areas of food packaging.

A non-regulatory system of waste reduction are "pay-as-you-throw" programs, where residents pay for the exact amount of trash they produce. This financial incentive can drive increased rates of recycling and composting, leading in some cases to 14% to 27% reductions in waste per year. While this can also have a disproportionate effect on lower-income individuals and families, they are able to lower their fees by reducing the amount of trash they produce.

IMPLIMENTATION Piecemeal v. Systemic Solutions The previous solutions are possible "piecemeal" solutions to the problem of food packaging waste. These narrowly focused tweaks may lessen the volume of food packaging waste, but will not solve the root problem.

However, because they are more attainable, they can be used as stopgap measures until larger structural changes can be employed.

Because of the scale of the problem, more extensive changes are needed.

For example, previous taxes and fees were rightly criticized for taxing only single-use plastic bags, and not the entire class of single-use containers and packaging. In their book Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart assert that "regulation is the signal of design failure" and that "good design can require no regulation at all."

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While there is truth in this statement, the current system so shields consumers and companies from the externalized costs of their actions that the only way to truly achieve meaningful change might be to make these costs tangible. Only when unsustainable behavior is made unprofitable will companies and consumers change their behavior. The most realistic way for these costs to be made real is probably through some form of government intervention.

Piecemeal legislation that has been enacted has indeed lowered the quantity of single-use waste in our world, but McDonough and Braungart argue that these types of legislation "only work to make the old, destructive system a bit less so," and can, by dampening adverse effects, actually make it harder to stimulate the public or political willpower needed to address the problem.

With rapid population growth around the world, burgeoning middleclasses are increasingly demanding a Westernized lifestyle. Supermarket chains are stepping in to fill this demand, significantly increasing the consumption of single-use food packaging. With this in mind, a complete world-wide ban on all single-use products could be the best way forward.

Our current trajectory demands dramatic course changes, not small tweaks.

Impediments to Change The main impediments to changes in the way we package food are logistical, political, and social. The "engines of change" discussed in Section 2 play significant roles in forming and maintaining these impediments to change.

The logistical problems center around the needs of food packaging in the massive food supply system. The reliance on plastic is especially hard to shift because it is unrivaled in versatility and cost. Commonly produced from gases or other byproducts from the process of refining petroleum, the raw materials for production can be virtually free. It is lighter than glass and paper and already has full acceptance in consumer's daily lives. Plastic is the key to maintaining the wide variety of foods to which contemporary consumers have grown accustomed. Regardless of packaging material, consumers will likely still demand pre-made processed foods like crackers, candy, and ice cream. In a grocery store without 72

plastic, for instance, how can these foods be safely dispensed and taken home? Frozen and wet foods pose an especially difficult challenge. Good, thoughtful design will be essential in solving these problems.

In opposition to any change to the status quo are the petroleum, agricultural, and food industries. These extremely motivated and powerful industry groups have nearly endless resources to devote to lobbying and wield substantial political clout. These groups have spent considerable sums of financial and political capital to overturn or block single-use plastic bans, and fight regulation categorically around the world - and have been extremely effective at doing so. Overcoming this obstacle will be a challenge, as advocates for sustainable packaging reform do not have access to even a fraction of the resources available to the multi-national conglomerates they are fighting.

Lastly, and possibly the largest barrier, is social. Humans certainly possess the technology to solve the problems associated with food packaging, but collectively lack the will to enact change. If the population decided to stop purchasing any products packaged without sustainable packaging, industry, and the government would have no choice but to respond. While the consumer does have power, in the context of a power dynamic that pits individuals against a global system of production, it feels deeply unfair for them to carry the blame.

However, the fact that this problem could be corrected through a social shift presents an opportunity. With the right spark, public opinion and behavior can change very quickly. For example, around 2010 the harmful health effects of the plastic additive BPA became widely known. Almost instantly, there was a massive public outcry and health panic. Within a year, without government intervention, nearly every large company voluntarily stopped using BPA. This is why the social aspect is possibly the most important: the lack of pressure on companies and the government is what permits this unsustainable status quo to persist. While individuals can certainly make positive changes in their lives to reduce their personal waste, it's only through large-scale change that systemic problems can be solved. If the public demanded solutions to the problem of single-use products, industry and the government would have to follow.

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ZERO WASTE HIERARCHY The Zero Waste Hierarchy is a peer-reviewed waste-management model developed by the Zero Waste International Alliance as an alternative to the prevailing waste management models used around the world. In traditional models like "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," or the 3 Rs, the foundation of the waste system is always a form of permanent disposal such as landfilling or incineration, accompanied by recycling, reuse, or source-reduction programs. Building solid waste management plans from this model result in large, expensive, and wasteful systems.

In contrast, the Zero Waste Hierarchy centers minimizing environmental impact and promoting conscientious management of resources. Every product that is manufactured represents a resource used and the energy expended to make it. Our current model is based on destroying these materials. Landfilling a product, aside from physical space requirements and risk of environmental damage, is a clear example of wasting the resources invested in producing it. Incinerators, often euphemistically called "Waste-to-Energy" or "Resource Recovery Plants," also waste these materials, regardless of electricity produced as a byproduct, alongside emitting greenhouse gases and other possibly harmful emissions specific to burning trash.

The Zero Waste Hierarchy is meant to be applied at all stages of the system, forming a pathway for industry, policy-makers, and individuals to move up the hierarchy from worst to best use of materials. For industrial designers, all future products should be designed to actively push us towards the top of the Zero Waste Hierarchy pyramid. From the very beginning of the product development cycle, all products should be conceived to be used within a closed-loop, circular economy. This means they should only use non-toxic, reused, recycled, or sustainably-harvested materials, and be durable, reusable, easily repairable, compostable, and easily disassembled.

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RETHINK/REDESIGN REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE/COMPOST MATERIAL RECOVERY RESIDUALS MANAGEMENT

UNNACCEPTABLE

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Zero Waste Hierarchy 7.0, developed by the Zero Waste International Alliance (2018).

DESIGNING CHANGE As discussed in this section, the transition to a circular economy will need both piecemeal and systemic changes to succeed. The government could offer financial incentives to promote the development of responsiblyproduced products and discourage - or even ban the opposite.

Overall, a fundamental shift in the way we think of consumption needs to change. Consideration for the entire lifespan of a product will need to be present from the beginning. Perhaps the very concept of ownership needs to shift instead to a network of shared goods and services. Putting emphasis on building local economies, as opposed to global, will also promote closed-loop systems.

How can this be incorporated into our design practice?

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WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? It was time to design. But after coming to a more thorough understanding of where we are, how we got here, and what needs to change, I found that all of my ideas felt either hopelessly insignificant or laughably idealistic beside such dizzyingly large and complex problems. I felt powerless...

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Al Capone and associates in Chicago's Dearborn Station (May 3, 1932). Edits by author.

... but I also believe deeply in the power of design to effectuate positive change, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable barriers. In the real world, our systems are unyielding, but what if I constructed an alternate world where the root of the were solved by default? What if I designed for that alternate world, instead of our own?

How might my design output change within this system?

Could this practice yield any useful solutions?

Might it even produce better solutions?

I decided to find a method of designing that was empowering while yielding real, practicable solutions. The search for this method brought me back to the root issues of the problem.

This section applies the research presented up to this point to build and then design within an alternate world.

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DISLOCATION Through my research, I observed that the omnipresent problem at all levels of the contemporary food system is dislocation, as expressed in two interrelated ways. First is dislocation from our place, and second is dislocation from the consequences of our consumption.

As discussed in section two, the history of humanity has seen us become increasingly separated from our physical locality. What and how we built, ate, and lived used to be borne of a relationship between ourselves and our place. Now, the contemporary consumer economy facilitates a lifestyle completely divorced from our locality.

Later in that section, the concept of economic externalities is discussed.

