Ecocreative has designed the new line of Jeffries Compost, Soil and Mulch bagged products. The bold, colourful packaging features info-graphics that educate consumers on how to combine products to get the best result.

When research found that this ‘living’ product must be packaged in non-biodegradable plastic bags (due to the nature of the product), Ecocreative also helped the client design point-of-sale collection stations where consumers can return the bags for recycling.

You’ll find the Jeffries bagged products at many South Australian garden centres; more detail on their website.

Never to be put off by a little dirty work, Ecocreative has designed and produced packaging and point-of-sale recycling stations for the launch of Jeffries compost, soil and mulch bagged products. Five garden and horticulture products that were once only available by the truck or trailer load will now be sold from commercial stockists in handy gardening sizes for the first time. Several of the products are certified to NASAA organic standards.

These bags will come in for some rough treatment and be exposed to the sun, rain, so the packaging design needed to be robust and couldn’t be shy! Bold earthy colours and textures have been assigned to the different product categories for easy identification, no matter how you find the bag. These identifiers set the basis for an ‘easy as 1, 2, 3’ infographic that features on the reverse of each bag and throughout supporting collateral, showing everyone how to get the best out of their gardening experience.

‘Making our products available in bags has long been a goal for us and represented a huge challenge’, notes Jeffries Managing Director, Lachlan Jeffries. ‘We needed to meet our own demanding standards for quality, integrity and sustainability and address many technical challenges and other requirements regarding certifications, labelling and standards. We’ve worked closely on our brand with Ecocreative over the past few years and they really get what we’re about. All the hard work is worth it everything about the bags exceed my expectations. They look just awesome and I am excited about what this will do for our business.’

There is also an educational aspect to the bags. It was necessary to broaden awareness of Jeffries role as an innovative recycler. Ecocreative created the Jeffries ‘green organics loop’ to show that the garden prunings, lawn clippings and other raw materials collected from the green organic wheelie bins of South Australian homes, are transformed by Jeffries into compost, soil and mulch products, ready to go back into South Australian gardens. It’s important for people to remember that whatever is put in their green organics bins could end up in our own back yards, so we needed to reinforce that the green bin is no place for plastic or anything else that won’t make good compost, soil or mulch.

Once the compost, soil or mulch is on the garden or in pots, people are left not with empty bags (destined for landfill), but with an opportunity to keep helping Jeffries keep recycling. As the SA-made plastic bags are not yet recyclable through traditional government waste streams, they cannot be put in yellow-lid kerbside bins. To tackle this issue head on, Jeffries has organised its own bag return program. Customers can return their bags to their stockist in specially marked brown recycling bins (branded with some help from Ecocreative). Jeffries takes care of the rest, organising the recycling of the bags into other plastic products. What’s more, for every bag returned to the retailer Jeffries donates 50 cents to Community Garden Projects in South Australia!

‘This ambitious move into the sale of premium garden product in bags is much more than a category-breaking move into a competitive marketplace’, says Matthew Wright-Simon, Ecocreative’s Director, ‘it’s about packaging the Jeffries culture of innovation in recycling, environmental responsibility and community engagement all at once and wrapping it up in a retail experience right at the point where a person is committing to doing something positive—getting something good for the garden and getting their hands dirty! As a partner in Jeffries’s positive growth story, Ecocreative is proud to have been part of such a great initiative. After all, it embraces two of our favourite things, recycling and gardening!’

The display encourages people of all ages to walk the resource journeys to find out what happens after something goes in the bin.

Ecocreative recently designed and developed an interactive waste display for the Adelaide Airport to launch its new recycling bins. It centres around the topic of waste and resource management in a lighthearted yet educational manner.

A challenge presented by the placement of the installation within the airport terminal was the need to appeal to a wide social, cultural and age demographic. The strong visual nature of the resulting installation aims to be universally appealing and communicative through icons, colour and sequence, rather than language alone.

With one of the new recycling bins positioned centrally as the hero, the floor-based installation engages both children and adults, encouraging them to physically walk the journey of each of the three waste streams as they learn about the process. The campaign was further extended through kids’ activity sheets and table-talker information cards.

Best of all, there will be fewer departures from the airport for landfill than ever before!

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Client:  Adelaide Airport
Creative team:  Jeremy Boyd (CD), Clare Andrew (GD), Robin Green (Illustration)
Photography: asbCreative.com

A great opportunity exists for a new graphic designer to join the Ecocreative team! If you’re passionate about designing for a better world, we’d love to hear from you.

We want to fill the position as soon as we can, so don’t dally in downloading the role description and submitting your application.

Applications close 2 August 2011, and we will notify shortlisted applicants soon thereafter.

Please direct any queries to Jeremy Boyd, Creative Director or Sarah van Maarseveen, Sustainability & Operations Manager.

• Melbourne – May 12 – 22
• Canberra – May 26 – 29
• Alice Springs – May 27 – 29
• Brisbane – June 3 – 4
• Sydney – Jun 3 – 5
• Byron Bay – June 3 – 5
• Adelaide – June 10 – 12
• Perth – June 10 – 12

Check out HRAFF’s Awesome Program

Appealing to architects, building designers, assessors, builders. engineers and consumers this seminars provide valuable information and insight on how to make homes more sustainable.

The two hour CPD seminar showcases a recently completed 8 star home as a case study with the project manager and live-in owner, Cameron Rosen sharing his journey of designing, developing, building and living in this sustainable home.

After sold out seminars in Sydney we are now touring to:

Adelaide – 14th and 15th April 2011
Melbourne – 19th and 20th April 2011
Brisbane – 28th and 29th April 2011

FOR MORE INFO AND TO BOOK (places strictly limited)
http://www.australianliving.info/apage/104560.php

Adelaide architect and founder of Energy Architecture John Maitland renovated his own home and made a documentary about the process. What unfolds is essentially a human interest story, showcasing details of the methodology and products of sustainable building practices. Click here for more info.