Juan Mantilla, head of creative at Kiko Milano, talks about the brand’s new Green Me range.
‘Guendalina Sganzerla from [secondary packaging company] Pusterla was our hero dealing with all the complexity of the Green Me product line. They worked on this more hours than anything they’ve done with us. They were committed on a personal level. Pusterla is doing so much for P2P.
‘The worst thing is, that if you make cosmetic packaging in paper rather than plastic you need certifications from every vendor that the components are aseptic, have not been contaminated and are recyclable in the paper or organic stream. If you produce it in plastic, you don’t need certification.
‘It’s a paradox! It’s a nightmare. It took eleven months – with an incredible amount of negotiation. It is probably the most complex project we have worked on.
‘People should be obliged by law to recycle. The difficult thing is to convince people that it’s worth the effort and go the extra mile to allow the customer to dispose of things correctly, to plan the end of life of the objects we design and produce.
‘Five years from now we will be inside a better product life cycle culture. We have to bring on and motivate young designers to do it. Otherwise, there will be just a few dinosaurs left, trying to avoid the meltdown. We need vice-presidents to work at a very high level on sustainability goals. In the day-to-day work, which is what a designer does, it’s difficult and complex.
‘We wanted paper to replace plastic on a highly stressed and multi-use functional object, in this case the compact, where you open and close it so many times per day; the more you use it, the more the paperboard creases on the folding areas and breaks apart; also, natural paper without any protective coating or lamination could absorb dirt and dust during shelf life or daily life. For this reason, it is vital to choose the right paperboard (Old Mill ECO40) for this kind of packaging, with the right elasticity and, at the same time, the strength and resilience to abrasion needed to stand the use. Now, with moulded pulp (like éclose®), you have other possibilities that were not available before on an industrial scale.
‘So, it’s like building a unicorn right now because the actors in the supply chain are not yet all working in harmony. That’s the difficult part. You need lots of rapid prototyping and testing … and repeat. But it’s a journey. You learn the hard way how to build a better product for the environment, otherwise you’re like Don Quixote, picking the wrong battles all the time!’
Amendment: The outer boxes of the Green Me range shown on page 28-29 of Pulp 26 were printed by Grafiche Bramucci in Sesto San Giovanni.
Material: Old Mill
Photography: Lee Funnell