From a corrugated shipping box that ditches tape forever to a luxury whisky bottle made with upcycled distiller’s grains, this year’s iF winners prove that sustainability is no longer a constraint — it’s the brief.
The 2026 iF DESIGN AWARDS landed with a clear signal: packaging’s sustainability conversation has moved past materials swaps and into structural rethinks. This year, iF’s jurors gave one of their highest honors yet, the first-ever perfect score for Sustainability, to a humble corrugated box, while across the broader winners’ list we saw a wave of projects rewriting the rules around glue, labels, plastics, ink, and end-of-life.
