Turn Off The Pillow Machines

Today in Tedium: If you’ve been buying stuff on Amazon lately, odds are you saw some interesting shifts in the packaging on your doorstep. More of it, perhaps not all, has been coming in packages completely made of paper or paper byproducts. That is an interesting trend, and it’s likely to continue in a big way, according to Amazon itself. The company announced this past week that it had made “its largest reduction in plastic packaging in North America to date,” and planned to replace 95 percent of plastic air pillows produced for its North American packaging with far more recyclable paper equivalents by the end of the year. In many ways, this is the latest round in a push-and-pull that has been happening between plastic and paper packaging over the past 40 years—with plastic mostly winning during that period, but paper winning the most recent rounds. Why? Today’s Tedium ponders paper, plastic, packaging, and baggage—the latter in more ways than one. — Ernie @ Tedium

Today’s issue is sponsored by TLDR; more from them in a second.

(prairiemom/Flickr)

Remembering when paper bags were seen as worse than plastic ones

When I was a teenager, I worked in a grocery store. I was a “courtesy clerk,” which meant I was responsible for four things: retrieving carts, managing the bottle machines, putting back unpurchased goods, and (occasionally) bagging.

Despite the fact that a solid 50% of my job was managing a recycling apparatus, I remember that the modern consensus about single-use plastic bags wasn’t set at that time, and nobody was bringing in reusable bags at this juncture. (This was around the period in which American Beauty, a film with a scene built around a floating plastic bag, won an Oscar for Best Picture.) In fact, we tended to believe that plastic bags were somehow more environmentally friendly than the paper equivalents, and we were told to only use paper if the customer specifically asked for them.

That would be considered crazy talk today—nowadays, paper is seen as immensely more renewable. But the debate was a bit more up in the air than you believe.

The reason? Paper bags are resource-intensive to make. They also tend to be a bit heavier, and don’t handle rain particularly well. And then there’s the fact that paper bags require the chopping down of trees to make.

You may think I’m making stuff up, but the British Environmental Agency did in-depth research into the paper bag in a 2011 study about baggage options in general and found plenty of reasons to lean against the use of paper as a baggage option:

However, we analyzed the production of similar forms of paper and found the energy required from grid electricity contributed significantly to all impacts. The disposal of ash from paper production also has an impact on eutrophication and freshwater aquatic ecotoxicity. The production of palm oil for use in paper manufacture affects terrestrial ecotoxicity. Although the bags are produced in Europe, the distribution of the bags from the bag producers into the supermarkets via the UK importer is still noticeable in most impact categories. This is because of the impacts of road transport emissions on acidification, eutrophication, terrestrial ecotoxicity and photochemical oxidation, and the impacts of oil production for diesel on abiotic depletion, human toxicity and aquatic ecotoxicity.

While the study noted that paper’s long-term impact was lower than plastic, as it actually, y'know, biodegrades, paper comes with serious considerations on the front end, because of its ecologically heavy production process. Additionally, it weighs more, takes up more space, and costs more to transport.

A patent drawing of what became the modern plastic shopping bag. Admit it, you use these all the time.

The plus side, as the BBC notes, is that you only have to use a paper bag a couple of times to make it more environmentally friendly than a single-use plastic bag one. The downside is that paper bags tend to be only used once themselves, in part because they tend to degrade somewhat because of the elements. You may not get three uses out of them because they won’t last quite that long.

(Notably, UK grocery stores dropped paper bags entirely back in the 1970s, in favor of plastic, for this very reason.)

And oh yeah, on top of all that, there was a point where we also didn’t recycle paper bags—which seems silly given that paper is a highly recyclable material. But something happened in the 1970s that nudged us towards doing that.

We know you’re worried about inflation, so we’ll help you save money. Oh yeah, please bring back your shopping bags, will ya? (The Times of Shreveport, Louisiana/via Newspapers.com)

The first time grocery chains asked people to reuse their bags, it wasn’t out of ecological concerns

So yeah, I’m sure you just read that line about us not recycling paper bags and thought to yourself, holy crap, that’s nuts. I can’t believe we didn’t do that.

