sustainable packaging

Packaging needs to catch up with product development in moving towards improved sustainability performance. There are consumer pressures mounting in the right direction, and it has been predicted that sustainable packaging will make up 32% of all packaging by 2014. There are even carbon taxes on packaging in the Netherlands. But this is not just about reducing the amount of packaging material used, or even using recycled and recyclable materials. It's about finding creative ways to design packaging with a cradle-to-cradle perspective, in many cases imagining future uses that are completely unrelated to the original purpose of the packaging.

There's a brilliant set of examples, evaluations, interviews and principles in the book Designing Sustainable Packaging by Scott Boylston.

For those of us who are not package designers, it's a good idea to be aware of these examples and guidelines so that we can be discerning consumers. So what follows a 'list of lists' on better package design.

cycling innovations

Transportation challenges seem intractable for all but a few cities that try hard to create an appropriate balance in the emphasis placed on the various modes of transport. In most cases the most maligned and ignored are cyclists,waiting in the shadows for an improved system to unleash their pedal power. And in most cases it will probably take bold initiatives to put things right. Like Copenhagen's superhighways that not only are direct, allow high speeds and overtaking, and give cyclists priority as they approach cross streets; they even borrow the traffic engineering concept of "green waves" so that if cyclists travel at the intended speed, they will approach signalised intersections when the signals are green for them. Bold, indeed.

And a bit more on the quirky side, here's an idea that may or may not be a good one but gets full points for innovation: a bike lane that isn't really a bike lane, but a temporary image of one, created by a bicycle-mounted laser system that projects a lane on the road surface that follows the cyclist wherever she goes, alerting other road users that they should leave a safe space around the cyclist.

While we're talking quirky, here's something that is neither practical nor green, but interesting if you're the kind of person who likes to soup up your wheels by strapping on a genuine jet engine and seeing where two wheels can take you.

But that might not be the whackiest design out there. Here are 15 futuristic designs for concept bikes. There may be one for you. Or perhaps you want to look back in time for a historic perspective.