Summer is the prefect time for picnics, pretty much anywhere! On roof tops, in Central Park, at the beach, open air cinemas or the zoo, a good picnic is special. But how often do you make the effort and unleash your creativity to put together a delicious lunch or dinner in a box or basket?

Medical waste is sorted outside Bangalore, India.

Image: Kleenex Hand Towels

"Kimberly-Clark has long recognized the importance of corporate responsibility and integrated the concept of sustainability in our business practices," the FAQ on Kleenex Hand Towels reassuringly announces.

Rendering of "T-Garden" by Luca Trazzi.

Photo courtesy of Paperboard Innovation

Cardboard is one of those underrated materials, often with a short and meaningless lifespan that ends when your package is delivered. Unless you are cardboard in the hands of io10design's cardboard fiends Allessandro Antoniazzi and Valter Davanzo.

Photo via Senz

So we are pretty keen on finding a solution to disposable design, or objects conceived to break here at TreeHugger, and one of our favorites is the shoddily-designed umbrella, which we gave its due way back in 2006 with our Umbrella Inside Out competition.

A coffee cup as a plant pot, coke cans for Halloween cape, a detergent bottle as worm harvester or washing tablet net bags for toy storage; these are all things people have done with the packaging they found in their daily lives. Reuse is often better than recycling, so when the consumer gives a packaging a second life before eventually recycling it wherever possible, he saves resources.