Now, let’s add an element into this messy situation: a paper shortage. During the early 1970s, amid the energy crisis, we actually started to have issues with our paper supply. We had a run on paper, if you’d believe it.

This situation, largely forgotten about today, has resurfaced periodically over the past few years, particularly when we heard rumors of a toilet paper shortage during the early days of the pandemic.

For The Atlantic, a documentarian, Brian Gersten, made a film about it, highlighting how it lived in the same context as gas shortages and high unemployment. A Republican congressman sounded the alarm; Johnny Carson made jokes about it; and then, there was a run.

Supermarkets were, in fact, not immune to this issue, as evidenced by the fact that a surge of mentions of reusing bags started appearing in newspaper ads during this era. Per searches in Newspapers.com, the first mentions of the now-common term “reusable grocery bag” surfaced around this time.

The first reference to this specific term I could find, dated January 1974, came from the now-defunct grocery store chain Weingarten’s, which pledged to offer “an important step to help you in the fight against inflation” in the same ad where it offered customers a penny for each duplex reusable grocery bag.

However, Weingarten’s was far from alone, and many actually used a different term that more correctly pinpointed what they were actually asking for: “return-a-bag,” which started appearing in newspapers in Florida and the Northeast starting in December 1973. As Ned Meara, the national paper and packaging buyer for the grocery chain Grand Union, told the Palm Beach Post at the tail end of 1973: “There will be a two million-ton shortage in the next two years, and it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better.”

How’d the Grand Union program do? Simply put, it was a drop in the bucket, but that drop was still pretty sizable, per a March 1974 ad published in the Miami area:

How successful has this program been? Well, it varies with the region. In some areas, there has been a higher bag re-use rate than in others.

Company-wide the re-use rate is 1 to 2½%. Grand Union uses 5 million bags a week. That means that, throughout the entire company, 50,000 to 125,000 bags a week are being brought back. That’s enough to fill almost half of a 40-foot trailer truck.

This campaign only ended up being temporary. While other chains picked up on the return-a-bag campaign, it ended up losing steam by the fall of 1974.

Essentially, this campaign to reuse bags was one of corporate convenience timed to an economic crisis. The real effort to make grocery bags reusable didn’t hit until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when reusable bags, and even canvas shopping bags, began to be promoted anew. What changed in the meantime? The rise in plastic options, which in many ways ignited the debate around grocery bag use.

It’s fascinating to see how the reusable grocery bag trend surfaced. For a while, it was a big deal, then for 15 years, the discussion completely died off. Then in the early 1990s, as Captain Planet told us how to save the world, it emerged anew. But the campaign died entirely by the mid-1990s, with few media outlets even broaching the idea after 1995.

Shout-out to Janice Okun, who wrote this story at the very moment reusable shopping bags went into overdrive. She may have even started the trend! (The Buffalo News/Newspapers.com)

Ultimately, it didn’t stick in a useful way until the late 2000s, with the breaking point in the U.S. hitting in the summer of 2007. That’s when a trickle of stories about reusable shopping bags turned into dozens—and headlines like “The time has come for reusable shopping bags” came out of the woodwork. And it kept growing, hitting a fever pitch in 2008 and 2009. It was the hottest recession-era trend.

There are many reasons why it hit at this time. One non-environmental factor is the rise of grocery stores that discouraged the use of single-use grocery bags, such as Aldi, which saw strong growth in the U.S. during the 2000s.

But another factor was regulatory. In March 2007, San Francisco became the first city in the country to ban single-use plastic bags, and it was far from the last. Other cities, like Washington, DC, taxed plastic bags. Even if many communities did not follow the city’s lead, it nonetheless encouraged the uptake of reusable bags as a broader trend. And that, as a result, created a market for multi-use bags.

Just one problem—people’s behavior began to change. Rather than buying trash bags from stores, they were buying them, and pretty much everything else, over the internet, which for many types of purchases nullified the whole reusable-bag argument.

