COLOUR IN THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY: AN INTERVIEW WITH DAN DICKER
Circular Colour: a contentious issue for brands
Dan Dicker, circular design pioneer and founder of Circular&Co. talks to Sarah Conway about the troubled relationship between colour and circularity.
COLOUR NOTES
MATERIAL: paper, polyurethane, polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene #6
COLOUR PROCESS: none, colour masterbatch
NATURE OF COLOUR: serendipitous, flecked, inherited, irrelevant
Introduction
When we talk about waste, recycling, and even circularity, we are generally talking about materials. Despite everything we know about the environmental harm done by many of its processes and applications, colour rarely gets a mention.
Perhaps colour is considered too frivolous to take part in these serious conversations, too difficult or too contentious. Whatever the reason, we can no longer ignore colour’s ubiquity in linear take-make-waste systems. It isn’t just the impossibility of achieving circularity without considering how we make, apply and reincorporate colour; allowing colour to be an afterthought is also a wasted opportunity. Colour is the most emotive element in design. If we want to get people excited about circular products, we need to harness the power of colour.
“ ‘Here’s a new product we’ve created, made out of recycled so and so, isn’t it great! We’re launching it in two months, and by the way, it’s a different colour.’ That obviously isn’t going to work.”
— Dan Dicker
If anyone can align the people and technology needed to make regenerative design more colourful, it’s Dan Dicker. Dan has been pioneering circular materials and processes since launching ashortwalk (now Circular&Co.) from his garden shed in 2003. While many of us accepted that throwaway plastics like plant pots and single-use cups couldn’t be recycled — their light weight and colour material profiles making reprocessing them commercially unviable —Dan quietly got to work and created high-value products such as House Signs, Tide clocks and the multiple-award-winning Circular Cup.
Having created reusables from waste for Cafe Nero, Costa, The Design Museum, MacDonald’s, The RSPB, Starbucks, The V&A, Waitrose and The Woodland Trust, it’s clear that Dan’s egalitarian, planet-first approach to business is unmired by the snobbery that can pervade the design scene. On the eve of the launch of Circular&Co’s NOW cup, a consciously colourful product designed specifically to engage consumers who are not yet buying into sustainability, Sarah caught up with Dan to talk about the role of colour in our transition to a circular economy.
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Interview
SC — Sarah Conway, Stories of Design
DD — Dan Dicker, Circular&Co.
SC. We’ve talked before about the challenge of reconciling brand colours with the colours inherited from post-consumer waste. I wondered if businesses are becoming more flexible in their relationship with colour as consumers become more eco-conscious?
DD. It’s a critical point. When we’re doing projects with other businesses, colour is often a sticking point. Perhaps you’ll redesign something and make it out of a reincorporated material and offer it back but say: look, you know if you really want it to be a circular product, we have to use the natural colour that comes out of recycling that kind of material or product, so, therefore, the colour’s going to be X. Then you find the marketing department has these four Pantone colours engrained in their brand guidelines that are ‘their colours’ they can’t stray away from. When you try to go outside of those colours, they struggle to accept that change, both visually and from a corporate perspective, which is probably a more interesting point: that flexibility required to adapt your brand guidelines based on trying to become more circular.
“If you can get people from different departments involved in colour decisions very early, at the concept stage, they’re more open.”
— Dan Dicker
SC. That’s interesting. Are decision-makers beginning to allow for some fluctuation? Or do you think we’re holding out for a new generation of less-harmful colours that will enable us to keep our precise shades?
DD. I’d say it hasn’t changed, and it is still quite a challenge. What tends to happen in a large company is that the sustainability manager, and even the CEO, will be very open to colour changes. But when it filters to the marketing department, they’re still quite staunchly ingrained in what’s already been decided. These can often be big global brands, and you can see why they feel very protective and the need to toe the corporate line. So it’s very rare that someone in marketing who’s controlling colours will buckle and be flexible and open to colour change. They have to be pushed by other people. So I’d say from that side, no. No, there’s not been any shift. I think the interesting challenge is how bigger companies internally make this change because very often, people at the top are keen to be flexible, but it doesn’t filter down. So the head of marketing will be too scared to go off-brand even though the CEO has said, yeah, absolutely, this is something we’ve got to do.
