Iggesund launches crowdsourcing effort to find better packaging options

Sweden-based Iggesund Paperboard has announced a collaboration with American crowdsourcing company Crowdspring that will challenge designers to improve existing consumer packaging options.

“The aim is to get a picture of how global designers as a collective group believe they can steer packaging development in a more sustainable direction,” the company said. It added that it wanted designers to present innovative alternatives to unsustainable materials.

Project coordinator Staffan Sjöberg said: “Every day we all see examples of packaging that could be improved by a better choice of materials or a better design. Now we’re giving designers all over the world the chance to contribute their ideas on how to replace packaging made of glass, plastic or metal with solutions that use paperboard.”

“We will not claim any commercial rights to the ideas that come in. We’re just interested in getting a snapshot of how designers believe they can improve the packaging they see in the shops they visit on a daily basis. We want to publish the ideas and maybe reproduce some of them in physical form but we are not interested in exploiting them commercially.”

Iggesund, which is part of the Swedish forest industry group Holmen, claimed that the project represented a departure from convention for Crowdspring; “the online marketplace’s services are used when someone wants either a number of inexpensive design proposals or a wide range of ideas,” it said.

It follows significant investment from Iggesund in increasing its energy efficiency and reducing fossil carbon emissions from the company’s paperboard mills.