Consumer’s experience of tea packaging as environment-friendly

Abstract

The packaging design is perceived as environmentally friendly when deploying established “green” conventions for design, materials, form, colours, and symbolism. The paper aims to determine which tea packaging design choices mainly influence consumer's impression of eco-friendliness. After the sustainable solutions for packaging form were examined, additional attributes of sustainability in terms of the materials were established. These were the shape of the packaging for the ease of use, closing solution, content visibility, printing paper perception, and other use-friendly attributes. Upon experimenting with six versions of prototype designs, following the guidelines of user-centered design, the final prototype has been selected for further development and testing. The alternatives for appropriate printing ink, printing pressure, and substrate were tested on various paper samples. Due to the various recycled substrate’s surface colours and morphology, the flexographic printing process resulted in various shades of image colours and line sharpnesses. To determine correlations between different attributes and make a final design decision, the subjective quality assessments were implemented.