Both consumers and businesses face little real consequences for producing waste, even if this stasis has begun to change as climate change becomes a more pressing issue.

The combination of separation from our locality and the conversion of consequences to externalities perpetuates our current unsustainable food packaging system.

What hypothetical system would force society to mend this dislocation?

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WESTRIDGE NEIGHBORHOOD This neighborhood in Verona, Wisconsin, is where I grew up. Every Monday morning, a garbage truck wakes up the quiet cul-de-sac, and that afternoon we roll our empty garbage bin back to the garage. Every week, every month, every year, my whole life. This rhythm is nearly universal in the United States, one we accept without question. We buy, we make trash, and the trash goes away. I don't know where those trucks take the garbage. I don't think many people know, or honestly, care.

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Both images of Verona's Westridge Neighborhood downloaded from Google Earth.

To be truthful, I didn't consider it myself until over one break, while unloading groceries from the car during a visit home, I asked myself, "What if none of this food packaging could ever leave our house?"

I figured we would stop buying certain items, but what about the ones we can't live without? Would we find other uses for the packages? Would we bury them in the backyard next to the azaleas? Burn them in the side-yard by the neighbors we don't like?

The daydream expanded: What if every bit of trash that entered the neighborhood could never leave? What would the residents of Westridge do? Build a landfill in Johnson Park? Set up a recycling facility in the Rasmussen's basement?

In what ways would our relationship to trash change? What about the community's relationship with trash? Would we come together, or splinter into factionalism? Perhaps we would argue to a stalemate and end up with trash everywhere. Or maybe we would collectively change how we consume and build a clean neighborhood together.

What if we became responsible for our trash?

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TRASH ZONES AND CRACKER BOXES This daydream grew into the conceptual design context I was searching for: Trash Zones.

In this hypothetical world, the government has instituted compact geographic regions, usually about the size of a residential neighborhood, where once trash crossed the boundary, it could never leave. Trash, in this context, is everything a person is going to dispose of eventually, including recyclables and compostables. Under this system, the borders of Trash Zones are perfectly enforced.

Implementation of Trash Zones would have profound effects, and immediately prompts more questions than it answers. Certainly, it would change individual lifestyles, purchasing decisions, and relationships with waste. Because neighborhoods would be responsible collectively for trash, it would likely become an integral part of the social fabric. Trash would no longer be an externality, but a pressing local issue.

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Trash Zones would mend the dislocation that forms the root of the problem by forcing the relationship between people, place, and trash to change immediately. This altered relationship would, in turn, affect how every single consumer good is made, packaged, sold, consumed, and disposed of.

The implication of ever-broadening ripples made it clear that to be productive, I needed to find one focus to explore within the overarching design framework.

For practical and poetic reasons, I chose the cracker box.

Cracker packaging makes use of both single-use paper and plastic, and crackers have specific needs that would provide interesting practical design constraints. Poetically, the cracker box was the United State's first implementation of single-use consumer food packaging.

With a clearly defined focus within the Trash Zone context, I was hopeful that all design outputs would, by default, solve or at least respond to the issue of dislocation.

This project brings modern food packaging back home, but in an entirely novel context.

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An image of a Nabisco Uneeda Biscuit Box circa 1910. Taken from page 157 of "Trade mark litigation. Opinions, orders, injunctions and decrees relating to unfair competition and infringement of trade marks" (1915).

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THE DESIGN NARRATIVES

DESIGN NARRATIVES:

TRASH ZONES AND CRACKER BOXES

Before beginning, I made the mind map shown on the previous page. Almost immediately after starting to work within the Trash Zone framework, I realized that I had stopped "designing" as I normally experienced it. Instead, my output had involuntarily morphed into narratives.

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BUSINESS

COMMUNITY

INDIVIDUAL

I instinctively began to tell myself stories about what happened to cracker boxes once Trash Zones became law. Some of these stories were funny, some serious, and some entirely speculative. Most of these stories dealt specifically with cracker boxes, and some did not. Giving each story the same serious consideration, the following Design Narratives range from highly practical to wildly speculative. This varying output is a crucial feature of this design process, not a flaw. It brought levity and joy to the design process and led me to new productive places I would not have gone save through these playful thought experiments.

When I began to write my ideas down, I saw that I wasn't thinking about how things might change, but how they did. Consequently, the Design Narratives are written as if they have already happened. They generally begin with a short introduction that prvides background information and poses a broad design question, to which the ensuing narrative responds.

The design work is mine, but is presented and written as if they are analyses of projects that have already been implemented. The Narratives are organized into three sections: business, community, and individual.

As you move forward, suspend your disbelief and enter the world of Trash Zones with me.

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BUSINESS TRASH ZONE AND CRACKER BOXES DESIGN NARRATIVES

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PACKAGING REDESIGN GARBAGE SOCIAL MEDIA CONSUMER DISCOUNT CARDS BYOC CAFÉS ALDI ZERO MICHELIN STAR CRACKERS

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PACKAGING REDESIGN Under Trash Zones, consumer demand for eco-friendly cracker packaging skyrockets. While some prefer a zero-waste approach, others choose instead to buy products that lower their footprint. Whether reducing the volume of material used, swapping in eco-friendly alternatives, or rethinking the product itself, companies try nearly anything to attract these newly waste-conscious consumers. Not all of these innovations are successful, but some companies discover novel and effective responses to this new consumer demand.

How might food companies reduce the amount of waste produced by cracker packaging?

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Explore Alternative Packaging Materials Companies respond by trying out alternative packaging materials. At the top is a fungus/mycelium-based material attempted by a few daring companies. Unfortunately, consumers were turned off by the uneven surface and negative connotations of fungus, especially around food.

The center image documents the 80-day progression of a biodegradable plastic bottle. A sugarcane-derived PLA bioplastic, shown at the bottom left in pellet form, was successfully applied to the box liner. Lastly, some companies choose to forgo the liner completely, and packaged their crackers directly in the cardboard box, instructing consumers to eat them quickly before they go stale. This last method proved commercially unsuccessful.

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Cut and Bake Crackers Knowing that consumers already buy pre-made cookies, biscuits, cinnamon rolls, and others to bake at home, HyVee pilots "Cut and Bake" crackers. Inspired by butter packaging, Cut and Bake cracker dough sticks are sliced at home into about 50 crackers each and baked at 350 degrees for 8 minutes. The sticks can be frozen for future use. The box is recyclable and compostable, and the wax-coated wrappers are compostable. The pilot was successful enough for Cut and Bake crackers to stay on the market.

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Back to The Beginning Nabisco returns to its roots and brings back one of their early packaging innovations: the wax-coated cardboard box. These boxes effectively seal out humidity while also protecting the contents from impact. Wax-coated cardboard is not recyclable but can be composted. As a part of the marketing campaign promoting this new eco-friendly packaging, Nabisco reintroduces to the market Uneeda Biscuits in their original packaging.

Instantly popular for their trendy vintage look and eco-credentials, Nabisco decides to keep them on grocery store shelves after the marketing campaign ends.

For cracker companies that can't go zero-waste, options to reduce waste, and especially those that shun nonrenewable materials such as petroleum-derived plastic, are popular.

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GARBAGE SOCIAL MEDIA Originally a tool to connect people through the internet, over the last decade, social media has evolved into a powerful cultural and commercial force in contemporary life.

Free to use for users, these platforms derive profit from data collection and targeted advertisements. Moving beyond now “traditional” digital ads, brands increasingly use the platforms for marketing their products to consumers by sponsoring posts by users with large followings. These “Influencers” live aspirational lives their follows work to emulate.

Consumer trends spread quickly within the social media ecosystem. This, combined with the expanding “app-ificication” of our lives, presents an opportunity to harness this technology to promote and facilitate transition to sustainable lifestyles.