That meant it was time to turn on the pillow machines.

The idea of someone buying a ton of pre-inflated air pillows just to ship to other people is hilarious to me. You’re buying air just to ship it to somebody else! There is air all around you—just package some of that! (via Amazon)

Packaging remains a sustainability sore spot in the internet age—but Amazon wants to fix that

To start this next section, I want you to think about an interaction you likely have had a million times. Buying a drink with the Starbucks app: It’s incredibly convenient! It saves time! It’s easy to do!

But it comes with a downside: You’re basically giving up the ability to use a reusable cup when purchasing it. After all, they don’t have your cup. You are essentially stuck using theirs, even if you plan to drink the blended beverage on their premises.

That mindset translates to online shipping, which has to go a lot further than a barista’s hand to yours. Shipping means byproducts. It means cardboard. It means paper. And yes, it means lots of plastic. You can’t reuse it. You just have to ensure it gets delivered in the most efficient format possible, and that it’s easy to recycle or compost.

Which is why the work of the fine folks at Sealed Air and other companies eventually evolved into maximizing materials while minimizing air. (Above is a video on how Bubble Wrap is made, which highlights Sealed Air’s use of multiple resins during the process.) After all, you can wrap a dozen layers of bubble wrap around an object to prevent it from moving, or you can just make bigger bubbles and save a bunch of plastic in the process.

In recent years, Amazon and other manufacturers have used a lot of sealed-air pillows, which are fascinating to look at and kind of absurd in the abstract. We’re shipping giant bubbles of air in boxes across the country basically all the time now.

Sealed-air pillows are essentially simplified versions of bubble wrap. And the nice thing is, since air is basically everywhere, you can make sealed-air pillows in the comfort of your home if you so desire. If you want to buy one, knock yourself out; many go for less than $200 a pop. Above, the creator of the YouTube channel Enabling E-Commerce shows off his use of one of these machines, which he notes runs quite hot in action. The reason? The machine uses a fan to fill bubbles with air, then immediately uses a heating mechanism to weld the air pillows shut.

This is a product that exists because our shipping capabilities have grown suitably complex in the 65 or so years since Bubble Wrap came to life.

This stuff that Amazon uses in some of its bags has more in common with cheese curls than you’d think. (Amazon press photo)

But the thing is, packaging materials made from paper have also continued to evolve and improve, which makes sense, because there’s money on the line. Perhaps the sign that the packaging game would start to move back in the direction of paper came in 2019, when Amazon announced a new paper mailer that introduced what the company calls a “water-based cushioning material.” What is that vague innovation? Well, here’s how a blog post describes it:

The rigorous work of inventing Amazon's new recyclable paper padded mailer required the ingenuity of scientists, engineers, and technicians at Amazon's packaging and materials lab. These experts, who obsess over the tiniest of details, have been able to capitalize on a curious reaction that happens when you heat a form of glue, similar to what's used to make cardboard boxes.

”It creates a puffy material that's lightweight,” said Justine Mahler, senior manager with Amazon’s customer packaging experience team. Lightweight recyclable cushioning is a “packaging dream,” she said.

Essentially, Amazon took the same effect that led to the creation of cheese curls—a puff of a starchy object created by heated extrusion—and applied it to the glue used to keep different layers of cardboard together. They essentially created the same general effect of bubble wrap with freaking starch! Hate Amazon as much as you want, that’s goddamn clever.

Amazon’s latest move has been to simplify the process of packing even further. Its boxes now use less material than they used to—and the shipping bags the company suggests are recyclable as paper. And where you might have once seen a bunch of air pillows filling up the dead space in your packaging, you might now see sheets of paper, or even a single large sheet.

I’m sure Amazon did the math on all this: This product can handle this level of shaking in transit. Therefore, we can use a large sheet of paper to take the blows instead.

It makes Amazon look good, helps it meet sustainability goals, and relies on paper that can be reused, too.