Abstract
The challenge of global sustainability presents enormous opportunities for product innovation and creative response. Concerns about the rising volume of packaging wastes particularly request the redefinition and redesign of conventional products in the packaging industry. Ecovative Design, being founded by a young mechanical engineering student in 2007, develops an array of environmentally friendly materials that perform like plastics but are made from mushrooms. The mushroom packaging is renewable and biodegradable and can be made with crop waste brought from local farms. Drawing on the case of Ecovative Design, this chapter aims to describe a creative destruction approach to redress sustainability challenges and to explore pivotal factors that fostered the company’s ability to decarbonize and dematerialize in support of sustainability. We find that a company’s technical competency with systems-thinking skills and stakeholder engagement capacity can lead to the realization of ecological modernization principle.
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Kim, Y., Ruedy, D. (2019). Mushroom Packages. In: Marques, J. (eds) Handbook of Engaged Sustainability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53121-2_27-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53121-2_27-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53121-2_27-1