How could a social media app help people living in Trash Zones reduce or eliminate their waste footprint?

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Rubbish Launched soon after the implementation of Trash Zones, this app fosters a global community of people working to eliminate their waste footprint. Users log their waste and compete to move up the Rubbish scoreboard. Users can show off waste reduction projects, and share knowledge through the chat function.

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By syncing with your grocery store app, Rubbish automatically analyzes the material composition of your purchases. Using location data, user scores are combined with and compared to other users in the Trash Zone, promoting healthy competition within and between Zones. The app recognizes recurring types of user waste and provides tailored educational resources to target these sources. Additionally, through sponsored brand partnerships, Rubbish recommends alternative products that also target the user's common waste sources.

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“Trash Influencers” become increasingly common on Rubbish, sharing tips, flaunting their low-waste levels, and posting selfies with their highly-photogenic compost systems. Their followers work hard to emulate this glamorous zero-waste lifestyle. Food packaging waste is greatly reduced over time.

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CONSUMER DISCOUNT CARDS Many grocery stores make use of shopper discount cards. These membership programs provide discounts to the shopper, but also shape consumer behavior. By offering reduced prices on specific items, stores influence consumer decisions.

Iowa-based supermarket HyVee has a long-standing and highly successful consumer discount program called Fuel Saver + Perks. In this program, shoppers can purchase specific quantities of certain products to earn a discount on gasoline. Of course, this discount is only available at affiliated gas stations, ensuring a second consumer purchase for the company.

A unique UPC label connects all products in modern supermarkets to an inventory management database. Because of this, even if a shopper is not chasing bargains, if a Fuel Saver card is used at checkout, HyVee gleans valuable consumer information from the transaction.

Could consumer discount cards be re-imagined as a mutually-beneficial way to transition consumers and food companies to less-wasteful packaging alternatives?

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Implementation of Trash Zones heightens consumer awareness of their food packaging waste. In response, HyVee re-launches its consumer discount program as the Trash Saver + Perks program.

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Operational Details of Trash Saver Program The Trash Saver program harnesses the data-collection capability of consumer cards to track packaging waste. To do this, the type and volume of materials used in product packaging is added to the HyVee's inventory management database.

Then, when an item's UPC is scanned at checkout, the product's packaging information is automatically retrieved. This data can be used internally to track consumer preferences in regards to packaging materials. When a Trash Saver card is used, this data is connected with the consumer, and automatically uploaded to the integrated web and app portals so shoppers can effortlessly track their waste over time.

info conveyed to shopper

shopper selects product

Triscuit - Roasted Garlic printed cardboard HDPE ďŹ lm

RECYCLE

information sent to account

cashier scans UPC label printed cardboard & HDPE ďŹ lm

retrieve product materiality

connect to database entry database

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Shopping history can be easily connected to an outside tracker, such as Rubbish, or tracked through the Trash Saver online portal. Shopper history is analyzed for higher-waste packaging products. The website offers discounts on lower-waste products, possibly secured through brand partnerships.

The Trash Saver program is a mutually-beneficial way for consumers and businesses to transition to a waste-free grocery store. Shoppers are incentivized socially and fiscally to buy conscientiously-packaged products.

This consumer demand gives companies a reason to start redesigning their packaging.

This symbiotic relationship, over time, could shift the paradigm of food packaging design considerably.

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BYOC CAFÉS Bring Your Own Cracker (BYOC) Cafés allow people to enjoy their favorite crackers without needing to bring the packaging into their home Trash Zone. These cafés come in a few different forms.

Some are quite simple places with some seating where customers can bring their crackers, pay an “unboxing” fee, and enjoy their snack. When they finish, customers dispose of their boxes on-site. At some higher-end cafés, customers can also purchase coffee, wine, cheese, or other pairings with their crackers.

These cafés also make ideal locations for package delivery lockers.

Customers can choose these lockers as the delivery location for their packages ordered online, and can then open them on-site and dispose of unwanted packaging before heading home.

Features of a typical BYOC Café: 1 - Package pickup lockers 2 - Standing table for opening packages 3 - Plastic and paper recycling, and trash bins 4 - Coffee/wine/cheese bar 5 - Crackers, for purchase 6 - Seating area What sort of novel businesses might arise to help people maintain their current lifestyle?

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These businesses thrive in the early years of Trash Zones, but fall out of fashion as consumer and business practices evolve past wasteful packaging methods.

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ALDI ZERO Conventional supermarkets that sell products made by hundreds of different companies under one roof have little to no control over how individual foods are packaged. This decentralized packaging design arrangement and fierce competition between brands, requires the main focus of food packaging design to be on cost per unit, basic functionality, and effectiveness as an advertising surface.

Many inventive solutions would prove impossible to implement on a piecemeal basis. Because large stores would need to continue selling redesigned products alongside conventionally-packaged goods, any solution that breaks away from the traditional shelf format will be hard or even impossible to integrate into the aisles. Adding complication to this situation are the fees companies pay to reserve space for their products on grocery store shelves. These "slotting fees" are often incredibly expensive, heightening the financial risk of introducing redesigned packaging, and advantaging large companies that can easily afford to pay.

This economic clout gives companies the power to essentially design grocery store layouts themselves. For these and other reasons, traditional grocery stores struggle to respond nimbly to the change Trash Zones bring and struggle to attract trash-conscious consumers.

But not all companies face these issues. ALDI, a chain discount grocery store, controls product development itself by only selling private brands.

ALDI controls its store layouts and does not have to worry about interbrand competition. Alongside this structural advantage, a loyal and distinctly self-reliant store culture indicates that both ALDI's brand and shoppers are well-positioned to adapt successfully to life under Trash Zones.

How might ALDI, or similar companies, decide to respond to the implementation of Trash Zones?

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Recognizing a quickly growing market need and their unique ability to respond, ALDI risks it all. Leveraging the control it has over its in-house brand packaging, ALDI agilely re-brands, redesigns, and relaunches all stores nationwide as ALDI ZERO, a high-tech, completely zero-waste supermarket.

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ALDI ZERO: Complete Grocery Store Redesign Executives, strategists, and designers came together to develop a vision for a zero-waste future. Embracing the opportunity that comes with making such significant changes, ALDI also looked at emerging market trends. One new development that has proven successful is Amazon Go. In these stores, shoppers enter using an app, select purchases, and then simply walk out. The store uses cameras, sensors, and deep learning to track which items are taken automatically, and sends the shopper a receipt for the purchases later. Initially only selling foods like sandwiches and drinks, Amazon has plans to launch fully-stocked Amazon Go grocery stores.

Because ALDI was already redesigning all packaging, it was an opportune moment to implement this sort of innovation into future ALDI ZERO stores. Therefore, it was decided to not just to design a zero-waste packaging system, but to create an entirely new grocery system with reusable, modular, tech-integrated packaging as the hub of a new hightech grocery shopping experience.

user remembers to bring their used packaging

user returns used packaging as they enters the store

user makes plans for another trip user stores used packaging on tray until next visit

user selects goods o shelves in store tech-integrated modular packaging system

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items are automatically added to digital cart seamless user checkout experience

user consumes food at home

user puts tray in car or carries it home

reusable packages are sanitized, ďŹ lled, and restocked on shelves

user takes home packaging on integrated tray

user receives an e-receipt possible future delivery or pickup integration

PACKAGING SPOTLIGHT: Cracker/Dry Goods The design team first mapped and analyzed all products in the store to identify the smallest number of different packaging designs ALDI ZERO stores would need. The general brief for the packaging, tailored to each product's specific needs, is as follows:

J Made from scratch-resistant, non-porous, durable plastic that can withstand many sanitizations and be recycled at the end-of-life (plastic chosen over glass because of weight and risk of shatter)

J Easily fillable with product J Tech-integration for seamless shopping experience J Highly effective food storage capability (moisture, chemical, oxygen, barriers, etc.)

