When commercial fisherman haul their catch onboard, they dump them into these fish boxes. These are put on-ice, offloaded at shore, and transported directly to fish markets and auctions. The boxes are then transported to a processing facility. The fish are removed, to be processed and re-packaged, and the boxes are discarded or recycled.

The boxes are made out of Expanded Polystyrene Foam (EPS), a/k/a Styrofoam, and are de facto single-use; they're never re-used due to fear of contamination. EPS is technically recyclable, and in Europe, where standards are stringent, these often are. However, in the rest of the world, not so much.

Milan-based design firm Cono Studio has designed a better solution. Their CN Fishbox is designed out of vegetable-waste-derived bio-based plastic. Not only do they use no petroleum in their production, but they're 100% biodegradable.

But they have another trick. The standard EPS fish boxes are designed to stack, but not to nest. So when they're being shipped, empty, from the manufacturer to the fishing companies, there is a fair bit of wasted space. The CN Fishbox, however, is designed to both stack and nest. If all of the CN Fishboxes are placed pointing in the same orientation, they nest within each other.

However, if you rotate one of them 180 degrees, now they stack. That's because the ledges inside of them are offset, and the pieces do not have 180-degree rotational symmetry.

The advantage of this approach is that they reduce their initial transport volume by 40%. So it's a win on two fronts.