Brett Allcorn: Post Industrial Waste Product Proposal

I'm heading in the packaging direction since it seems like there is a lot of opportunity there, especially after the information on HP packaging laptops in cases. Very cool. So I felt like there were three directions to go:

1) Saves material
2) Saves material + protects the product
3) Has a secondary use e.g.

One idea was just a latex coating that could be peeled off. Plastic is also an option or perhaps a recycled material.



















(example of latex coating on work gloves)

Just this simple coating wouldn't work well for fragile items like consumer electronics.














(air pack packaging used by Amazon.com)

Packaging electronics sandwiched between two air packs like the ones shown above would really cut down on packaging. Whats great is these packs can be any color and you can print on them. So there can still be graphics on the front of the package and information or directions on the back. It takes up some space but really its 4 sheets of superthin plastic put together the right way. Why not use air to our advantage? There's plenty of it and its free.

The third direction is that it has some sort of secondary use like the laptop bag. I also found a good example of secondary use packaging here:



















(bug repellent and apple packaging)

While packaging apples might be an unnecessary use of materials the package has the added benefit of keeping bugs away until the apple is ready to be picked. So there is a lot of opportunity in that.


My concerns:
The contest doesn't require you to use post consumer/industrial waste or to use recycled materials, however that doesn't really seem to be the goal of the class. If we're required to use these types of materials I would like to know that.