As takeaway becomes more and more indispensable, takeaway packaging has also become a "battleground" where brands and businesses compete with each other.
Affected by the epidemic can not be delivered to the home when the takeaway like a mountain piled up under the office building, community entrance, conspicuous and easy to identify the packaging may also become an important factor affecting customers to order.
▲ Gold concept packaging by designer Eslam Mhd for Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Burger King, Pizza Hut, McDonald's, Pringles and Dunkin Donuts. Image from: Behance
But at a time when littering is still a big problem, the beautiful takeaway packaging is like going through a super failed plastic surgery - face crooked, hands dislocated, feet sprained and body broken - as soon as it turns into litter... ...
The takeaway packaging will mostly have a conspicuous logo on it, which turns into a highly identifiable 'ugly garbage', turning what was originally a beautiful presentation of the brand's image into a negative publicity of the brand's image all of a sudden.
▲ 30-40 year old takeaway trash (pictured left with a 1980s McDonald's burger box and right with a 1992 Quavers snack bag). Image via: Instagram @gezzaplayspop
McDonald's, the global fast food brand with recognisable takeaway packaging and high takeaway sales, has inevitably become the biggest victim of 'ugly trash' - there's even a 'McDonald's trash' (#mctrash) hashtag on Instagram, with a decade-long stream of users updating the picture.
However, McDonald's Norway has recently come up with a very "clever" solution - since the ugly look of their takeaway rubbish has been seen by so many pedestrians, why not photograph it and design it as an advertising campaign, and use it on the tray paper, with a "before" and "after" comparison image of the brand new packaging placed on it.
McDonald's Norway's Instagram has gone from being a platform for beautiful food photos to a solo exhibition of "takeaway trash" photography by photographer Jói Kjartans overnight. The tagline on the photo is a double entendre - Take away your take away (take away means both "take out" and "take away" in English, which translates to "take your take away").
▲ McDonald's Norway's Take away your take away themed ad. Image from: Jói Kjartans
In addition, McDonald's also invited its own Golden Arches to play the lead role, connecting McDonald's take-out waste and public garbage cans in a set of video ads against littering, which received unanimous appreciation and a lot of retweets from netizens, and the brand's image is quietly adding value.
▲ McDonald's Norway's Take away your take away themed ad. Image via: Instagram @mcdonaldsno
Instead of featuring great looking packaging designs, this time we're going to turn our attention to an advertising campaign and art campaign against littering.
▲ McDonald's Norway's Take away your take away themed ad. Image from: Best Ads On TV
What is the best design to get to the root of the big problem of littering? Should the litter be beautified to make the promotional images more appealing, or should the realistic presentation of the ugly state of litter warn the public? Let's explore this together.
Let the public, who are used to seeing litter, see the "ugly" of littering
The first season of the hit series Love, Death and Robots included an episode titled "The Junkyard" about old man Dave, who calls the junkyard home, and Otto, the trash monster.
Otto eats the people and things around it and becomes part of itself, and it's littered with household garbage that we see every day, even to the point of familiarity.
▲ Old Man Dave and Otto the Trash Monster. Image from: Love, Death, and Robots Season 1 Episode 9 "The Junkyard
Able & Baker, the studio responsible for the anime effects in this episode, used the "ugliness" of household garbage as sustenance to create this monster that eats people, and the "weapon" used to grab them was the gum residue that is hard to remove from the streets.
▲ Garbage Monster grabs someone twice. Image from: Love, Death and Robots Season 1 Episode 9 "Junkyard
In 2008, creative agency Colenso BBDO designed billboards in bus shelters in Auckland, showing the amount of trash that changes around the shelters over the course of a week.
The following year, such a design trick cleverly appeared on an IKEA billboard, but the junk cluttering it was replaced with kitchen items, with recommendations for products for storage below.
Such billboards displaying real trash, and having to stuff them with trash every day and clean the inside of them afterwards, are neither a perfect replica of the ugliness of littering, nor are they a bit time consuming - there's already a lot of work cleaning the streets, and sorting out the trash for the billboards and putting it in every day.
What about replacing it with a picture of trash and designing it as a poster? There really is, and it predates this McDonald's ad launch by 8 years.
In early August 2014, the Toronto, Canada-based organization Live Green Toronto launched an anti-littering poster campaign with the theme slogan appearing in the bottom right corner of each poster - "Littering says a lot about you*).
What does it say about the problem? The answer is also hidden inside the poster by the designer. The poster features some food packaging trash with brand names, product names or advertising slogans that are cleverly spelled out with negative words such as 'Lazy', 'Self', 'Low Life' and so on.
These ads are used on bus and tram bodies, on billboards in public transport shelters, in community newspapers such as Metro and 24 Hours, and are also widely promoted online.
Unfortunately, less than a month later, the brand companies used in these advertisements, which they did not want to disclose publicly, called the government to request the removal of all posters on the grounds of trademark infringement. This was because the brands were saying that they "fully supported the anti-littering campaign" but objected to having their brands associated with "litter".
