The following is an excerpt from the book Green Graphic Design, by Brian Dougherty, principal creative director for Celery Design Collaborative.

Designing Backwards

"Designing backwards” is a process by which designers take a mental journey, starting from a design project’s ultimate destination and working backwards until we arrive back at the design studio. It’s a multiphase brainstorm process, really. Along the way, designers gain knowledge that informs the choices we make. That knowledge enables us to creatively avoid most of the roadblocks that might prevent green solutions from continuing downstream.

Start at the end, by imagining the best possible destiny for a design. Next, imagine the user’s experience with the design and envision scenarios that would make the experience particularly memorable or valuable. Visualize the process for distribution and delivery to the user, including warehousing, packaging, and transport. Search for methods that would be more efficient and effective than the status quo. Finally, define a greenest-case scenario for how the design could be printed, bound, and finished. This includes all of the materials that go into the manufacturing and the ecological impacts of the manufacturing process itself.

The End: Design for Destiny

The starting point for our backwards journey is “the end.” In most cases, graphic design projects end here in a landfill...or if we’re lucky, here in a recycling facility.

It’s hard to imagine during the excitement of brainstorming and layout, but that beautiful design you’re working on will end up as trash. It will be thrown away.

But “away” is not really a destiny. It is usually a euphemism for burying something in a hole and covering it with dirt. There is a simple fact of planetary life—nothing goes away. For all practical purposes, we live in a sealed container, allowing only light to enter and heat to escape. We are on what Buckminster Fuller called “Spaceship Earth,” sealed up tightly and hurtling through space. With very few exceptions, all of our design output will stay onboard indefinitely.

Destinies for Design Materials

That means all of the paper, plastics, glues, inks, foils, coatings, and other finishes that make up our designs eventually go somewhere, and that somewhere is not so far away. There are six potential destinies for the materials graphic designers specify:

1. Perpetual litter: for plastics and other persistent materials lingering in the ocean or on land
2. Landfill: either conventional or hazardous waste
3. Incineration: converting materials into energy + air emissions + ash
4. Compost: through a municipal program or at home
5. Recycling: into reusable fiber, polymers, or metals
6. Reuse: for the same or a different purpose

It is possible to look at each of these destinies through the lens of material value. Each represents a loss of material value (with the possible exception of fully reusable designs). Yet some destinies are better than others.

Perpetual litter is the truly worst destiny for the materials we design. This is particularly a problem for plastics waste. In places without sophisticated waste disposal infrastructure, plastic trash has become a permanent pox on the natural landscape. Meanwhile, ocean currents have assembled plastic trash into several massive “garbage patches” of floating debris covering an area twice the size of Texas out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Landfill is an ecological dead end, although a somewhat “managed” dead end. Materials that end up there essentially have no value for society or for the natural ecosystem. Worse still are materials that require a hazardous waste landfill. These materials demand special treatment, often at great expense, to protect society and the natural environment from their inherent toxicity. The first thing to do when we design for destiny is to eliminate materials that require hazardous waste handling. Later in this book we’ll identify some of those materials and propose strategies for avoiding them. 

Incineration is the end of the line for material structure, but some of the energy embodied in the material can be captured and put to good use. Aside from energy, there are two main outputs from incineration, gaseous emissions and solid ash, and each can be problematic. Some materials, such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics, release hazardous gases if they are burned. Other materials, such as the metallic pigments in some inks, end up concentrated in the solid ash remaining after waste is burned. While the concentration levels in the initial use may be considered nontoxic, they can result in toxic incineration ash that must be handled as hazardous waste. The material choices that designers make have a direct impact on how good or bad incineration is for society and the natural world.