J Develop a unified brand language across the suite of packaging styles The following work is taken from the dry-goods design team. Initially, the cracker team, the team's work expanded early on to also securely package dry pasta, grains, cereal, among many others.

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LID Embossed ALDI ZERO logo Secure close and tight seal Wide opening angle FLANGE Soft silicone flange CAP Contains the sensors that connect to the automatic shopping system Circular hole wide enough to fit most hands Smooth lip facilitates pouring SEAL Soft silicone seal

SCREW TOP After sanitization, workers reattach the top which locks into canister, like a pill bottle, so customers cannot separate them at home

CANISTER Injection blow-molded ABS Can see amount and quality of food Square design has same volume as traditional rectangular box Easy to hold size

BOTTOM Brightly colored and friendly Opaque bottom hides crumbs and wear-and-tear from consumer

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e

Under this system, ALDI ZERO manufactures foods as normal, but instead of packaging the foods on the factory floor, large batches are sealed and shipped directly to local stores.

There, workers fill sanitized packaging on-site. Each store has its own local reusable packaging loop, with the only external input being the food delivered from the centralized manufacturing facilities.

Attention was paid to all parts of the user experience.

User testing revealed that the sound and feeling of opening up a new food package was incredibly important to consumers.

Accordingly, the lid is designed to "pop" in a satisfying way when opened for the first time. This subliminally communicates to the user that the product contained is fresh, sanitary, and of high quality.

This same packaging is also used to sell many other dry-goods. It is just one of a suite of specially-designed containers.

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CASE STUDY: Whole Foods and COVID-19 The COVID-19 Pandemic provided an interesting glimpse into a possible future where physical grocery shopping has largely been replaced by online grocery delivery. In the spring of 2020, New York City was particularly hard-hit by the COVID-19 Pandemic. Within the city, demand for grocery delivery surged at the same time as physical visits to grocery stores dwindled. Balancing this demand, Amazon, the owner of Whole Foods, closed certain stores to in-person shoppers and used them as grocery delivery fulfillment centers.

With technology-integrated, specially-designed packaging, ALDI ZERO is well-positioned to expand into delivery. While for now, ALDI ZERO stores are not going to be converted into delivery fulfillment centers, it is an area the company is actively researching. In the short term, ALDI ZERO will begin offering normal delivery services as soon as possible.

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An ALDI ZERO store post-converstion.

The cracker/dry-goods canister shown in this section is just one of the many designs created for ALDI ZERO. All sectors of products have their own packaging style, unified by a common design language. The proportions of these products are all based on a consistent 3-dimensional grid ensuring they fit well together on shelves and in the shopping cart. Shopping carts were themselves redesigned to have a removable tray as the top. Because consumers do not have to empty their cart on a conveyor belt, the tray is designed to securely hold containers and then be lifted off and taken home with the shopper. This tray makes returning the packaging easy.

The technology embedded in the packaging not only tells the store what the shopper bought, but what packages they are using. With the ALDI ZERO phone app, users make sure they have no outstanding packaging, and set reminders to bring them the next time they go to the store.

With the seamless shopping experience, a unified suite of smart and reusable food packaging, and no waste to dispose of, along with the low prices ALDI is already known for, these stores are a great success.

ALDI ZERO swiftly becomes the dominant force in the grocery market, forcing all other grocery stores to follow their lead and go zero-waste.

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MICHELIN STAR CRACKERS Lobster, once so plentiful throughout New England it was considered peasant food, gained luxury status in the United States only after plummeting populations from overfishing drove up prices. Under new regulations, crackers, now prohibitively expensive for nearly all, begin to appear on menus of high-end restaurants. Diners secure reservations months in advance to experience trendy 12-course cracker tasting menus featuring only the finest ingredients and inventive preparation methods.

How can crackers be plated for high-end dining?

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The elevation of the quotidian to luxury is one of many odd and unexpected results of Trash Zones.

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COMMUNITY TRASH ZONE AND CRACKER BOXES DESIGN NARRATIVES

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OUTREACH AND WORKSHOPS COMMUNITY KITCHEN NEIGHBORHOOD DUMP LOCAL RECYCLING PRECIOUS PAPER CRACKER SURVEILLANCE

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OUTREACH AND WORKSHOPS Trash Zones force neighborhoods to treat food packaging as a local issue.

In these circumstances, creating a shared social responsibility is extremely important. If even one person chooses to be wasteful, everyone in the Trash Zone will be negatively affected. Communities encourage residents to share their work proudly—backyard compost piles to prominent positions in front yards; absence of a curbside trash becomes a mark of social prestige.

Social media pages or email newsletters communicate with the residents of the Zone messages about shared responsibility, spotlights on low-waste households, and logistical information. All of these efforts help to reduce strain on the local trash infrastructure.

How can communities simultaneously reduce garbage production while also fostering shared responsibility?

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COMMUNITY WORKSHOP THIS SATURDAY 3pm at Brookside Park Cracker Box Planter Join us for a fun community workshop that is perfect for kids and adults alike! In this workshop, you will not only learn a new skill but will build a sense of community responsibility for our trash.

This project extends the life of a cracker box by turning it into a planter. If the original cardboard is compostable, the planter could be planted directly into the ground when the plants reach maturity.

Materials: Bring two cracker boxes Directions: 1 ) Cut two boxes into five sections 2 ) Cut vertical inserts into sections 3 ) Fold and glue carrying handle 4 ) Assemble 5 ) Fill with soil and plant seeds

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PROCESS: Cracker Box Planter Workshop Box 1:

Box 2:

Box1:1: Box

Box2:2: Box

Removetop topand andbottom bottomflaps, flaps, save1: forlater. later.

Cutinto into 2.5”save vertical halves.

Remove save for Box 1: Box Cut 2.5” vertical Remove top and bottom flaps, forhalves. later. Box 2: nto 2.5” vertical halves.

Cutinto intothree threehorizontal horizontalsections: sections: Glueends endsshut. shut.

Cut Glue tallhorizontal horizontalsections Cut into three horizontal sections: ends shut.

2 2x x3”3”for tall Remove top and bottom flaps, save later. sections Cut into 2.5” vertical halves.

Cut into 2.5” vertical halves. +

Glue ends shut.

2 x 3” tall horizontal sections + 1 x remaining horizontal section

+ x remaininghorizontal horizontalsection section 1 x1 remaining

Cut into three horizontal sections:

2 x 3” tall horizontal sections Box 1: + 1 x remaining horizontal section

Glue ends shut.

Box 2:

2 x 3” tall horizontal sections + Box 1: 1 x remaining horizontal section

Box 2:

Cut into 2.5” vertical halves.

Glue ends shut.

2 x 3” tall horizontal sections + 1 x remaining horizontal section

Remove top and bottom flaps, save for later.

Cut into three horizontal sections:

Cut into 2.5” vertical halves.

Glue ends shut.

Box 1:

Box 2: Remove top and bottom flaps, save for later.

Cut into three horizontal sections:

Remove top and bottom flaps, save for later. Cut into 2.5” vertical halves.

Cut into three horizontal sections: Glue ends shut.

2 x 3” tall horizontal sections + 1 x remaining horizontal section

Box 2: Remove top and bottom flaps, save for later.

Cut into three horizontal sections:

2 x 3” tall horizontal sections + 1 x remaining horizontal section

1)

Box 1:

Box 2:

Cut into 2.5” vertical halves.

Glue ends shut.

Box1 1- -2.5” 2.5”vertical verticalhalves halves Box

Remove top and bottom flaps, save for later.

Cut into three horizontal sections:

2 x 3” tall horizontal sections + 1 x remaining horizontal section

Box22- -Remaining Remaininghorizontal horizontalsection: section:Handle Handleconstruction. construction.

