Designing an environmentally friendly packaging for a smart therepeutical device

Abstract

Packaging forms a major part in society’s daily life, as people are consumers, and every product has some form of packaging to protect the product and ensure that it arrives to the consumer without any damage. Sustainability is also a topic which is becoming more and more relevant in society, and since packaging is so often used, then sustainability principles should be applied when designing packaging to decrease the negative impacts that the packaging has on the three pillars of sustainability. The goal of this study is to design sustainable packaging for the Olly Speaks toy, a smart therepeutical device aimed at helping young children with speech and language impairments develop and acquire skills. Current available packaging was first assessed to understand how sustainability can be applied to packaging. A survey was then conducted to deduce the customers’ requirements. From the research done on current packaging, technical responses were obtained and used to meet these customer requirements. This gave a good insight on what the sustainable Olly Speaks packaging should aim to be. It was concluded that the main function of packaging is to protect the product. Three internal packaging design concepts were generated using various cushioning materials. The cushioning materials chosen for this study were bubble wrap, bubble wrap with carton inserts, and EPS foam, and along with prototypes of the Olly Speaks toy, these were subjected to drop tests to test whether these design concepts do protect the toy inside. Results show that all the three packaging design solutions did protect the prototype. Furthermore, a sustainability analysis indicated that the bubble wrap internal packaging was the most sustainable with respect to its impacts on the financial and environmental pillars of sustainability.