Years later, McDonald's did what those brands didn't dare to do back then - put its own brand logo on an ad against littering, and paid for it themselves. Not only that, but in order to support the campaign, they also organized several large clean-up events, where the campaigners wore sanitation uniforms with the McDonald's Golden Arches logo and the campaign slogan.
Interestingly, Publicis, which designed the poster for Toronto back in the day, also designed the Proper Littering billboard for Coca-Cola in 2019.
The white curve in the logo is used as a small hand and the index finger points to the recyclable bin, which is similar to the McDonald's logo pointing to the bin.
Transforming trash with art and design so it's not 'trash' anymore
When we look back at past advertisements or campaigns that have been associated with garbage, more often than not, the angle of garbage recycling is used to give a new look to garbage with the charm of art and design, so that they can remove the label of "garbage" and transform into daily necessities, crafts, exhibition art, etc.
Also used for billboard visuals, the "African Trash Masks" (African Trash Masks) themed poster, initiated by Green for Peace Africa and curated by the Namibian branch of the advertising agency Advantage Y&R, is so artistic that the trash on it doesn't even look like trash anymore.
Two young local Namibian artists - Petrus Shiimi and Saima Iita - were invited to design masks out of garbage, which were then worn by children for a photo shoot, as a way of suggesting that garbage pollution will have a negative impact on future generations. The campaign was first launched in June 2017 and subsequently won second prize at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity.
Not only can trash be turned into very artistic artefacts, it can also become an exhibited artwork. 23 October 2021, the exhibition "The Age of Discards: What Can Design Do? opens at the Design Museum in London on 23 October 2021.
We tend to think of trash as something marginal, which is the way we prefer to deal with it because it's out of sight and out of mind. But what if trash isn't something secondary? What if it became the absolute protagonist of the culture we've created?
-- Justin McGuirk, Chief Curator of the Design Museum
The exhibition features over 300 pieces of recycled waste designs across fashion, architecture, food, electronics, packaging and other industries.
The exhibition area is divided into three sections according to the theme - "Peak Trash", "Precious Trash" and "After Trash", promoting redesign from both the perspective of eliminating waste and creating recyclable uses.
▲ Dirk van der Kooij's 3D printed chair made from discarded fridge material. Image from: Dezeen
▲ Studio Drift's new materials made from e-waste like iPhones and Volkswagen Beetles. Image from: Dezeen
In the last section, the modular laptop Framework, which can be easily repaired and upgraded, was the focus of the exhibit. In the opinion of Justin McGuirk, chief curator of the Design Museum, if there were easier ways for ordinary people to repair or recycle things, they wouldn't throw a lot of stuff away for fear of the hassle.
The exhibition includes two specially commissioned installations - Aurora, a 3D printed light installation made from sugar cane, and Fadama 40, a large wall installation of 40 televisions.
The 40 televisions in Fadama 40 are a veritable 'junk' - an exhibit that Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama salvaged from Agbogbloshie, the world's largest electronic junkyard, cleaned and assembled to the maximum.
🙂 Fadama 40. Photo from: Twitter @ibrahim_mahama
Garbage is even associated with performance art, which has to mention the German artist Swaantje Güntzel, most of whose works are related to garbage pollution.
▲ Swaantje Güntzel 2020 SEESTÜCK I (now in the North Frisian Museum). Image from: Swaantje Güntzel official website
Swaantje Güntzel's best-known art project, Plastisphere, consists of a series of devised performances and filming in public settings, while the main act is 'littering'.
For example, Swaantje Güntzel collects garbage from one part of the city, takes it to another highly trafficked location hundreds or even kilometers away, and performs a "garbage throwing" performance along the way in a vehicle, and when the garbage is thrown, the performance is over.
▲ Swaantje Güntzel 2016 PLASTISPHERE/Promenade Thessaloniki. Source：Swaantje Güntzel
Swaantje Güntzel also collects water-related rubbish and performs 'littering' at hotel pools and sea lakes. Swaantje Güntzel chooses to suffer in silence if he encounters angry comments and spitting from pedestrians during the process.
With a background in both ethnography and art history, she hopes to remind the public of their responsibility for public space through these artistic performances.
Public space is a collective space, and we should all be held accountable for it. Unfortunately, people just don't want to take responsibility, either in an individual sense or in a collective sense. We're knocking on that door in their hearts by giving them back their trash for the show.
- Performance artist Swaantje Güntzel
▲ Swaantje Güntzel (work Vortex II) sitting in the center of the garbage. Image from: NDR
Making trash recycling beautiful and coming up with more beautiful ideas for trash transformation has been playing an important role in encouraging the public to reuse discarded trash and reborn it into items of value to humans.
But these overly rosy images may make people forget the ugly side of litter itself, and even overlook the fact that the problem should be tackled at the source - reducing discarded waste, and not littering.
Suppose you were also given a design project against littering, would you choose to beautify the litter or show the ugliness of it in real life?