Box FromSide, Side,fold foldand andbend bendasasshown shownbelow. below.Glue.

Glue.

From

Box22- -3”3”horizontal horizontalsections sections Box

2)

Box 2 - Remaining horizontal section: Handle construction.

Box 1 - 2.5” vertical halves From Side,Box fold bend as shown below. Glue.

2 -and 3” horizontal sections

ox 2 - 3” horizontal sections

Box 2 - Remaining horizontal section: Handle construction.

From Side, fold and bend as shown below. Glue.

sections Box 1 - 2.5” vertical halves

Box 2 - 3” horizontal sections

Box 2 - Remaining horizontal section: Handle construction.

From Side, fold and bend as shown below. Glue.

Box 2 - Remaining horizontal section: Handle construction.

Box 1 - 2.5” vertical halves From Side,Box 2 -and 3” horizontal sections fold bend as shown below. Glue.

ox 2 - 3” horizontal sections

Box 2 - Remaining horizontal section: Handle constructio From Side, fold and bend as shown below. Glue.

Box 2 - Remaining horizontal section: Handle constructio From Side, fold and bend as shown below. Glue.

3)

Box 1 - 2.5” vertical halves

+ 4)

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Box 2 - Remaining horizontal section: Handle cons From Side, fold and bend as shown below. Glue.

Box 2 - 3” horizontal sections

=

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Outreach and workshops build collective responsibility for neighborhood garbage, which over time dramatically reduces local waste.

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COMMUNITY CRACKER KITCHEN Communal ovens have a long history throughout the world. Seen in the Shtetls of Eastern Europe, rural French villages, and especially around the Mediterranean, communal ovens formed an important part of nutritional, political, and social life for thousands of years. They were mainly used for baking bread, but also baked casseroles, meats, and other dishes, depending on local cuisine.

In 15th and 16th century Italy and France, these ovens and the fire inside were almost always the property of the local Lord who charged for the use of the oven. After the French Revolution, ovens in France became communally owned and free to use. Families would bring their homemade dough to the ovens, and return later to pick up their baked bread. To differentiate their loaves, families would cut the tops with distinctive patterns. In Central America, some communities still have community masa mills and tortilla ovens, although they are becoming less and less common.

These ovens are for more than just cooking, developing into places where community is built and maintained. While uncommon in the United States, some community ovens do still exist in North America, around the Mediterranean, and in parts of Europe.

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A communal oven, "four banal," in CĂŠvennes, France

Brought into contemporary life, this historical model would help Trash Zones avoid packaging waste, and so much more. Communities could build community ovens in parks or some other public area, and people could gather to and make and bake crackers as a group. There could be a "Cracker Club" that maintains the oven, is in charge of baking, and holding on cracker making and cooking classes. While perhaps challenging by yourself at home, making larger batches with a group would change the experience and perception of cracker baking.

These new community spaces could be more than just ovens, but entire community kitchens. Cooking classes, craft workshops, meetings, even parties, could be held here. The oven would become a permanent resource for community groups and residents, well beyond simply being a place to bake crackers. If located in a park, these kitchens could be adjacent to community gardens, providing fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs to the kitchen and community.

In places where there are no public areas available, a community could use email or social media to organize baking days at a neighbor's home.

Alternatively, these gatherings could be used to make the dough for later baking at home.

Community ovens take cracker consumption from global to local. The community could choose what to make, when, and how much. More than that, the oven would be a place where everyone feels welcome as a part of a larger whole while keeping their neighborhood clean.

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THE NEIGHBORHOOD DUMP Residents of Trash Zones must make incredibly hard decisions about how to deal with their waste. After source-reduction methods, the four most common waste-processing options are composting, recycling, landfilling, and incineration. Each option has pros and cons, and all usually face some local opposition. The question of trash disposal, previously far removed from everyday life, becomes a pressing local issue, and the subject of vigorous debate. The issue is unavoidable: a decision must be made soon, or the matter will get out of control.

With trash piling up, what might neighborhoods decide to do with their waste?

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INCINERATION

LANDFILL

RECYCLING

COMPOSTING

PRO

CON

- non-permanent

- no non-organic waste

- supports local gardening

- takes up space

- minimal tech needed

- odor and wildlife risks

- generates useful product

- extends product lifespan

- semi-permanent

- can process non-organics

- requires investment

- generates useful product

- needs considerable processing to be effective

- high volume solution

- permanent

- can process all materials - once covered the trash is not visible to the community

- odor, wildlife and water quality risks - potentially hazardous if not done correctly

- high volume solution

- fire risk and air pollution

- can process all materials

- requires professional management to be safe - produces hazardous ash that needs to be stored

- possibly smaller footprint than landfill

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CASE STUDY: Controversy in Trash Zone #IA-346.24

This Trash Zone faced considerable community controversy during discussions over the construction of local trash infrastructure. A steering committee recommended either converting the local park into a landfill, or acquiring the backyards of six residences to build an incinerator. This location was the only viable option for the incinerator, both in terms of physical space and because access to a main road was required, as per local fire regulations. The options were put before the local residents before construction began.

Residents immediately and overwhelmingly rejected the landfill in order to save the much loved park.

While the incinerator was slightly more popular, after the owners of the backyards to be affected by the construction started a widelycirculated petition questioning the effects on local air-quality, this option was also scrapped. Instead, the Trash Zone leaders created a small community compost center in one corner of the park, and investigated ways to recycle locally.

Residents began to change their habits and encouraged their neighbors to do the same, hoping to avoid forcing a decision on one of the rejected proposals.

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The controversy around where to build this sort of capacity was perhaps the strongest motivator to change behavior during the early years of Trash Zones.

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LOCAL RECYCLING Even before Trash Zones, international paper and plastic recycling markets were already in crisis. The trans-Pacific recycling economy was increasingly non-viable as developing economies blocked imports, rejecting their status as the world’s trash dumping grounds. These struggles were already beginning to push recycling projects towards the local-level.

After the implementation of Trash Zones, instead of being seen as byproducts of their lives, communities realized that plastic and paper were valuable community resources. Local manufacturing, utilizing small-scale recycling systems, has become an important part of local economies as well as central to waste-reduction efforts within Trash Zones.

Connection to the local community, a sense of collective ownership and pride in their output, helps drive the success of these facilities. Based on local needs and trash composition, communities decide which products to make. These products are produced for local use, and recycled again after use, forming an almost completely closed-loop recycling system.

This is not a completely closed-loop, however. Some continuing input is required as paper can be recycled 5-7 times, and plastic can only be recycled 1-2 times before degrading. Because of this, communities emphasize creating permanent states for recycled plastic, while the paper is allowed to be used in more short-term applications.

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Community recycling/manufacturing programs foster a community of shared responsibility for what was previously trash, create local economic opportunities, and deliver products of, by, and for their place of origin.

Cracker boxes provide two highly-recyclable materials:

2

HDPE PLASTIC #2 plastics are the most recyclable and recycled plastic. It is also used widely throughout food packaging.

PAPER CARDBOARD Paper cardboard is often recycled. It required less specialized equipment to recycle, ideal for the small scale.

How could local communities recycle their cracker packaging into new products?

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PROCESS STUDY: Low-tech Paper Recycling

Gather Cut

Hydrate Grind Squeeze

Mold Press

Dry Seal

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REAL WORLD CASE STUDY: Precious Plastic

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Created by Dave Hakkens as his 2013 graduation thesis from the Design Academy in Eindhoven, Precious Plastic is a small-scale open-source plastic recycling program.

His program provides people or communities with the means to set up and run local plastic recycling programs. Machine designs, mold designs, and project ideas are all available for free online. Pre-made machines, molds, and finished products are also available for purchase. This system has shown promise in real life and would thrive under Trash Zones.

Use

Community recycling can range from low to high-tech, depending on resources available. But with enough creativity, opportunity is limitless.

