If consumers were to design sustainable packaging, what would it look like? In the qualitative phase of a recent study, ethnographers from research consulting firm Hartman Group queried consumers about the packaging and labeling attributes most important to them when it comes to sustainability. Analysts asked consumers to depict, in their own way, the most important attributes and most effective messaging tactics of sustainable packaging. Here, two examples of how consumers illustrated their responses:

Awareness of sustainable packaging is tied to consumers’ daily lives, so it follows that their understanding of sustainability is tied to the back-end environmental impacts of a package (typically, by what happens to it after they use the product at home), as illustrated in these examples.

The exercise was conducted in preparation for Hartman Group’s Marketing Sustainability report, which looks at bridging the sustainability gap between companies and consumers. The full report can be found here.