SC. That’s fascinating. So, many marketing teams see colour as absolutely fundamental to their identity. More so perhaps than their values?
DD. Yes, for that particular department. Whereas people up higher would perceive it as the other way around. I guess the way we’re trying to address that is by involving people from the marketing department very early on in the decision-making of a project, so they’re not just handed something at the very end. You know: ‘Here’s a new product we’ve created, made out of recycled so and so, isn’t it great! We’re launching it in two months, and by the way, it’s a different colour.’ That obviously isn’t going to work. But if you can get people involved in the concept stage, they’re a bit more open, so that’s how we try to approach it.
SC. Interesting. Would your ideal scenario be to keep things the colour of the material, the colour they are? Have you tried incorporating colours that are more circular or reclaimed?
DD. Yeah, yeah, we have. And sometimes, that does work. A lot of times, we’re asked to try to cover the existing colour up. So the material is circular and recycled, but a print that goes over the top to bring it back into line with a preferred colour option. 99% of the product is recycled content; you’ve just added this extra print. I mean, the print is in eco-inks, but purely as a discussion around colour and identity, we’re often asked to kind of whitewash over it. It depends on the product and the brand and the type of visual look you’re trying to achieve. I think a good example is the cups, where we’re staunchly saying that the whole point of the cup is that it looks like it’s made from recycled materials. But a lot of companies say, ‘look, we love your cups, we love that it’s made from paper cups, but can it not have those horrible white flecks in it?’ So I guess that comes down to our brand pillars and what we stand for because we always say, well no, we’re refusing to do that, that’s the whole point of the cups, so you’re either going to have to live with that or not take the product.
“If you mix any form of coloured plastics together they tend to come out a brown or a black or a grey. Which is unfortunate because I think if we’re honest they are quite hard colours to work with visually.”
— Dan Dicker
There are some areas where it really does work. You can come up with visual elements to a circular product where they’re all about looking very recycled, and that’s almost part of the design, and that’s a lot easier. You can relish and make the most of the visual identity that the recycled material’s given you. But if I’m honest, I think that’s probably 20% of the time, whereas 80% of the time, we’re trying almost to mimic the conventional look of the product. Therefore there is this discussion of how we don’t want it to be a grey or a brown or a black — which are the dominant colours.
DD. Generally, if you mix any coloured plastics, they always tend to come out a brown or a black or a grey. They’re almost like the three colours you’re dealing with. Which is unfortunate because I think if we’re honest, they are quite hard colours to work with visually. It’s a challenge. If we do change a colour, then from a circular perspective, it’s not that bad because we add a masterbatch. A masterbatch is 0.05% of the overall mix, so it’s not too horrendous from a circular perspective. But it’s something we shouldn’t need to do if we can get it right.
SC. One interesting thing about emerging circular colours is that they don’t have names or numbers; they haven’t necessarily been codified into existing systems. Do you think there’s an opportunity here, having been quite alienated as consumers from colour, to re-engage?
“colours and colour names can engage people with a circular lifestyle.”
— Dan Dicker
DD. Definitely. I think what you’re doing is a really lovely challenge to develop a circular colour palette. It’s a really beautiful idea; you could almost make that a trend. The other aspect that makes me think of is, we always have a challenge in converting people. There’s always a percentage of people who have already bought into the circular, sustainable lifestyle. But, unfortunately, the vast majority aren’t, and in terms of types of colours and the wording of those colours, there’s an aspect of bringing in names that don’t push people away but trying to bring those people into the fold. I think sometimes we fall down the trap of naming things in such a way — earthy, for want of a better term, tree-huggy names — that put people off who might have otherwise engaged. There’s value in that, too, in the wording you use.
