Cardboard

Cardboard is a thick, durable paper-based material used for packaging, shipping, crafts, and storage. It is made by pressing together layers of wood pulp fibers, usually from recycled paper.

Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes--which is why Finland has the lowest infant mortality rate in the world.

The cardboard sleeve around hot beverages that protect your hands from heat is called a zarf.

So prevalent is the empty cardboard box's reputation as a plaything that in 2005 a cardboard box was added to the National Toy Hall of Fame.

Edvard Munch's famous painting "The Scream" was painted on cardboard.

American factories generated more than 400 billion square feet of cardboard in 2020, a leap of 3.4 percent from the year prior. Cardboard-box consumption spiked in the early days of the pandemic, when everything we needed arrived at our homes swathed in brown-paper packaging; astonishingly, the trend lines have never really reversed course.

Cardboard as we know it began not as packaging at all but as a stiffener for gentlemen's top hats: in 1856 English inventors Edward Healey and Edward Allen patented corrugated (fluted) paper for exactly that purpose.

It took until 1871 for corrugated paper to find its true calling, when American Albert L. Jones patented it as a cushioning wrap for fragile glass bottles and lamp chimneys.

The modern corrugated box didn't arrive until 1890, when Scottish-born Brooklyn printer Robert Gair accidentally discovered that creased and cut paperboard could be folded into ready-made cartons.

The world's largest cardboard box, built by Smurfit Kappa Van Dam in the Netherlands on September 16, 2016, measured a colossal 3,264.42 cubic metres--roughly the volume of a small apartment block.

Corrugated cardboard remains one of the most recycled materials on the planet, with a recovery rate above 90 percent in the United States, far outstripping most plastic packaging.

Source New York Times