Moral Licensing & Packaging

I have a personal and professional obsession with packaging.

Simply put, I collect it. I buy things just for the box they come in. I’m seduced by the label on the wine bottle, the feel of a matte-coated tube, the elegant snap of a magnetic closure. For consumers like me, packaging sits at the intersection of branding, capitalism, and desire.

I teach packaging design at the Alberta University of the Arts, in a course where students explore the psychological power of tactile objects and learn how to construct 3-dimensional forms. We talk about the signifiers, affordances, and mental constructs that create meaning in packaging: how it frames our experience, triggers memory, supports ritual, and conveys brand identity through touch, weight, and even the sound it makes when opened. Packaging is functional. It’s symbolic. It’s emotional. It’s performative.

But one of the most difficult and essential parts of the course I teach is this: I tell my students that most of what they make, regardless of whether it’s beautiful, smart, or inventive, will end up in the landfill. We also confront another hard truth: that recycling, often seen as a responsible act, is reactive and insufficient. Only a small percentage of what goes into recycling bins is ever actually recycled. The rest is diverted to landfills, incinerated, or shipped overseas. The promise of recycling can offer a false hope for redemption—a kind of moral license that allows overproduction and overconsumption to continue unchecked.

That’s a brutal reality for designers who love bringing tangible things into the world. And yet, it's necessary. Physical design has an afterlife. We need to talk about it.

The uncomfortable truth is that much of our creative output has a short shelf life. It’s touched briefly, then discarded. Even the most innovative packaging, if it doesn’t find a second life or avoid obsolescence, is destined to be buried or burned. But there are strategies we can use to delay or redirect this fate.

We often begin with the familiar mantra: reduce, reuse, recycle. But we must admit that in most consumer cultures, recycling is treated as a kind of emotional safety net. We toss mixed materials into the blue bin not because we know they’re recyclable, but because we hope they are. It’s an act of aspiration—a small gesture that makes us feel like we’ve done our part. The blue bin becomes a proxy for virtue. And the packaging is a shortcut to that feeling.

In Calgary, where I live and teach, there’s a new province-wide law to charge manufacturers for the cost of recycling their materials. Under the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) law, producers, rather than taxpayers or municipalities, are responsible for the end-of-life management of their products, including packaging. The costs of recycling and waste management are shifted away from local governments and residents and toward the manufacturers who create and profit from these materials.

The hope is that EPR will incentivize smarter design, leading to packaging that’s easier to recycle, that avoids mixed materials, and that uses fewer virgin resources. It also creates pressure to innovate in recycling infrastructure and materials science, aligning economic interest with ecological good. In the long term, EPR has the potential to push us closer to a circular economy—one where materials loop instead of leak, and responsibility is embedded into the very beginning of the design process.

And yet, even with all this in mind, we have to contend with a deeper, more pervasive issue: the way sustainability is sold to us.

This is where branding steps in. A well-designed package doesn’t just sell a product—it sells moral license. Colour, typography, icons, language, material finish, and messaging all work together to lift the cognitive burden of consumer choice. In a sea of similar products, a soft sage green background, sans serif type, a lowercase wordmark, a BCorp logo, and a leaf icon tell you what you need to know—or rather, what you need to feel: that this one is the better choice.

You don’t have to compare ingredient lists. You don’t have to read the fine print. You don’t even have to think. The brand has done that for you. Visual and verbal cues act as shortcuts, making consumers feel like they’ve made a responsible choice without needing to verify the full environmental impact.

Take Seventh Generation, an American company that manufactures and sells cleaning supplies and personal care products. The name itself suggests legacy and foresight. The logo has a leaf. There’s a B Corp logo on the package. The bottles are clear. The type is gentle, not shouty. The language is purposeful but calm: “bio-enzyme power,” “clean with purpose,” “saves energy, saves water, saves trees.” And so, when you grab a roll of paper towels made from 100% recycled fibre but wrapped in plastic, you might not pause to ask: wait, is this really better for the environment? Because the branding already answered that question for you.

That’s the “halo effect”: when one part of something seems good, we assume the rest must be too. It's a visual and verbal promise. The moment you see it, the decision is made. This is the one that won’t make you feel bad later on.

Moral licensing shows up the moment the product feels “good enough.” When you choose a green-looking product, that moment of virtue acts like a permission slip. You’ve done the right thing. You chose the “good” version. And because you’ve made a responsible choice, you may not feel the need to examine the bigger picture—how much energy was used in manufacturing, how far the product travelled, whether the packaging is truly recyclable, or whether it’s still part of a waste-heavy system.

This sense of virtue gives consumers permission to disengage from deeper questions. The packaging “feels good,” so the buyer feels good—and may be less likely to reduce consumption or question the system behind the product. Over time, this pattern shapes a broader cultural belief that individual purchasing decisions are the main path to sustainability, reinforcing a feel-good illusion of impact while systemic issues go unchallenged.

Manufacturers, companies, and brands all know this. They bank on it.

Design becomes the delivery system for ethical ease. By drawing on a shared visual language of sustainability—like leaves, earthy green colour tones, clear packaging, or recycled textures—brands imply environmental virtue. These cues do the emotional heavy lifting, allowing consumers to feel like they’re making responsible choices without looking too closely. The surface aesthetics handle the emotional labour. Branding becomes a moral proxy, a shortcut to a clear conscience, an absolution.

This brings us to the morality of the license itself. When a consumer sees a green leaf icon or reads the words “eco-friendly,” they often accept these cues at face value, allowing the packaging to absolve them of guilt proactively. But this license doesn’t emerge from nowhere. It’s authored. Manufacturers, companies, branders, marketers, and designers make conscious choices about how sustainability is framed, exaggerated, or implied. When a manufacturer’s claim is vague or unverified, the communicator becomes complicit, deciding whether to question, stretch, or obscure the truth. In that moment, the moral license shifts from consumer psychology to professional ethics, where belief is shaped not only by what is said, but by what is deliberately left unsaid.

A change is happening in culture right now. Amid rising costs, inflation, environmental awareness, political climate, and changing social habits (including those influenced by GLP-1s), people seem to be buying less, choosing differently, or rethinking what matters to them. One of the most powerful examples right now is Canadians choosing locally made products over imports from the U.S.

It’s not a revolution, but it might be a recalibration starting.

As designers, we can choose to meet that moment with honesty. We can focus on the “reduce” and “reuse” part of the “Three R’s” and design packages with fewer material inputs. Smarter things. Things that aren’t just easier to buy, but easier to live with—and live without. In doing so, we also face the reality that moral licensing isn’t just a result of consumer behaviour; it’s influenced by the signals we as manufacturers, branders, and designers choose to send.

And as consumers, we can reframe consumption. We can resist the easy comfort and be more aware of moral licensing. We can ask harder questions: Where did this come from? Where will it end up? What does it mean to make something that truly lasts? The most expressive, radical thing consumers can do is to consume differently—not performatively, but thoughtfully.

If packaging reflects both cultural values and personal desires, then it also reveals the ethical bargain of our consumption. The culture we create must be one that can live with its own afterlife—not just materially, but morally.