SC. From your experience with global brands, do you think colour is an effective way to engage people with circularity?
DD. That’s what’s really exciting from my perspective. We’re collectively building this circular movement, and actually, colour — and how you bring people along and introduce people to a circular lifestyle through colour — is a really interesting angle.
At the moment, we’re working on a take-back cup for MacDonald’s purely to try to target those who aren’t engaged in reusables. You pay your pound, and when you bring it back, you get your pound back. Even down to the target markets — the younger generation, teenagers who might go into MacDonald’s and probably haven’t thought about having a reusable but are quite engaged in the environment. How do you market towards them? I think it is down to tone-of-voice and not using colour names that might switch them off but to talk in their language.
SC. Yes. That’s an interesting point. Do we intend to foreground the product's eco-credentials or celebrate other aspects of the design or its function or lifestyle? Green is trending because of its eco-positive associations, even when the product is environmentally disastrous. Do you see a future where we can embrace a less predictable colour that changes from batch to batch or ages and fades?
DD .In terms of longevity, the classic example is jeans: the older they get, the more worn they get, the better they look. So there is a market or a movement where people relish that. If you can get that feeling with other products….
With living colours, that story really helps with the power of persuasion. If you have that, you’re going to talk about it. We’re collecting and using ice-cream tubs from within Cornwall, and interestingly they come with their own colours; they’ve got quite an interesting palette. They go through from the shade of our original cups, and as we’ve added more of the ice-cream cups into the mix, you can see how the colour has changed to greys and creams. As a result, we’re having a debate — these are subtly different, so do we switch the whole colour line to this new colour, or do we add a masterbatch to bring them in line with our existing colour?
Another interesting thing happens when you mould the lids you make, a load of blues say, and then switch to a load of pinks, but as you switch the colour, you get probably 20–30 lids that come out are a mixture of both. We keep them all, and we’re deliberating what to do that could make a separate range because there’s a real joy in that.
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Conclusion
Household recycling contains a rainbow of high-density polyethylene plastics (HDPE), implying a similarly rich spectrum of upcycling opportunities. Unfortunately, plastics aren’t sorted by colour and HDPE is industrially recycled to grey.
Dan has been ingenious (he was a Dyson inventor before starting his own business) in making the most of an uninspiring palette. Still, it’s time to rethink how we collect, sort and reincorporate our waste. It isn’t just the material that’s precious; it’s the colour too.
‘Recoloured’, by Jessica den Hartgog is one example of a collaboration between industry and designer to organise plastics according to their existing colour material identity. While this project was on a small scale, it offers a glimpse of a future in which colourful plastics are combined in innovative ways to stay colourful, generation after generation.
A second challenge Dan raises could be overcome today but is likely to outlive colour-blind HDPE recycling is entrenchment over brand colours. Colour identities may have to become more flexible if consumers are to take brands’ sustainability policies seriously.
Perhaps by embracing palettes that are less codified and accommodate range, designers and brands can initiate more honest, intriguing and nuanced conversations with consumers. As Dan points out:
“An interesting thing happens when you switch the colour, say from blue to pink, you get probably 20–30 lids that come out that are a mixture of both… there’s actually a real joy in that.”
— Dan Dicker
The future is…nuanced, flecked, imperfect, negotiable, accepting, inclusive, open, flexible, assorted, variegated, heterogenous, egalitarian, democratic, impure, time-worn, care-worn, textural, ingenious, resourceful, joyful.
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Circular Colour is a series of interviews, essays and colour profiles in which we explore approaches to colour that could significantly change the way we tackle waste.
If you find this article useful, please follow Laura Perryman and Sarah Conway so we can write more about ethical colour and design.
Also in this series:
This article was jointly curated with Laura Perryman
Many thanks to Dan Dicker for taking part in Circular Colour. You can find out more about his work here:
