Bin around ... the unsexy world of sustainability needs a shot in the arm. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images  Whenever I think of sustainable design, I think of the opening sentence of Victor Papanek's book Design for the Real World. It goes: "There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few of them." Papanek, a designer himself, went on to call designers "dangerous", the producers of "garbage". And that was in 1972.  These days, designers have a rather different role as societal problem-solvers, leading the way to a cleaner, better future. But I suspect Papanek is still right. Notwithstanding this new conscientious breed, there is no getting over the fact that the majority of product designers earn their living supplying growth-dependent economies with novelties for our ever-more-insatiable appetites. Increasingly, many of those objects are being presented as sustainable. Perhaps packaged in brown cardboard with little green arrows on it.  "Sustainability". I have never much liked the word. "Sustainable" is not an adjective you would use to describe something you love. To sustain something is to keep it alive, pure and simple – more of a duty than a passion. Once, we aspired to reach the moon; now, we just hope to hold on to what we've got. Sustainability suggests the flatlining of human ambition. So I did a double-take when I saw a new book called Sustainism Is the New Modernism. If sustainability is boring, "sustainism" is just grammatically freaky (adding "ism" to a verb?). As you'll already have worked out, it yields the word "sustainity" (as in, from here to sustainity). Oh, and "sustainist".  This may sound like parody, but it's not. The creators of these terms, Michiel Schwarz and Joost Elffers, have presented what they describe as a manifesto for the 21st century. The book is a collection of aphorisms and slogans. Some of them – the catchier ones – were coined by others, such as Buckminster Fuller's "do more with less". Many of them are the authors' own, such as "not high-tech versus low-tech, but appropriateness and sustainable solutions". The book is lavishly illustrated, with new logos designed to signify organic, local or recyclable goods. It is sustainability rebranded.  The authors' instincts are absolutely right: sustainable design needs a shot in the arm. But I don't believe a book full of platitudes and colourful symbols is the necessary serum. Their elegant trefoil logo for recycling may be better than the existing one, but no one ever failed to recycle something because they didn't like the logo. There is no argument to win here. I don't think there are many people out there who don't want to live sustainably. It's not a matter of persuading them but of offering them the right choices.  I trawled through a few books on sustainable design, such as The Eco-Design Handbook and 1000 New Eco Designs and Where to Find Them. The majority of work in this area is not particularly impressive. Most conforms to a material palette we think of as sustainable – lots of wood, cardboard and paper – or makes a show of using recycled materials. In that respect, there is a kind of sustainable design aesthetic, and it comes in shades of brown. Plastic rarely features, no doubt due to an instinctive feeling that it's inherently bad for the environment, even though plastic is sometimes the most environmentally friendly material for the job. It uses less energy to manufacture than glass or metal, and it's lighter to transport. The trick is to keep it out of landfills.  The problem is that consumers, and often designers, too, are bewildered by what really constitutes a sustainable product. You can't judge it by looking it at; you have to know the object's past and future – whether it's made of renewable or recyclable materials, how much energy went into its production, how it's going to be disposed of. It's not objects that are unsustainable, it's the systems that produce them. And designers have to steer their clients towards sustainable systems – that is, if they have the luxury of a client who isn't just after the cheapest, fastest solution.  The closest we have come to a sustainability orthodoxy is the "cradle to cradle" solution pioneered by Michael Braungart and William McDonough. According to their mantra, products need to be made fully recyclable so that, once they are discarded, each part can be turned back into itself again. The problem with that logic is that it promises infinite consumption with impunity. Businesses must love it. The drawback of putting so much emphasis on recycling, however, is that it makes us feel virtuous about throwing things away. Disposability – along with its henchman, planned obsolescence – is the real enemy.  The answer, it seems to me, is to buy fewer things that we value more: to design products that endure and that we can repair more cheaply than replace. And the real way to win the public over to sustainable design is not with a war of words but by tapping into their desires. We want things with sex appeal, not ones that look as though they are made of Weetabix.  To return to our "sustainist" authors, it's telling that they frequently square up to the futurist manifesto of 1909, setting themselves in opposition. They are right, of course. The futurists' machine-lust and speed greed are absurdly unhelpful in our age – too aggressive, too self-destructive. But Marinetti's screed had a libidinous energy that was never matched in any of the successive manifestos of the 20th century. At one point in his delirious fantasy on mechanisation, he and his futurist chums see some cars. "We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts," he writes. Perhaps the sustainists could use a shot of whatever Marinetti was drinking.
Justin McGuirk: Sustainability – all matronly browns and little green arrows – has drained the sexiness from design. If designers want to do some genuine good, it's time to re-engineer their thinking