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PRECIOUS PAPER While Precious Plastic does a good job of handling local plastic waste, it does not offer a solution for paper recyclables. Precious Paper, a new sister-system of the current system, uses the Precious Plastic model to build the means to recycle paper. Community plastic collection locations will be expanded to accept paper waste alongside plastics. The Precious Plastic system will then be used to create recycled plastic presses, molds, screens, and other pieces needed to recycle cracker boxes into new products effectively.

The process is as follows: finely-ground paper is combined with water and a natural binder such as rice paste or cornstarch, highly compressed in a mold, and allowed to dry. The final product is a lightweight, dense, and durable material that is dye-able, sand-able, and wood-like. If organic binders are used, it is also compostable.

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Plastic Top Mold (Precious Plastic)

Recycled Paper Product (Precious Paper)

Plastic Bottom Mold with Mandrel (Precious Plastic)

This process is a more refined version of the method shown on the previous pages and is similar to the process already used to make egg cartons and paper planters. While these products can and would be made with the Precious Paper system, more exciting are the products possible by combining the outputs of both systems together.

Four different Precious Paper + Precious Plastic product concepts are explored on the following pages.

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CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

Stacking Coaster Set

Nesting Trivet

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Pen Cup + Storage

Modular Bulletin Board

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PRODUCT CONCEPT: Nesting Trivet and Plant Tray These recycled paper trivets can either be used separately or in pairs.

They can be made in different sizes to fit a wide range of pots and pans.

The paper trivets can be paired with a plastic drip tray to be used under potted plants. The base of the potted plant rests on the trivet, elevating it above the nested plastic tray that catches excess water. The wide range of plastic and paper colors means this product can be widely customized to all tastes and decors.

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PRODUCT CONCEPT: Coaster Set Each set comes with four recycled paper coasters and a plastic storage rack. The square coasters have a smaller square hole in the center that fits around the carrying handle of the plastic holder. The storage rack is made from a recycled plastic sheet, cut into an elongated H-shape, and bent to form a carrying handle with two rectangular feet. Because they are meant to absorb condensation, a strong hydrophobic binder is added to the paper before forming. Color can be added to the paper during mixing.

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PRODUCT CONCEPT: Modular Bulletin Board These paper bulletin boards made from recycled cracker boxes and are held up by recycled plastic brackets. Manufacturing the paperboard is very simple because it is a simple, flat rectangle. The board can be dyed different colors and paired together on the wall. Color could be decorative, or be integrated into an organizational system, such as "pink = important tasks for the week." Whiteboards, magnet boards, and mirrors could be easily integrated into this system. The customizability of this product makes it ideal for a wide range of people or businesses. The brackets are designs do the boards can easily slide out and be recycled after they have been used long enough to get tattered.

The brackets are very easy to make. Follow the normal Precious Plastic sheet process, and cut into four-inch wide strips. Then, use a jig to put two 90 degree bends into the heated plastic strip. The color of the bracket will depend on the plastic used to make it and can yield beautiful variations.

The top and bottom brackets can be cut and moved to accommodate any paper board dimension. Small, formed-paper baskets hook into the brackets to store thumbtacks or other items. There are nearly endless configurations possible

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PRODUCT CONCEPT: Pen Cup and Stackable Storage This pencil cup pairs a recycled paper base, perfect for absorbing leaking pen ink, with a recycled plastic tube to provide vertical structure.

The waves of the base are repeated in the design of the trio storage containers. These three containers can be used to store paperclips, pushpins, rubber bands, or any other small item. Their wave design makes them nestle securely together to take up less room on the desk.

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The product concepts shown here are just a few of the opportunities made possible through a partnership between Precious Plastic and Precious Paper within Trash Zones.

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CRACKER SURVEILLANCE With local capacity full, communities adopt increasingly restrictive and authoritarian measures to stem local trash flow. Complete cracker bans become more and more common at various levels of government. Some neighborhoods set up roadside checkpoints to guarantee that no illicit snack foods enter the neighborhood.

In particularly hard-hit areas, roving bands of cracker-hunting vigilantes dig through waste receptacles at night for contraband. In desperation, one local Trash Zone deputizes these vigilantes as the official Neighborhood Cracker Watch. To facilitate inspection, the Watch’s first official decree is to mandate all households switch to glass trashcans.

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These measures spark a nation-wide debate: "Are we willing to give up our privacy and freedom in exchange for a clean community?"

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INDIVIDUAL TRASH ZONE AND CRACKER BOXES DESIGN NARRATIVES

146

CREATIVE REUSE PATTERNS CRACKER COOKBOOK QUESTIONABLE COPING METHODS GENCO CRACKER COMPANY ABSTAIN

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CREATIVE REUSE PATTERNS With so many used cracker boxes and plastic bags around the house, people find ways to give them a second life. The cardboard boxes are quite durable as long as they don't get wet, and if thoroughly cleaned and let dry, the bags can be used again for many other purposes.

How might individuals reuse cracker packaging at home?

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Bulk Goods Container Bring the cleaned box with its inner bag to the wholesale section of your local grocery store. Fill the bag, weigh it, and stick the printed label on the outside of the box. Great for rice, beans, even crackers. Make sure to roll the bag down and close the top to keep contents fresh.

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Countertop Compost Fill the bag with your day-to-day compostables to save a trip outside. Roll the bag down and close the top when not in use. When full, empty into the garden pile, clean the bag, and start again. Make sure to label the box clearly to save houseguests an unwelcome surprise.

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Dreamcatcher With some scratch paper, some pens, and a few alterations to a one cracker box, you will never miss another brilliant midnight idea. Just reach over and jot it down before you fall asleep again.

Inside Trash Zones, people understand that the materials around them not disposable, but valuable creative and utilitarian resources.

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CRACKER COOKBOOK It is very easy to buy a box of crackers off the supermarket shelf, but under Trash Zones, more and more people find this convenience outweighed by the prospect of living with the packaging forever. To avoid this, baking crackers at home becomes popular, even though it may not be as easy as store-bought.

How do you make crackers at home?

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PROCESS: Homemade Wheat Thins

Gather Ingredients I already had sugar and salt, but I had to buy wheat flower, butter, and paprika.

Total cost: $9.78

Prepare Ingredients Measure dry ingredients, add cubed butter. Measure water to add in during mixing.

Mix Use food processor to throughly combine ingredients. Mine is quite small and it could barely handle the task.

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Roll Out Dough The instructions said to roll out the dough very thin. I did not have a rolling pin so I used an empty wine bottle.

Cut Crackers With a pizza cutter, cut square crackers. There were some odd-shaped pieces from the edges. I only had about 21 nicely shaped crackers.

Bake Oven set to 400°F. The directions said to line the baking sheet with parchment, but I did not have any. Baking time was only 7 minutes.

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Homemade Wheat Thins Ingredients 1.25 cup white whole wheat flour 1.5 Tbsp granulated sugar 1/2 tsp salt 1/4 tsp paprika 4 Tbsp unsalted butter cold, cubed 1/4 cup water Instructions 1. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mat. Set aside.

2. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. 3. Place flour, sugar, salt, paprika and butter in food processor and process for 20 seconds, until all combined. With the food processor running, drizzle in the water until the dough forms a ball.

4. Transfer the dough onto a flat surface and roll out very thin, yet not see-through.

5. Using a pizza cutter, cut the rolled out dough into 1.5 inch squares. Place squares on prepared baking sheets, sprinkle with additional salt and bake 6 to 8 minutes, or until the edges turn golden brown.

6. Cool crackers on the sheets.

The process was not too challenging but was undoubtedly harder than simply purchasing a box of crackers. For me, not having a powerful food processor or a rolling pin added challenges. The crackers were quite tasty but would have been better if they had been rolled thinner. Now that I have the ingredients, I could make many more batches before having to buy additional ingredients.

