Clever Little Bag

It's hard to imagine something as simple as the shoebox being completely overhauled and rethought. But Puma and Fuseproject, the design firm led by Yves Béhar, have done just that, in a design that was almost three years in the making.

The bag tightly wraps an interior cardboard scaffolding--giving it shape and reducing cardboard use by 65%. Moreover, without that shiny box exterior, there's no laminated cardboard (which interferes with recycling). There's no tissue paper inside. And there's no throw-away plastic bag. The bag itself is made of recycled PET, and it's non-woven--woven fibers increase density and materials use--and stitched with heat, so that it's less manufacturing intensive.

The impact: Puma estimates that the bag will slash water, energy, and fuel consumption during manufacturing alone by 60%--in one year, that comes to a savings of 8,500 tons of paper, 20 million mega joules of electricity, 264,000 gallons of fuel, and 264 gallons of water. Ditching the plastic bags will save 275 tons of plastic, and the lighter shipping weight will save another 132,000 gallons of diesel.