Metsä Board, part of the Metsä Group, organized for the third time the international packaging design competition Design Challenge-Better with Less 2022-2023. A jury of experts chose two proposals to share first place: Children's Headphone Packaging by designer Kitty Ching and Protective Cardboard Padding by designers Marcin Michalski, Monika Klimpel and Adrian Olejnik.
The contest invited designers to create the packaging of the future without waste. 124 participants from 27 countries joined the challenge with their creative ideas.
“Choosing the winner from among such excellent entries was an incredibly difficult decision, so the jury decided to select two first prize winners,” he says. Ilkka Harju, president of the jury and director of packaging services at Metsä Board.
The first winning design, “Kids Headphone Packaging”, focuses on ease of use and consumer recycling. Thanks to elegant design engineering, the packaging is easy to open and offers excellent product protection. The packaging is easy to recycle and takes into account the aspect of reuse, since the inner part of the packaging offers the possibility to store the headphones. The reuse is favored by the aesthetic presentation and the pure and clean cardboard material used.
The joint first prize winner was “Cardboard Protector Padding”, a protection solution for transporting televisions or electronics. The solution creates a protective structure in the form of a beam that protects the contents on each side of the container. The packaging, made from virgin wood fiber board, is lightweight and durable, and supports the circular economy in terms of ease of recycling and minimizing the amount of material used.
The first prize winners will share the prizes for 1st and 2nd place and will receive 6.500 euros each.
The third prize, worth 2.000 euros, went to reshape. The concept of packaging David Thiel it is designed to work with a wider range of products thanks to an innovative packaging format, which reduces the number of packaging elements that need to be stored.
Metsä Board offered as an additional prize an internship for a student at its Finnish Cardboard and Packaging Center of Excellence. The winner was Zero Residue medication blister, designed by Patrick Walby, a container for the pharmaceutical industry that aims to replace the plastic and aluminum that are usually used in medicine containers with cardboard.
Two honorable mentions were also awarded to the Totally Bananas packaging, designed by Max Gubbins, and to F'lover, designed by Mine Koca.