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Some of the challenges could be avoided or reduced by having the proper machines, or by making dough in advance and freezing it. As with many areas of our lives, the infrastructure to do many tasks ourselves has been lost. After people obtain the right equipment and incorporate this practice into their daily lives, home cracker baking could become more widespread.

If the only way people could eat crackers is if they had to bake them, consumption would undoubtedly decline.

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QUESTIONABLE COPING METHODS Each person deals with the challenges of life within Trash Zones differently. Neighbors spy on neighbors, quietly judging their trash output.

Wasteful people are ostracized, publicly called out in the community newsletter. Some defiantly refuse to change their ways.

Under these circumstances, some individuals find less-virtuous ways to cope. From hoarding boxes to shopping the dark web for now-illegal favorite snacks, you might be surprised at the ways your once-friendly neighbor changes after Trash Zones are implemented... ... you might be frightened by how you change too.

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159

160

161

162

People don't like to change and will often take extreme measures to continue some semblance of their previous lifestyle.

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GENCO CRACKER COMPANY Trash Zone boundaries are impermeable - or are they? With "Genco Cracker Company" as their front, an illicit trash-disposal organization, known around the neighborhood as the Cracker Mafia, moves into town.

They can make your problem disappear... for a price.

Pay them upfront, and don't ask any questions. Where does the trash go? Don't worry about it - you never visit that poor neighborhood on the other side of town anyway. Tomorrow, some people you don't even know will wake up to a mysterious pile of rubbish. They might notice that there are dozens of empty Fire Roasted Tomato flavor Triscuits boxes (your favorite) mixed in with the other miscellaneous bits of trash produced over the last few months.

And hey, maybe "Genco Cracker Company" has a private landfill. You have no way of knowing - they weren't too forthcoming on details.

All you know for sure is that your trash is gone.

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PICK UP

DROP OFF

• GENCO CRACKER CO. • IMPORTS & EXPORTS

Import Fee

$25

Export Fee

$35

Crackers 3lbs @ $18/lb

$54

-------------------TOTAL:

$114

Thank you for your business!

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ABSTAIN Perhaps the answer is simple: stop.

166

But can you simply stop consuming?

167

168

169

It is not an accident that "Abstain" is last.

In the process of creating the Design Narratives, I strived to stay zoomedin on cracker boxes. While mostly successful, explorations were often so closely linked to larger systems that my output necessarily asked questions or implied changes beyond the scope of the narrative at hand. Considering a community recycling program inevitably raises questions about other forms of waste in the community, for instance.

This urge to widen the scope is not surprising because at the core of this contextual design process is the understanding that all products are components of a larger system. This project did not begin as a search for a zero-waste cracker box. It didn't even begin as a search for a cracker box at all. In fact, I set off generally to find solutions to the issue of food packaging waste in grocery stores, ranging from reduction to elimination.

My research made it clear that food packaging is a systems-level problem.

Zooming in to consider only cracker boxes within Trash Zones made exploring this systems-level problem feasible for a single person within the time allotted. Which brings us back to the question of why Abstention is the last Design Narrative.

When compiling the Design Narratives into this book, I decided to start each section with the most simple, realistic narrative and work my way up to the larger, far-fetched ideas. For example, I opened the business section by suggesting some simple packaging redesigns and ended with highend plate designs for Michelin-starred cracker restaurants. Then why is abstention last? It seems easy: just stop.

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The answer is that for crackers, yes, abstaining is easy. At such a small scale, and especially for a non-essential product, stopping is not a radical nor particularly hard step to take. But abstention, despite its apparent simplicity, cuts across all products, sectors, and walks of life. It is discussed last because it forces us to zoom back out. In the final Design Narrative, abstention is a system-level question applied to a tiny constituent node. Expanding the question of abstention back to the system-level is unavoidable, and at this level is fundamentally different.

Trash Zones, by design, do not just affect cracker boxes. If you were reading carefully when Trash Zones were explained, the definition of trash as "everything a person is going to dispose of eventually, including recyclables and compostables" may have caught your eye. This definition would include cracker boxes, yes, but also your car. It could be a plastic milk jug or your flat-screen television, a t-shirt, or your house itself.

Not only is abstaining from these products more complicated than crackers, but the scale of change examined in the cracker box Narratives implies that almost incomprehensibly significant changes will be needed for more sophisticated products to exist under Trash Zones.

Consequently, the ways these products would change under this system is orders of magnitude larger than those seen in cracker boxes.

Finally, abstention is discussed last because it vests responsibility for changing the entire system on the consumer. Companies maintain they are merely fulfilling consumer demand, dodging responsibility for waste.

Consumers, meanwhile, exist in a system devised to deliver convenience while shielding them from the dark side of their consumption. Dislocation: a prerequisite for the entire system to continue to function. Being separated from our locality in what we consume and the waste we produce is both a product and an enabler of the system: a self-replicating pattern. In the end, the individual is not a player in the system but a hostage, trapped inside with very little agency. Compared to the inertial magnitude of our prevailing system, an individual abstention is essentially symbolic.

Trash Zones make individuals and communities responsible for their trash, but in contrast to our current system, this forces the entire system change, not just the individual.

Abstinence is the most challenging, and perhaps the most far-fetched of all the Design Narratives.

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TRASH ZONES? This project has never been an argument for the actual implementation of Trash Zones. Neighborhoods could not possibly deal with this scale of waste. With vast differences between rural, suburban, and urban neighborhoods, socioeconomic differences throughout, and many other factors, implementation would likely exacerbate the inequities we already experience. Importantly, and ironically given my original intention, Trash Zones would most likely be an ecological disaster.

Instead, Trash Zones are an attempt to intentionally challenge the extent to which our lives, as expressed through our products, are global, or at the very least reliant on external systems to exist. It brings the problem

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of waste "home" not to recommend consumers actually dig backyard landfills, but encourage us to design products as if they will. Would our phones be nearly non-recyclable and filled with heavy metals if the consumer had to dispose of them within their neighborhood? Almost certainly not. But then why design them that way in the first place?

The central aim that drove the creation of the Trash Zone construct was to consider how our world would change if the side effects of our consumption ceased to be externalized. Because in fact, trash does not truly disappear from our lives when it enters a dumpster, it just moves conveniently out of sight. And when trash leaves the view of the haves, it often remains well in-sight of the have-nots. When the consequences of endless consumption are not felt personally, it is not that they do not exist: payment is just delayed. The twentieth century was bought on climate credit, and we are now finally being called to pay for the last century of reckless consumption.

Within Trash Zones, questions we as designers are encouraged to ask (but usually only if they are profitable) became mandatory. They forced me to think differently about what I designed, to consider what materials I used, and the product's entire lifespan. I had the freedom to realistically challenge whether a product was even necessary, or whether a nonphysical product, a new model of ownership, and or even changes to social practices could be the answer.

Trash Zones, in their far-fetched constraints, gave me freedom.

That Trash Zones raise such questions is proof that my goal to build a design framework that would inherently generate solutions that "solve or at least respond to the issue of dislocation" was successful.

Together, these Design Narratives constitute a case study of a design methodology that, through joy, levity, creativity, and rigor, delivered a diverse array of actionable design interventions that, with further development, could be deployed in the real world.

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6.

DESIGNING UPSIDEDOWN Industrial design's myopic focus on single product outputs squanders its tremendous potential to effectuate change. While satisfying the immediate needs of businesses, an important necessity, this approach often ignores the larger systems within which all design outputs exist.

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?

I believe that these approaches can be combined. This project began to find concrete solutions to the visible problem of food packaging waste. It developed from there into a more in-depth personal exploration of what industrial design can and should become. The work presented up to this point is my attempt to put into practice a holistic design methodology that challenges the conventional industrial design process while delivering practical design outputs. I call this design methodology Designing UpsideDown, referring to the way it enabled me to consider a real-world problem from a completely unconventional perspective.

