“There is no such thing as a sustainable brand. And we are not a sustainable brand. Every frame we produce, every lens we cut and every package we ship: everything is connected to natural resources. Every happy customer comes at an environmental cost.” Eyewear brand Ace & Tate’s latest Responsibility Report begins with a refreshingly honest intro. It goes on to document the brand’s impact on People and Planet in detail, including the ‘highs’ and ‘lows’. Download it here  

The RSA Student Design Awards, the world’s longest-running student design competition, is celebrating its 100th birthday on September 21. The ceremony will be shown live on YouTube. The 2023 Bicentenary Medal will be awarded to Satish Kumar and Schumacher College for “their outstanding contributions to education that is enabling people, places and the planet to flourish in harmony”. Following the event, an exhibition on '100 years designing for and from the future', will share “rich stories and artefacts from the SDA archive”. Details here

The Nature Conservancy has launched its 2023 Global Photo Contest, “a chance for you to give voice to nature by sharing what you see with others around the world”. Deadline: September 29. Details here

To “help designers explore different strategies for building a circular economy”, What Design Can Do has created a workshop kit based on research collected for its Make it Circular Challenge. The kit includes examples of existing circular projects, research into how approaches vary across the world and instructions on how to run a circular design workshop. Download it here

In Design Week, Design Council Design for Planet festival programme lead Hugo Jamson challenges designers, brands and retailers to come together and create new packaging standards. “Arguably the time of packaging as a differentiator is over,” he says. “From a century of packaging formats and materials that offered a competitive edge we need to move to a place where every packaging format is optimised for a particular product need and standardised between the brands that offer variants of that product.” Read the piece here

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