A portfolio case study by Marina Ermina — design, build, sustainability copy, and the green-claims research that stopped it from shipping.
A concept B2B website and interactive impact calculator for a compostable paper-cup line aimed at the Icelandic market — cafés, offices, event organisers, and institutions looking to move away from plastic-lined cups. I designed and built the whole thing: the page structure, the copy, the visual design and animation, and a calculator that lets a business estimate the impact of switching cups.
Live: the full animated site and the standalone impact calculator — a focused interactive tool that estimates the impact of switching cups. Both are in Icelandic, with English versions: site · calculator.
This is the part I'm most proud of, and the reason I'm sharing it.
While building the site, I did the due diligence on the product's environmental claims — reading the certificates and declarations rather than taking the marketing at face value. That research found that the headline claims the cups were being presented with did not hold up:
- the "plastic-free" certification had in fact been cancelled;
- a certificate being cited actually covered a different material grade than the one in use; and
- the cups were not exempt from Iceland's plastic-content marking rules, contrary to how they'd been framed.
Because of that, the site was never published as a live commercial page. Catching it before it went out — rather than after — is exactly the outcome you want from real green-claims scrutiny.
It shows three things I do, together:
- Design & build — a complete, animated, responsive website coded by hand.
- Sustainability copywriting — warm, clear, benefit-led copy for a B2B audience, without greenwashing.
- Green-claims due diligence — reading the certifications and regulations closely enough to catch claims that don't stand up. This is the skill I'm building my work around.
A note on the claims shown on the page. The wording you see on the site reflects the original brief. I've kept it as-is on purpose — the "before" that my research corrected. The due-diligence summarised above is the whole point of the piece.
index.html— the full animated EcoCups website (with the impact calculator built in).calculator.html— the impact calculator as a standalone interactive demo.
Hand-coded HTML, CSS and JavaScript — no site builder. Scroll-based animation, a fully interactive impact calculator (embedded in the site and available standalone), self-contained files with embedded assets, and web fonts from Google Fonts.
Marina Ermina — data analyst and sustainability researcher moving into automation, web, and AI work, based in Reykjavík. I care about work that's both well-built and honest. (add contact / portfolio links)