The central tool of this methodology, Design Narratives completed within conceptual design frameworks such as Trash Zones, are not fantasy. Even if they seem far-fetched, this framework was built from a research-based analysis of existing systems and functioned to provoke a radical shift in my perspective on real-world issues. When dealing with hyper-complex entrenched systems such as grocery stores, a radical approach that yields new ideas may be the only way to alter the status quo.

This final section details the mechanics of this system and its application to industrial design practice.

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METHODOLOGY Original Problem Identify a problem and conduct preliminary research to identify the scope of systemic involvement. This scope could be very specific, or extremely broad.

Existing Framework Conduct intensive research to understand the structural context of the problem. This research could be in many areas. The goal is to allow research to travel where it needs to in order to understand the framework in which the problem exists.

Root Problem Synthesize research to identify the root issue(s) of the problem. The problem identified may seem far removed from the visible structure of the original problem. This speaks to the nature of large systemic problems.

Conceptual Framework Turn the root issue(s) "upside-down" to build a conceptual design framework that creatively responds to, solves, or avoids the root issue.

Narratives Do not limit creativity and give all narratives equal consideration. In this upside-down world all design outputs should naturally respond to the root issue.

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APPLICATION Food Packaging Waste ... is the manifestation in people's daily lives of important changes:

Food Packaging Innovations and Engines of Change ... represent a complex and broken status quo enabled by one core issue:

Dislocation ... is turned "upside-down" to build a conceptual design framework:

Trash Zones ... creatively mend dislocation, allowing the designer to creatively explore a specific design problem:

Cracker Boxes ... designed in this context will inherently solve or respond to the issue of dislocation.

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This project shows that by combining research, creativity, and joy, it is possible to design for the complexity of our world while maintaining empowerment as a designer in the face of seemingly insurmountable barriers.

I have always loved reading science fiction, immersing myself in their worlds, and daydreaming to fill every corner of the world existing off the page. This sense of discovery and freedom is how it felt to work on the Design Narratives. Design is storytelling, and to be human is to design. The process of Designing Upside-Down brought joyful humanity to the design process while still delivering valuable outputs.

This methodology could take the place of the first of a double diamond design cycle. Where the Upside-Down methodology differs is that it is not a circle, as most design processes are conceptualized, but an oscillation.

The designer can move back and forth between worlds, endlessly refining, redefining, creating, and exploring. The best ideas gleaned in the Narratives could be turned "right-side-up" and refined within the context of the real world: the second diamond.

These outputs, because of their origin within a well-constructed, researchbased conceptual framework, upside-down, will inherently respond to, solve, or avoid the root issue. Importantly, free from the constraints of existing systems, relevant and novel ideas that would not have been accessible outside of the conceptual framework can emerge.

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This project focused on food packaging waste in grocery stores, an immensely complex problem with ramifications throughout society. As an essential part of human existence, food is an ideal space where a systemslevel approach is needed - but it is not the only one.

There are innumerable similarly complex and impactful systems that designers interface with as a part of their work. Because of the nature of industrial design, we have a heightened capacity to shape these systems.

This capacity is why, both practically and ethically, designers must not ignore systemic complexity in their design practice.

Practically, design outputs will inevitably fail to deliver meaningful change if too myopically focused. Ethically, as designers, our heightened ability to shape systems means we have greater responsibility to consider questions of sustainability, equity, and justice.

If we are not designing holistically, then we are designing superficially. By default, superficial design maintains the status quo. In our current social, ecological, and technological moment, superficiality is criminally wasteful.

Now, more than ever, industrial design requires - not just presents an opportunity - for a holistic, system-level approach to design.

Beyond design, this project demonstrates that we all have power to shape the systems that define our world. I hope you, the reader, go forward with this knowledge and wield your power, in whatever way you can, to make our collective world a better place.

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21. Image taken from page 31: Hess, Catherine, Timothy Husband, and J. Paul Getty Museum. “European Glass in the J. Paul Getty Museum.� Los Angeles: Museum, 1997. Web. 22. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc488741/ 23. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Liu_Ding.jpg 24. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/55450639135488182/ 25. https://hyperallergic.com/445233/winsor-newton-griffin-gallery-colarts-lab/ 26. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/90111 27. Image scanned from page 167: Cahn, William. Out of the Cracker Barrel; the Nabisco Story, from Animal Crackers to Zuzus. Simon and Schuster, 1969.

28. https://www.seriouseats.com/2015/03/history-of-breakfast-cereal-mascots.html 29. https://en.design20.eu/objects/hair-comb-auguste-bonaz-paris-1920s/ 30. https://amzsupply.com/products/100-pack-poly-bakery-bread-bags-12-x-6-x-24-cleargusseted-bags-for-packing-and-storing-polyethylene-bags-for-home-bakeries-and-otherfood-industry-businesses-thickness-1-mil-fda-approved 31. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/95420085828379700/ 32. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/india-plans-to-end-single-use-plasticswithin-three-years/2019/10/02/1035003a-d989-11e9-a688-303693fb4b0b_story.html 33. http://www.worldstar.org/winner/2018/green-packaging-packnatur%C2%AE-cellulose-netpackaging-and-packnatur%C2%AE-organic-wineglass-0 34. https://matadornetwork.com/read/ikea-mushroom-packaging-decompose-weeks/ 35. Image by author.

36. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tetra_Pak_boy_with_Tetra_Classic,_Italy.jpg 37. Made by author, based off the image: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b496da7adc1 296281623bc4dfed39a44 38. https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/11/andy-warhols-campbells-soup-paintings-exhibition 39. Aerial views showing four suburban neighborhoods in the United States. Google Earth, earth.google.com/web/.

40. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pork_packing_in_Cincinnati_1873.jpg 41. Image scanned from page 335: Cahn, William. Out of the Cracker Barrel; the Nabisco Story, from Animal Crackers to Zuzus. Simon and Schuster, 1969.

42. https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Genuine-Military-Surplus-Assorted/dp/B0725MVKCZ/ 43. Altered image based on: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:American_Progress_ (John_Gast_painting).jpg 44. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/530932243543673609/ 45. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:American_way_of_life.jpg 46. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/18/huge-pile-rubbish-biggest-load-fly-tippedgarbage-ever/ 47. Made by author, based off the image: https://twitter.com/efbw_eu/ status/993840242535862272 48. https://www.hubert.com/product/90126/16-Barrel-55-mil-Plastic-T-Shirt-Bag-With-ThankYou-Graphics---12L-x-7D-x-22H

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49. Made by author, based off: http://zwia.org/zwh/ 50. https://www.nydailynews.com/features/ny-fea-capone-scarface-untouchable-20180821story.html 51.

Aerial and 3D views showing Westridge Neighborhood, Verona, WI. Google Earth, earth. google.com/web/.

52. https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14597579690/ 53. https://ecovativedesign.com/ 54. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Biodegradable-Pla-Plastic-Pellets_62142910036. html 55. https://www.manufacturing.net/chemical-processing/article/13125986/a-quick-guide-greendot-bioplastics 56. https://www.joann.com/cricut-kraftboard-sampler-12inx12in/15683428.html 57. https://pixels.com/featured/nabisco-uneeda-biscuit-woodson-savage.html 58. Altered image based on: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20170208/ NEWS07/170209859/aldi-remodeling-stores-in-effort-to-steal-share-from-big-grocerychains 59. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Four_banal_en_C%C3%A9vennes.jpg 60. All images from https://preciousplastic.com/ 61.

Altered image based on: https://www.wsj.com/articles/betrayal-in-berlin-and-checkpointcharlie-review-tales-of-two-cities-11574461892

62. Altered image based on: https://www.kdisonline.com/4-tips-for-reducing-crime-incommunity-associations/

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