Two design innovations have caught my eye when it comes to personal care products. Both designed and innovated by young people and both a design innovation solution to the problem of multilayer packaging and plastic waste generated from it.
The first is the soapbottle - a container made of soap for shampoo and shower gel designed by Jonna Breitenhuber in Berlin, Germany.
The other one is Nobho drops by the company run by 19 year old Benjamin Stern. The water soluble packaging is a perfect replastic to sachets.
Sachets and single-use packaging and sale of fast moving consumer good and personal care products especially sell in vast numbers in the developing world. If the giant FMCG companies with their "sustainability" projects and departments care and commit, they can replace plastic packaging and sachets with such 100% biodegradable alternatives. Yet, despite many plastic bans in place in the developing world - especially across Africa and India, the MNCs peddling FMCG goods wrapped in multilayer packaging and bottled in plastic-ware escape having to change their product packaging. It's small enterprise and neighbourhood shopkeepers who lose out on all sides. They are made to comply with plastic bans when they can't afford even the smallest shaving of profits while MNCs who can afford to implement replastic policies delay it or just don't comply especially in developing countries. This even when they produce biodegradable alternatives in developed nations like USA, EU and UK.
Now Jonna and Benjamin have shown that through innovations plastic packaging can be made redundant. Here's hoping their products become available in developing countries or the FMCG companies take note and implement such innovations in their packaging.
Soapbottle and Nobho are perfect examples of sustainable development goals (SDGs) 9 & 12.
Goal 9: Industry, innovation and infrastructure. Investment in infrastructure and innovation are crucial drivers of economic growth and development.
Goal 12: Sustainable consumption and production aimed at “doing more and better with less"These youngsters are pioneering trailblazers reinforcing the facts that young people are responding to the challenges to our environment more readily than industry.
In India, January 12, the birthday of Swami Vivekananda is observed as National Youth Day. Young environmental entrepreneurs, activists and innovators from across the world in general and India in particular demonstrate the power of youth.
- Schoolgirl Climate Activist Ridhima Panday of Uttarakhand, India
- Boyan Slat of The Ocean Cleanup
- Angelina Arora from Australia with her bioplastic from prawn shell
- The teens who figures out how to recycle styrofoam into Styro-filters - activated carbon.
- Anakta Prabhu, a schoolgirl from Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India demonstrated how thermocol can be upcycled.
Jonna Breitenhuber and Benjamin Stern with Soapbottle and Nobho are stellar young entrepreneurs and designers making a difference and changing the world one innovation at a time.
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