A Packaging Partner’s Perspective on the “Waste Crisis”

Too long, Didn't Read (TLDR)

• Mendocino County is beautiful. 

• Plastic is in your seafood and probably in a little bit of everything else that you eat. 

• Sustained plastic exposure is not great for human health.

• Although we take measures to reduce our studio's environmental impact, Gatto Rivera Branding feels pretty powerless to do much about the plastic pollution crisis through our personal actions.

• We're donating to Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit led by environmental experts whose mission is to build a well-informed, effective movement that will achieve the institutional, economic, and societal changes needed to save our planet, and ourselves, from the plastic pollution crisis.

• We're still feeling hopeful.

What’s a package designer to do?

It's been nearly a year since I attempted to create a zero-waste package for my homebrew. In that year, we've taken on a new business partner, rebranded, worked on more rewarding projects, and I've dedicated a lot of time to assessing what our team can do to be "responsible package designers." There have been no straight-forward answers, but one material kept coming up over and over again as having outsized negative health and environmental consequences: plastic. Unlike other packaging materials (i.e., aluminum, glass), plastic can only be recycled 1 to 2 times before it has no more practical function and unlike paper (another packaging material with limited recyclability) plastic does not biodegrade. While mindful use of all materials is important, aiming to eliminate plastic use can have the greatest impact in decreasing packaging's worst possible side effects.

 Where does plastic go?

Tim and I have been lucky enough to have both lived in Northern California our entire lives. Growing up, we each had friends and family members who would dive for abalone – a simple sea snail, whose meat is considered a delicacy in some cuisines and whose iridescent shells make for a lovely decoration displayed whole or inlaid in fashion accessories, homeware, or instruments. 

Given the frigid and sometimes treacherous waters off the Northern coast of our state, abalone diving is not a pastime for the faint of heart. To discourage over-harvesting, abalone divers are forbidden from using scuba gear during their dives and must hold their breath instead. A typical hunt entails plunging into the water wearing a wetsuit, weight belt, snorkel, and fins, carrying a crowbar-like tool that doubles as a measuring stick for selecting individuals above the 7-inch-diameter minimum catch size. Divers must search for the well-camouflaged snails in often murky water and pry them off their rocky perch in one swift, but forceful movement so the creatures don’t have a chance to tighten their grip making removing them next to impossible. 

When we were in our twenties, Tim took up “ab diving” and would spend multiple weekends a year camping near the rocky shores the mollusks inhabit. At the time, the catch limit was 3 abalone per day with no more than 18 abalone per diver per season.

Before I go too far into this post, I want to clarify that I am not writing about the waste crisis because I am a “nature person.’’  While I did some heavy-experimentation with wearing hemp jewelry in high school, I am not, as one would say, a “happy camper.” I am afraid of the dark. Unless I am covered head-to-toe in DEET, mosquitos have been known to pierce denim jeans to get to my sweet Salvadoran blood, leaving me with comically oversized welts that last for hours. I prefer to sleep behind a locked door, use heated restrooms, and refrigerate my food with electricity instead of ice baths. When I chose to study Environmental Policy Analysis and Planning at UC Davis almost 20 years ago, my concentration was in City and Regional Planning. I have always been most interested in the ways that humans can construct our “built environment” to minimize our impact on ecosystem health. While I sometimes wonder if the general public’s impression of an Environmental Studies curriculum involves students sitting in a meadow waiting to jot down field observations of fairies, my coursework was actually a mixture of political theory, economics, research methods and ecology. In other words, while I am not a “nature person,” it is fair to say that I am a nerd.

Given my aversion to camping, I didn’t typically join Tim on these diving trips unless a beach house with a hot tub was involved. On one such trip, a group of friends went in on an awesome weekend rental in Albion, CA. About a three hour drive from Napa, the windswept landscape of Mendocino County appears unspoiled. While Tim and a few others went out for a dive, the rest of us stayed back at the house to luxuriate and take in the sweeping views of the Pacific from the spa. 

That day, the crew had returned with three abalone: a success by all accounts given the difficulty of spotting and wrenching the animals from their craggy underwater homes. I went out on the back porch to watch the catch-cleaning ritual. The first two abalone were cleaned without incident, but as Tim separated the meat from the shell of the third abalone, a pool of sea water spilled onto the deck and a small, circular object fell to the center of the puddle. Upon closer inspection, we realized it was the plastic ring from a water bottle. I’d seen plenty of PSA footage of the sometimes fatal impacts plastic has on sealife, but seeing such glaring plastic pollution in this remote location first hand brought home how packaging can live on in disturbing ways past its initial use.

How did humans get here?

