Will ‘sustainability’ ever be hip? Will the design community ever truly appreciate it’s importance and the role they play with it? As the Senior Graphic Designer for Sustainable Business Practices, Lana De Jager has made it her mission to bring an awareness of the value of sustainability to the local design industry.

I once ran away with the circus. The Famous Spiegeltent, to be more precise: a two year delirium of program booklets, large format posters, double-sided flyers, new signage for every site, entrance light boxes, weekly advertisements in the street press and even a little bit of stage design. My graphic design ships had all come in at once.

Anyone who’s ever been to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival will tell you how much visual information there is - and how much paper is used to ensure that visitors know about the 2,088 productions happening in August. At the Spiegel Garden alone we stored 80,000, full-colour, 32-page programs for use during the season, along with piles and piles of artist flyers and posters. Every day I was confronted by my precious artwork getting soggy under a pint of beer, lying in the dirt on the ground, crumpled in the corner of the porta-loo. Never in my 15-year design career had I been so confronted by my own handywork. Up until that point I would’ve kept two or so pieces of the final prints of a design job for my portfolio and the rest of the masses of paper I ordered from the printer went ’away’. But in the words of environmental activist Julia ‘Butterfly’ Hill: “...when we say we are going to throw something away. Where is ‘away?’ There is no such thing.”

The impact that graphic designers and anyone who is in control of ordering large volumes of print material has on the community and environment around us, is becoming increasingly vivid and it has become impossible to avoid the word ‘sustainability’.

What is Sustainability?

According to Eric Benson from Re-nourish.com, sustainability is a systemic concept. It relates to the relationships between economic, social, institutional and environmental aspects of human existence. It organizes decisions to allow for current economic needs to be met while preserving biodiversities and ecosystems to maintain the same quality of life for future generations. Sustainability calls for humans (as civic creatures):
* Respect and care for the community
* Improve the quality of life
* Conserve Earth’s vitality and diversity
* Minimize the depletion of non-renewable resources
* Change personal attitudes and practices to keep within the planet’s carrying capacity
Eric’s website – re-nourish.com is a resource for the graphic design industry. When green design is usually discussed, most people think of buildings, products or even cars, but what about packaging? Shouldn't magazines, business cards, brochures and websites be green?

Why is Sustainability important?

Eric Benson puts it very eloquently: “Graphic designers have made some fairly amazing and powerful work since the inception of the profession with the early Art Nouveau movement in 1890. We have changed public opinion on wars, politics, as well as influenced new consumer behaviors that dramatically increased the world’s economic output. We’ve made life simpler (at times), faster and easier to navigate. However, as much progress as the design profession has made for society at large, we’ve also been responsible for helping to create an over-consumptive population and an ecosystem teetering on disaster. With every new print piece we produce we make or brand we promote, we also impact the general health of our planet through the vehicle and materials we choose to use.

Graphic designers have helped, through our profession, to deplete the planet of 50% of its most bio-diverse forests and fuel the need for oil (and increase air pollution) by choosing predominantly petroleum-based inks. The paper industry is the lifeblood of the print designer, as they supply the medium for our ideas. However, the price we pay as a society for our creative work is the contamination of our basic life necessities: biodiversity, clean water, and fresh air. The alarming rate at which natural resources are being depleted combined with a projected population growth of 3 billion over the next 40-50 years will only exacerbate current over-consumption and waste trends.”

What is the problem?

02 Australia, an online Australian eco creatives network, has put together a design guide that states the following issues to think about:
* most paper is made from native forests
* Some materials are made from toxic substances (eg. plastic is made from oil)
* Some materials use toxic substances and processes to create them
* Some materials create toxic by-products
* Some inks and printing processes are toxic
* Some materials become toxic after disposal
* Some materials are made from slave labour in sweatshops
* Some materials are made from resources stolen from indigenous people
* Some materials involve cruelty to animals in production and/or testing

Another online resource for designers, Design Hub poses the problem designers now face:
“The term ‘sustainability’ has both a communication problem and an image problem. It doesn’t necessarily resonate with most people on first encounter. The trend to describe it in terms of ‘quality of life’ will help communicate its relevance to a wider audience.

This can also help combat the image problem - that sustainability is about suffering, turning back the clock, ‘doing without’. Unless it becomes relevant and appealing to society at large, it will get nowhere.”

Luckily, we’ve reached a point where progressive business people have identified sustainability as a positive new business angle – a win-win situation for the planet and it’s inhabitants – and we’re only a breath away from large-scale change.

Sustainable Design will make your company more money

The Design Council (UK) has put forward the business case for sustainable design:
Your company’s business success cannot be purely measured in economic terms. Companies are adopting the ‘triple bottom line’ measurement, recognising that social and environmental sustainability is just as important as economic sustainability. Environmentally responsible graphic design brings about positive change and respect for the environment. New regulations and customer demand encourages companies to develop more sustainable products. How can sustainable design offer opportunities for business improvement without compromising our environment? Like any good design, sustainable design involves delivering the best performance or result for the least cost over the long term. Sustainable design involves the strategic use of design to meet current and future human needs without compromising the environment. It includes (re)design of products, processes, services or systems to tackle imbalances or trade-offs between the demands of society, the environment and the economy and, ultimately, restoration of damage already done.

A shorter term for ‘sustainable development’, sustainability aims for social and economic well-being for everyone, locally and globally, now and in the future, without compromising the long-term well-being of the environment. The crux is balancing the dynamic between the social, environmental and economic impact of a business or organisation. The simplest definition is that of improving quality of life across the board, including ensuring quality of life for future generations without losing sight of the need for a rich and diverse natural world.

Design is utterly crucial to moving towards a more sustainable future - by rethinking how we deliver products and their benefits without decimating the world around us, or compromising the well-being of others (now or in the future); sustainability is a key to enhanced performance and greater competitiveness.

Next week, we'll continue the series exploring how the local design community can tackle the issue of sustainability head on.