Sustainable design is relative
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First, you’ll notice we said we wanted a greener drinking cup. There is no such thing as a “sustainable” or “green” product, only a more sustainable or greener one. In fact, a green product is one that’s never made -- the most sustainable solution is to avoid making unnecessary items altogether.
When Priscilla learned the “Sustainable design is relative” concept, she stopped to think about her product. Were disposable drinking cups really necessary? Shouldn’t Priscilla be encouraging her consumers to use reusable cups instead? That was fine in theory, but reusables were made in another division and in another country. So, thought Priscilla, let’s try to make the best disposable drinking cup we can, and revisit the deeper product redesign later. After all, even if Priscilla succeeded in encouraging her customers to buy reusables, they weren’t going to stop buying disposable cups overnight.
For those products that we’ve decided are necessary, everything has impacts of some sort. The basic purpose of sustainable design is to find ways to reduce those impacts, and by doing so find a more sustainable solution. This section describes ways to determine what “more sustainable” looked like for Priscilla.
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