Plastic is so problematic for the exact reasons that it is so ubiquitous. It’s "cheap" to produce, lightweight and incredibly durable. Plastic packaging arguably accelerated the speed of globalization as it can greatly reduce the product loss inherent in shipping goods around the world. As advocacy group A Plastic Planet puts it:

“Decades ago, man invented a miracle material and called it plastic. This material is extraordinary because it is really a bi-product from fossil fuels; extremely adaptable, flexible… there are thousands of different uses for it. Plastic is also indestructible; dangerous when released into the environment with far reaching possible health effects to many species, including humans. Over the last few decades plastic has become the default material for far too many uses. Instead of respecting this miracle material, we have treated it like rubbish.”

Plastic pollution is so pervasive globally that one study out of the University of Newcastle Australia estimated the average human consumes 5 grams of plastic (the approximate equivalent weight of a credit card) each week. Exposure to certain common plastic additives has been shown to have a direct negative impact on human fertility and scientists have found the entire lifecycle of plastic from production, consumption and disposal have detrimental effects on human health. While the results of a single study should never be given too much weight, the body of evidence against the harm of widespread plastic use is vast. 

"The fantasy that plastics are an inexpensive material is just that – a fantasy that fails to acknowledge the tremendous costs we all pay.” – Ruthann Rudel, Director of Research, Silent Spring Institute

Materials that many people don't consider plastic, like clothing made from synthetic fabrics and kitchen sponges, are breaking down into their molecular "forever" structure and polluting our waterways for hundreds of years to come. 

Is it really that important to address?

It's difficult to quantify how damaging the failure to address the full life-cycle of plastic could be. Marine life that humans depend on for sustenance is already under pressure from greenhouse-gas-related ocean acidification and warming and is only being further harmed by plastics. Per the aforementioned credit card's worth of plastic we may all be eating each week, terrestrial ecosystems are also at risk of continual decline due to plastic contamination in soils absent major international action on the matter. The truth is we don't know how much plastic humans would have to produce to create catastrophic conditions for our own species' survival, but we do know that current quantities of plastic in the environment are harmful and many scientific projections anticipate exponential increases in global plastic production without intervention.

How does it relate to the wine industry?

Traditional wine packaging components of glass, corks and capsules are not often associated with plastic, but plastic shows up in industry packaging in unexpected ways. The backing that label rolls are spun on is most often plastic, any type of water-resistant label paper has either some sort of plastic lamination or plastic compounds extruded into the pulp, polylaminate capsules that mimic the arguably obsolete tin capsules are plastic, synthetic corks while having the benefit of being TCA-free are made of plastic, and pallets of wine cases are often wrapped with massive amounts of plastic film. Some of these plastics are recyclable, but too many applications of plastic are single-use, incredibly difficult to recycle, and can only be recycled 1 to 2 times before they have no more practical function.

While we do our best at Gatto Rivera Branding to advise clients about more eco-friendly packaging options, as a single studio it can feel a bit helpless when it comes to tackling the plastic pollution crisis. As a three-person outfit, the term "corporate responsibility" seems a bit overkill, but as parents of young children we do feel some personal obligation to help resolve a problem that is driven in large part by what we're designing every day: single-use packaging. After a lot of research, we've concluded that by donating to an organization dedicated to mitigating the worst damages of plastic pollution we'll have a bigger impact than any specific actions we can achieve as individuals. We've chosen to donate 1% of our 2021 profits to Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit led by environmental experts whose mission is to "build a well-informed, effective movement that will achieve the institutional, economic, and societal changes needed to save our planet, and ourselves, from the plastic pollution crisis."

Healthy kelp forest — Mendocino, Ca — 2011

What's next? 

The California abalone population is facing its own threats from climate change and invasive species destroying the kelp forests they rely on for food and shelter. There hasn't been an open season since 2018 because the population is too fragile. Tim has been getting an occasional dive fix by trying his hand at spearfishing. We still hold out hope the kelp forests might recover one day. 

Just a few weeks ago, world leaders from 175 countries signed the “End Plastic Pollution” resolution at the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-5) in Nairobi. It's considered the first step to create a legally binding treaty to address the full-lifecycle of plastic. The largely successful Montreal Protocol to phase out ozone depleting substances was formed under a similar framework, so there is reason to feel optimistic. 

We'll continue our commitment as a studio to use all materials thoughtfully. In an upcoming post, I'll review some key findings we made during a tour of the Napa Recycling & Waste Facility last fall and list a few personal steps we take to reduce our plastic use. We're always open to conversations about what it means to "be sustainable'' and what responsible plastic use looks like. It's worth mentioning that, for at least a stretch of time, plastic played a huge role in increasing human life expectancy through its widespread application in modern medicine. We recognize that in a complex and uncertain world, there are no one-size-fits-all answers, but we hope to build a culture of awareness and respect for the natural resources we depend on not just for comfort, but survival. 

Photography by George E Baker Jr., Eric Eisher, and Tim Gatto